Pennsylvania House of Representatives Democrats I was holding on once again won a narrow majority in the 140th House District byelection on Tuesday night.
WITH almost all results are now availableAccording to unofficial results, Democratic candidate Jim Prokopiak won with 6,462 votes (67.33%), compared to Republican candidate Candace Cabanas, who received 3,079 votes (32.08%).
Prokopiak did great across the board, winning all 33 precincts in the 140th District, which includes parts of Falls Township, Middletown Township and Morrisville. The map above shows he even managed to win 60% or more in 31 of those 33 precincts.
How does this compare to previous results in the 140th District? Well, direct comparisons to previous races are tough because this district has been redrawn after the 2020 census. What we can do, however, is map the results from former state representative John Galloway last race contested in 2020.
Galloway only secured about 60% of votes in his 2020 fight against Republican opponent Jeanine McGee. I mapped those results, and as you can see, Prokopiak edged out Galloway in all of their overlapping districts.
Still, given the different district lines, this one tally didn’t seem sufficient, so I decided to really open things up and compare Tuesday’s race results to President Joe Biden’s 2020 results in these HD-140 districts, as well as U.S. Sen. John Fetterman’s and Gov. Josh Shapiro’s 2022 results in the district.
I found that in HD-140’s 33 precincts, Biden won 18,210 votes (54.48%), while Donald Trump won 14,743 votes (44.11%). This 10-point victory fell just brief of Fetterman’s results, as the senator won 14,053 votes (56.33%), while Dr. Oz secured 10,055 votes (40.3%).
Shapiro, as you might expect, put together the strongest coalition of the trio. He won 15,467 votes (62.05%) to Republican State Senator Doug Mastriano’s 8,899 votes (35.7%). You can see my spreadsheet with precinct results for all of these races here.
Overall, Prokopiak managed to outperform every major Democratic candidate in the state’s primary in Tuesday’s contest. Given the stakes of the race, control over the House of Representatives in balancethis is a particularly impressive achievement.
Does this have any significance for the higher-profile presidential and Senate races in November? Well, it certainly isn’t unusual for lower-tier candidates like state representatives to outperform their fellow candidates. After all, that’s typically where Democrats run without opposition for most November competitions.
Still, Democrats must be encouraged that they are gaining support in Lower Bucks County, where they lost support over the last few cyclesUltimately, however, the central question – both nationally and in Pennsylvania – will be whether The Democratic turnout advantage we saw in the last special election will be in the November general election. Perhaps we’ll get a clue as to the answer from the April primary.
