Sounds like a solidly Republican district, right? Other elections follow the same pattern. In 2020, Republican candidates for Attorney general, Treasurer, and Auditor General all won SD-36 easily, with margins of 19.04 percent, 24.04 percent, and 23.22 percent over their Democratic opponents. And even as he was losing statewide, 2022 Republican Senate candidate Mehmet Oz won this district by thirteen percentage points — 55.5 to 42.2.

But at that same election, Democrat Josh Shapiro carried SD-36 by two-tenths of a percentage point — 49.2 to 49.0. This margin, similar to the 50.0 to 49.1 percent Democratic win this week, shows that the voters of northern Lancaster County are Republican, but that their party loyalty has its limits.

Comparing the maps of Shapiro’s 2022 victory with Malone’s 2025 win show a pretty similar shift in the vote.

In 2022, the consensus on why Democrats performed so well statewide was that Republicans ran flawed candidates. Trump lost the state in 2020, but Oz did worse than him in 66 out of 67 counties, including Lancaster. The Republican gubernatorial nominee, Doug Mastriano, did worse still, underperforming both Oz and Trump’s 2020 numbers in every county.

Was Josh Parsons, the Republican nominee in the special election, as unpopular in Lancaster County in 2025 as Doug Mastriano was in 2022? Or, to put it another way, was James Malone as popular as Josh Shapiro?

No. It’s worth noting that Parsons won a countywide election as commissioner less than two years ago — a low turnout, off-year election in which people mostly voted for the party with which they are registered.

The Parsons campaign must take responsibility for some of the slippage in the GOP vote. As my colleague Steve Ulrich noted yesterday at PoliticsPA, Parsons “has been a polarizing figure, not only among Democrats in Lancaster County, but also among more moderate Republicans.”

Still, if it was just about the candidate, the Republican would have carried the day on Tuesday.

We have to consider, as always, the thermostatic nature of elections; that is, the habit voters have of voting more heavily for the party that is not holding the White House, even in races that have nothing to do with the federal government. That is just part of the nature of modern politics, it seems: we are more inspired to vote against someone than for someone. For disappointed Democrats and left-leaning independents, this was the first chance to vote against Trump.

That brings us to turnout. It’s a cliché to say “it will all come down to turnout,” but of course that is a factor in any election. Turnout was down between 56 and 73 percent across the district, which is what you’d expect between a presidential election and a special election to the state legislature. But precisely how much turnout fell did not correlate with how much a municipality shifted toward the Democrats.

We don’t yet know from the election results who turned out, only that there were fewer of them. But it is clear from the data that one of two things happened: either the people of northern Lancaster County became fifteen percent more Democratic since November, or Democrats did a better job of turning out their people than Republicans.

It’s pretty clear that it’s the latter.

That’s important because it sends a message about how future campaigns in this state must be conducted. A generation ago, Republicans had a big advantage on high-propensity voters — the kind of people who never miss an election or a primary, year in and year out. Democrats had more of the every-four-years voter who only turns out for the big ones.

That’s flipped, another consequence of the party shift that has swept the nation since Trump came down the escalator in 2015 and announced he was running for President. He has brought many occasional voters and non-voters into the Republican Party, and they turned out big for him in 2024. But the state GOP cannot assume that a new Trump voter is necessarily a new regular Republican voter. Maybe they just like him. Maybe they like the party, but need to be reminded because they are not really obsessed with politics the way plenty of other people (this author included) are.

This was a problem for Democrats in the past, but they built around it. Campaigns worked on turnout, as did friendly labor unions and black churches. All of the constant “get out and vote” advertising that seemed stupid to a regular voter helped Democrats break through the noise of daily life and remind those sometimes-voters it was time to do their civic duty.

If the Republican Party wants to keep winning with Trump’s coalition, they must do the same. “Rock the vote” messaging was never aimed at the GOP voter, but it should be now. Trump’s campaign knew this, which is why they went from 2020’s hostility to mail-in voting to 2024’s “too big to rig” embrace of it. The result was the first popular vote majority for the party in twenty years, and a thumping electoral college win.

Pennsylvania Republicans: learn from this.

Turning out the voters is hard work. It takes volunteers knocking on doors, driving folks to the polls, telling them how to get mail ballots delivered safely and legally, and all of the things the Dems have known for a while now. Party machines are dying everywhere, so PACs and various other NGOs have stepped into the breach, but no matter who’s doing it, it has to be done for a party that wants to win in the 21st century.

Kyle Sammin is the managing editor of Broad + Liberty.