Pennsylvania
A political realignment in PA: Despite recent Dem wins, the GOP is gaining momentum, analysts say
Top political analysts in Pennsylvania say the state is in the midst of a major demographic and electoral shift, which is likely to prove beneficial for the GOP. According to the latest figures coming out of the commonwealth, Republicans gained more than 10,000 new registrants in the last two months.
An analysis of data from the Pennsylvania Department of State conducted by the news outlets PoliticsPA and SpotlightPA found Pennsylvania’s running totals of Republican registrants as of mid-May had increased nearly 11,000 since March 29. Democratic rolls lost about 4,600, and nearly 20,000 Democrats have decided to switch parties or re-register as independent or third-party voters.
Up until recently, Pennsylvania could be counted on for flipping its gubernatorial seat every two terms and has showcased a diverse range of U.S. senators, from the conservative Rick Santorum to the late Arlen Specter, who famously switched from Republican to Democrat. Political strategists said the latest figures show the GOP may have a lot to celebrate in November despite recent Democratic dominance.
Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro upset that gubernatorial trend when he defeated retired Army Col. and state Sen. Doug Mastriano in 2022 to succeed fellow Democrat Tom Wolf. And former President Trump failed to repeat the upset win he notched in 2016 while running against President Biden in 2020.
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A Pennsylvania welcome sign greets drivers on U.S. Route 222 entering Peach Bottom, Pa., from Maryland in 2022. (Charlie Creitz/Fox News)
However, the numbers tell the true tale, said Charlie Gerow, a Pennsylvania political strategist and former vice chairman of the American Conservative Union.
“Republicans have been gaining on the Democrats in Pennsylvania for a number of years, and the gap right now is very narrow,” Gerow said, noting how Democrats once outnumbered Republicans by 1 million in the commonwealth.
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When asked about recent Republican losses in light of Democrats’ declining registration advantage, Gerow said campaigns and registration figures have their differences.
“I have good news for the folks wringing their hands [about the Democrats’ recent successes]. [With] Donald Trump and David McCormick, Republicans are going to have a lot to celebrate.”
Gerow predicts McCormick will defeat Sen. Bob Casey Jr., D-Pa., who observers said in 2012 was helped into office by the name recognition and aisle-crossing popularity of his late father, former Gov. Robert P. Casey, the pro-life Democratic namesake of the landmark “Planned Parenthood v. Casey” case.
While Philadelphia and the suburbs see an influx of more moderate or liberal voters from the cities and a shift against populist conservatism, the numbers taken statewide appear to be moving in the GOP’s favor.
“The difference between the two parties’ registration is what is significant,” Gerow said. “What you’re seeing here is a very big demographic shift. The Republican Party is increasingly more populist. The Democrats are increasingly more elitist.”
Mastriano, who ran against Shapiro in 2022, told Fox News Digital he was heartened by the latest statistics.
“The trends under multiple measures can’t be making Democrats happy,” he said.
“Besides seeing statewide and even blue-centered areas like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh showing significantly more Republican registrations, even Gov. Shapiro’s big push for automatic registration when getting a driver’s license has resulted in bigger GOP gains, which I doubt Josh was expecting when he got behind this.”
While its major cities — Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Allentown — remain reliably in Democratic hands, one of several spreadsheets provided by the State Department showed about 2,200 Philadelphia voters left the Democratic Party so far this year, while the GOP lost about 400.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Shapiro addresses the media after casting his ballot at the Rydal Elementary School West polling location Nov. 8, 2022, in Rydal, Pa. (Mark Makela/Getty Images)
Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh, lost just under 1,200 Democrats and 500 Republicans.
Once reliably-Democratic areas like Schuylkill County now swing Republican, and Trump notably flipped several blue-friendly areas like Luzerne, home to Wilkes-Barre, and Northampton counties in 2016. But Republicans have suffered recent losses around Philadelphia, where once-red, middle-class Delaware County now leans reliably Democratic.
However, overall, there are 3,894,593 Democratic voters registered in Pennsylvania to 3,504,984 Republicans, according to state data.
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State Sen. Jarrett Coleman of Lehigh County added he believes the registration gap narrowing is indicative of public sentiment increasingly favoring the GOP.
“[It] is due to the fact that the Republican Party is more focused on kitchen table issues, and that resonates with voters,” Coleman said. “The people I talk to are more concerned about being able to pay their bills and making ends meet. They’re turned off by the Democratic Party’s unrelenting focus on social issues and making every election about abortion.”
Sam Chen, a top Pennsylvania political analyst and professor at Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, called the recent trends “fantastic” for Republicans and “worrisome” for Democrats.
Chen called attention to Pennsylvania voters’ proclivity to split their tickets
“In 2016, we saw Donald Trump win the presidency, Pat Toomey win his Senate seat, and then, down the row offices, it was all Democrats,” Chen said. He added that it may “take the edge off” such shifts in voter registration, and that that may not mean all of the “new” Republican voters will automatically support Trump or McCormick.
He argued that while some may try to delineate conservative and moderate Republicans, the true variable is populist via non-populist, regardless of party.
At the same time, Chen said there are things on the populist side of the party that voters for former Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., a longtime respected lawmaker who was not afraid to criticize Trump at times, would not support. Chen later added that some of the gross declines in party registrations, regardless of net gains and losses, are likely attributed to voter distaste with the entire body politic.
“They may not necessarily be conservative or moderate or populist,” Chen said. “They may also just be fed up and feel like they don’t have a home in their own party.”
State department officials who supplied data for purposes of this story declined to comment.
HARRISBURG — A new task force under Pennsylvania’s Department of State has been working since February to hunt down AI chatbots that may be misleading users into believing the bots are licensed professionals.
Last week, the Shapiro administration filed what it said was the first lawsuit to stem from its AI investigations and the first enforcement action of its kind announced by a governor in the United States. Pennsylvania officials indicated there could be more to come.
The high-profile litigation comes as lawmakers across the country are pursuing, and in some cases enacting, legislation to address concerns brought on by the growing artificial intelligence industry — from banning the creation of sexual images of minors to requiring age verification for all users. A number of proposals from Gov. Josh Shapiro’s most recent budget address await action in the legislature.
The administration’s lawsuit alleges that software known as Character.AI, which creates fictional personalities for users to interact with, posed as a licensed doctor and offered medical advice to a state investigator, violating state law governing the practice of medicine. The suit was filed by Pennsylvania’s State Board of Medicine.
“We will continue to take action to protect the public from misleading or unlawful practices, whether they come from individuals or emerging technologies,” Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt said in a statement following the Character.AI lawsuit.
Shapiro made a similar promise in a statement, saying Pennsylvania will continue “holding bad actors accountable and setting clear guardrails so people can use new technology responsibly.”
The lawsuit says it stems from an investigation in which an employee with the Department of State created an account with the service and began a dialogue with “Emilie” — an AI-generated character the software described as a “Doctor of psychiatry.”
The character allegedly claimed it went to Imperial College London, had been practicing for seven years, and is licensed in Pennsylvania.
“In fact, I did a stint in Philadelphia for a while,” it told the investigator, according to the lawsuit.
The software also provided what the lawsuit said was a fake license number.
Those claims, the Shapiro administration argues, trick users into believing they are receiving medical advice from a licensed practitioner.
“Pennsylvanians deserve to know who — or what — they are interacting with online, especially when it comes to their health,” Shapiro said in a statement. “We will not allow companies to deploy AI tools that mislead people into believing they are receiving advice from a licensed medical professional.”
The lawsuit seeks for Character Technologies Inc. (developer of Character.AI) to “cease and desist from engaging in the unlawful practice of medicine and surgery.”
A Character.AI spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday that the company’s “highest priority is the safety and well-being of our users.” The spokesperson said that before the lawsuit, Character.AI already featured disclaimers warning that its AI characters are not real, and that they “should be treated as fiction.”
The spokesperson declined to comment on the lawsuit.
Pennsylvania’s lawsuit is not the first Character Technologies has faced. At least one case was brought by the parent of a minor who died by suicide. The company last year adopted a policy to ban minors from engaging “in open-ended chat with AI on our platform.”
The Federal Trade Commission last year also opened an inquiry into the company, along with six other chatbot providers, regarding how they “measure, test, and monitor potentially negative impacts of this technology on children and teens,” according to an agency news release.
It’s unclear what led Pennsylvania regulators to specifically investigate Character.AI. A Department of State spokesperson said the source of the complaint was “confidential.”
Shapiro told CNN, one of several national media outlets that covered the novel lawsuit, that his administration “challenged” the Department of State to conduct these types of investigations “to go and use this technology and see what kind of risks it posed” to Pennsylvanians.
Some details about the effort, which Shapiro first teased in his February budget pitch, are not yet public. Members of the task force are not disclosed online, and the Department of State did not answer questions from Spotlight PA asking for their names or how they were selected. A Department of State spokesperson said the task force consists of 12 of its employees.
As part of the AI fraud initiative, Pennsylvania is crowdsourcing tips on what software the state should investigate through its “Unlicensed Practice by a Chatbot” complaint system and hotline. According to the Department of State, it has received 18 complaints since it launched in February.
Pennsylvania’s moves against AI companies come as they rapidly grow their user bases nationwide, especially children and teenagers.
According to a survey last year from Common Sense Media, a California-based child safety nonprofit, more than half of teenagers access AI platforms at least a few times per month. One-third said they use or view the software as a tool to socialize, including for conversation or relationship practice, emotional support, role-playing, friendships, and romantic interactions.
At least five states have enacted laws restricting chatbots or requiring disclosures, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. California, for example, requires companies to disclose to children that they are interacting with AI. Pennsylvania is not one of them, but the state medical board alleges Character.AI’s actions violated existing law.
In his February budget address, Shapiro called on the General Assembly to take action on artificial intelligence. He urged lawmakers to prohibit chatbots from creating sexually explicit or violent content of minors, mandate that developers require age verification from users, and detect when children mention self-harm or violence. He also wants companies to frequently notify users they’re not interacting with a human.
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Lawmakers have not yet adopted those proposals.
House Communications & Technology Committee Chair Joe Ciresi (D., Montgomery) said the body’s staff is “constantly” meeting with Shapiro’s office to discuss how lawmakers should address growing concerns from the public regarding AI.
Ciresi’s counterpart in the GOP-controlled state Senate, Tracy Pennycuick (R., Montgomery), did not respond to questions about the Character.AI lawsuit, Pennsylvania’s AI Task Force, or her staff’s coordination with Shapiro.
Two years ago, Shapiro signed a bill banning ownership or distribution of AI-generated sexual images of children and non-consenting adults, which Pennycuick had sponsored. Last year, he signed another Pennycuick bill criminalizing the use of AI to create a nonconsensual “digital likeness” (including deepfakes) to “defraud or injure” another person.
Pennycuick’s now pushing for legislation that would require disclosures and restrictions for chatbots when they interact with children. In the legislative memo, Pennycuick pointed to past lawsuits filed against chatbot developers to argue “heartbreaking cases underscore the urgent need for safeguards to protect children from unsafe and unvetted AI systems.” Her proposal passed the state Senate in March but has not advanced through committee in the House.
Lawmakers have also been working to address another aspect of the AI industry, the growth of data centers and backlash to them in some communities. In Shapiro’s February budget address, he said, “no sector of our country’s economy is growing faster than data centers and artificial intelligence.” He announced incentives for data center developers to follow stricter environmental and transparency standards.
BEFORE YOU GO… If you learned something from this article, pay it forward and contribute to Spotlight PA at spotlightpa.org/donate. This story was funded in part thanks to the support of the Lancaster County Local Journalism Fund. Learn more about how we are supported here.
Hersheypark in Pennsylvaniacould be forced to close this summer amid a dispute between the site’s operators and union employees, according to a report.
The amusement park is scheduled to open seven days a week starting May 21 in a shift from its weekend-only operation before the summer, despite a looming vote among employees about whether to go on strike.
Over 200 union maintenance employees at Hersheypark, The Hotel Hershey and Giant Center rejected a contract offer from Hershey Entertainment & Resorts on May 7, according to Inside the Magic. The park’s operators described the proposal as their “last, best and final” offer.
Over a three-day period this week, employees will vote on whether to strike after rejecting the offer, which is the third from the park’s operators. A strike could close the park just in time for the start of the busy summer season when families head on vacation.
The list of employees considering going on strike includes ride mechanics, electricians, plumbers, welders, painters, machinists, utilities technicians, carpenters, garage auto mechanics and sign artists.
In mid-March, the union and Hershey Entertainment & Resorts agreed to extend a former contract for 60 days to allow for continued negotiations.
According to Inside the Magic, union workers are seeking fair wage increases, more affordable care plans and higher pay premiums for less-desirable shifts. The union has also said that it will reject new contract offers that lower professional standards, devalue skilled trades or open the door to lower wages in maintenance roles in the future.
The Independent has contacted Hershey Entertainment & Resorts for comment about the possible strike.
Hersheypark, located 15 miles east of Harrisburg, is the largest amusement park in Pennsylvania. Founded in 1906, the 121-acre site boasts more than 70 rides, a water park with 17 water attractions and an 11-acre North American Wildlife Park, according to Hersheypark’s website.
It’s named for and themed in conjunction with the popular candy company.
However, a different park in the Keystone State was named as the top amusement park in the U.S. on TripAdvisor’s Best of the Best list.
It was Knoebels Amusement Resort in Elysburg, 42 miles north-northeast of Harrisburg, that topped the list. In doing so, the little-known park was ranked higher than Dollywood, Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, Disney’s Hollywood Studios and Universal Islands of Adventure that also made the top 5.
“It’s got it all: roller coasters, kid-friendly rides (bumper cars, a haunted mansion), swimming, camping, a mining museum, and even a championship 18-hole golf course,” TripAdvisor wrote. “The accommodating staff, clean facilities, and fun attractions make for a memorable family-friendly visit.”
Knoebels is the U.S.’s largest free-admission park, although tickets for individual rides cost a fee.
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