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Even Gov. Josh Shapiro couldn’t have saved Pennsylvania for the Democrats

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Even Gov. Josh Shapiro couldn’t have saved Pennsylvania for the Democrats


Elections often tell you less about the winners than the losers. Victory has many fathers, as the saying goes, but defeat shows you exactly what went wrong.

Pennsylvania’s 2024 results offer a master class in Democratic collapse: while Trump edged out Kamala Harris by 2 points in the presidential race, Republicans romped to victory in every down-ballot statewide contest.

Dave McCormick pulled out a narrow victory over three-term Senator Bob Casey; Dave Sunday trounced Eugene DePasquale by 5 points in the attorney general race; and incumbent Tim DeFoor beat Malcolm Kenyatta by an even wider margin for auditor general.

The AP called the Pennsylvania Senate race for Republican Dave McCormick Thursday afternoon. REUTERS

The story of how Democrats fumbled Pennsylvania reveals itself in the campaign’s final weeks. Trump’s operation blanketed working-class neighborhoods with simple, direct messaging: “Trump: Safe Borders/Kamala: Open Borders,” “Trump: Low Inflation/Harris: High Inflation.”

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His team’s “Kamala is for they/them” ad sparked legal threats but achieved its intended effect — the Democrats are worried about boutique issues rather than kitchen-table concerns like inflation. Harris, meanwhile, released a series of slickly-produced but culturally tone-deaf ads attempting to portray Pennsylvania working-class life.

Harris’s response proved telling. Her team launched what they considered their October surprise: a series of joint appearances with unpopular former Republican Liz Cheney focused on “saving democracy.” The rallies, held primarily in affluent suburban enclaves, epitomized the campaign’s fundamental misread of the state’s political geography.

Her campaign’s last notable attempt at working-class authenticity — a commercial featuring a supposed working-class local who seemed like an actor delivering focus-grouped lines about Trump being a “little silver spoon boy” — landed with my working-class relatives about as well as vegan bulgogi tacos at a union hall.

This messaging disconnect infected every Democratic campaign. DePasquale, running for attorney general, leaned heavily on his record as a fiscal watchdog and government reformer — but not as a prosecutor, because he never was one. A compelling pitch in theory, but it withered against career prosecutor Sunday’s relentless focus on fentanyl seizures and declining crime rates in York County. While DePasquale talked process and oversight, Sunday’s team plastered social media with bodycam footage of drug busts and arrests.

Kenyatta’s auditor general campaign highlighted the party’s deeper problems. The 34-year-old progressive rising star, known mainly for viral speeches and an unsuccessful Senate bid, campaigned on transforming the office into a vehicle for social change — which made sense when one realized he had no experience in the role. Against incumbent DeFoor’s straightforward non-partisan message about cutting waste and protecting taxpayers, Kenyatta’s ambitious agenda read like a DEI solution in search of a problem.

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Sen. Bob Casey still hasn’t conceded his seat to Senator-elect Dave McCormick. AP

Even Casey, who built his career on careful moderation and labor support, couldn’t find enough votes to secure a fourth term in office. After decades positioning himself as a blue-collar, Blue-Dog Democrat, Casey’s recent selective embrace of progressive causes provided perfect fodder for McCormick’s advertising team.

While Republican ads hammered Casey’s voting record and association with flip-flopping presidential candidate Harris, his campaign responded with a barrage of increasingly desperate fundraising emails, each one predicting imminent doom. The horrendously off-key messaging — subject lines included “To avoid a catastrophe” and “The worst news yet” — became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Who wants to vote for a loser?

The results expose the bankruptcy of Democrats’ coalition-building strategy. Harris’s team believed they could unite urban progressives and anti-Trump suburbanites while holding just enough working-class voters through careful messaging and strategic positioning. Instead, they achieved a rare political feat: speaking convincingly to absolutely no one.

Gov. Josh Shapiro, floated as Harris’s potential running mate, embodied these contradictions. His “Get Sh*t Done” gubernatorial slogan had promised pragmatic results but delivered historic inaction, as the Commonwealth Foundation has reported — just 111 bills signed in 18 months, the fewest of any Pennsylvania governor in 50 years. For comparison, Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin pushed through 1,654 bills in the same period with a part-time (and divided) legislature.

The implications stretch beyond a single election cycle. Despite its slowly-dwindling population, Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes and competitive Senate seats make it essential to any future Democratic coalition.

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Gov. Josh Shapiro has promised pragmatic results but delivered historic inaction. AP

Yet Tuesday’s results suggest the party has lost its ability to communicate effectively with voters outside Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The state office margins — larger than the presidential gap – indicate problems deeper than any individual candidate’s shortcomings.

Much as they have since 2016, Democrats continued to try to thread an impossible needle: mollifying progressives with substance-free identity politics while also wooing suburban Republicans and maintaining their working-class base in the absence of genuine working-class policy proposals.

The result was messaging so carefully calibrated it became meaningless, every bit as insubstantial as Kamala Harris’ final cameo appearance on SNL.

Unless and until Democrats can craft a message that resonates beyond their urban strongholds — and find experienced, competent candidates capable of delivering said message without sounding like McKinsey consultants explaining steel manufacturing to career steelworkers — Tuesday’s results may augur a permanent realignment in a state they once considered to be winnable.

Here in the Keystone State, as elsewhere in the country, the party’s obsession with building the perfect coalition has left them with hardly any coalition at all.

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Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work.

Reprinted with permission from RealClearPennsylvania.



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Pennsylvania-born indie rockers Tigers Jaw return with new album release

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Pennsylvania-born indie rockers Tigers Jaw return with new album release


The chorus for the song “Primary Colors” was something Walsh wrote years ago, with the song’s outro originally being used as a verse.

“And something just wasn’t quite clicking, and everything that I tried felt kind of forced,” Walsh said. “We were all just like, ‘Yeah, there’s something here, but it’s not quite doing what I think it has the potential to do.’”

The band then started toying with the dynamics between the verses and the chorus.

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“It just unlocked something for me in the idea where I was like, ‘Wow, this kind of quiet, loud, quiet, loud format really works well with this song,’” Walsh said. “So yeah, it just transformed it instantly into an idea that felt a lot stronger.”

The album was recorded with Grammy-winning producer Will Yip, a relationship still budding from their 2014 album, “Charmer.” Collins said the new album’s sound is “as true as we could be to playing the record live.”

“I wasn’t as tied to the tones that have classically been Tigers Jaw because I think at this point, I’ve just come to this realization that no matter what, if we’re making it, it is Tigers Jaw,” Collins said.

The new album has a “palpable energy” that shares the same spirit as their earlier records, Walsh said. And while “tastes evolve,” the band followed “what feels good.”

“This is the best representation of the band at the time, and it’s almost like a snapshot of us as artists, as people, as a creative entity over this time in our career,” he said.

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“Lost On You” is out now through Hopeless Records and is available on vinyl, CD and various streaming platforms.

“Lost On You” was released on March 27, 2026, through Hopeless Records. The album is available on vinyl, CD and various streaming platforms.

On April 16, Tigers Jaw will perform at Union Transfer at 8 p.m. They will be supported by Hot Flash Heat Wave and Creeks, the solo project of Balance and Composure vocalist and guitarist Jon Simmons, who is from Doylestown, Pennsylvania.





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Pennsylvania court upends mandatory use of life-without-parole for second-degree murder

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Pennsylvania court upends mandatory use of life-without-parole for second-degree murder


What to Know

  • Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court says the state cannot automatically give life without parole for felony murder without weighing each defendant’s culpability in the killing.
  • The high court on Thursday ordered a new sentencing hearing for Derek Lee over a second-degree conviction, but paused it for four months to give state lawmakers time to consider legislation in response.
  • Pennsylvania law has made people liable for second-degree murder if they participated in an eligible felony that led to death. Life with no possibility of parole has been the only possible sentence.
  • The court says the current rule treats a lookout the same as the person who kills.

Pennsylvania’s high court on Thursday overturned the use of automatic life sentences without parole for people convicted of second-degree murder, saying it violates the state’s constitutional ban on cruel punishment when imposed without a closer look at the defendant’s specific role and culpability.

The court majority ordered resentencing in the case of Derek Lee, convicted of a 2014 killing in Pittsburgh, but the decision also has implications for others among the roughly 1,000 other inmates currently serving similar second-degree murder sentences.

The court’s order was put on hold for four months to give the General Assembly time to “consider appropriate remedial measures.” In a footnote, the justices said they were ruling on Lee’s sentence and not addressing “questions of retroactivity.”

Prison reform groups hailed it as a landmark decision, while the Allegheny County district attorney’s office said it will follow the court’s order.

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Pennsylvania law has made people liable for second-degree murder if they participated in an eligible felony that led to death, and life without parole has been the only possible sentence.

“The mandatory penalty scheme of life without parole for all offenders convicted of second degree murder fails to assess individual culpability regarding the intent to kill, and mandates the same punishment regardless of that culpability,” wrote Chief Justice Debra Todd in the lead opinion. She characterized it as not distinguishing “between the lookout, and the killer who pulls the trigger.”

The state high court’s decision comes after years of advocacy to undo mandatory life without parole sentences both in Pennsylvania and nationally. Nazgol Ghandnoosh of the Washington-based Sentencing Project said she counts 11 states and the federal system as having such laws for that kind of crime, sometimes called felony murder. Several states — California, Colorado and Minnesota — have moved away from that sentencing framework in recent years, she said.

Justice Kevin Dougherty noted in a separate opinion that unlike those convicted of first-degree murder, defendants serving life without parole for second-degree murder have “never been found by a judge or jury to have harbored the specific intent to kill” and may not have had “any involvement whatsoever with the actual killing. He or she does not even have to expect or foresee that a life may be taken.”

Lee’s lawyers had wanted the court to rule that life without parole sentences are unconstitutional for all second-degree murder convictions in Pennsylvania, said Quinn Cozzens, a staff attorney for the Abolitionist Law Center, which helped represent Lee. Instead, the court ruled that trial judges must examine the individual circumstances of a defendant’s case to decide which sentence is most appropriate, including the potential of life without parole.

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The state’s public defenders’ association said the ruling will generate new post-conviction litigation and require them to do more investigation as well as develop “strategic litigation” to get the decision to apply retroactively.

A jury convicted Lee of second-degree murder but acquitted him of first-degree murder in 44-year-old Leonard Butler’s shooting death. Butler was shot in a struggle over a gun with Lee’s codefendant, Paul Durham.

Prosecutors argued it should be up to state lawmakers and the executive branch to address the policy issues surrounding second-degree murder sentences. Todd wrote that while the district attorney’s office “acknowledges that there may be persuasive arguments why a non-slayer should not be held to the same degree of culpability as the slayer, it stresses that these are policy decisions for the General Assembly.”

Cozzens urged lawmakers to “address this constitutional violation, given that the court granted them the opportunity to do so.”

Rep. Tim Briggs, a suburban Philadelphia Democrat who chairs the state House Judiciary Committee, said he planned to engage with Senate Republicans on potential legislation in response.

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Briggs said he wanted to have decision apply retroactively, to give people serving life “for being the getaway driver” to “have the opportunity to have their facts looked at again.”

“I think inaction leaves a lot of this up to the courts to decide. I don’t feel comfortable doing that,” Briggs said. “We have a policymaking role here.”

Justice Sallie Mundy wrote that Lee “willingly participated in an armed home invasion and robbery, and purposefully engaged in assaultive behavior in the form of tasing and pistol-whipping the victim.” She said Lee and Durham “arguably kidnapped the victims by forcing them into the basement” and it will be up to the county judge to decide if Lee’s life-without-parole sentence is appropriate.

Todd’s opinion, citing an advocacy group, said 73% of those convicted of felony murder in Pennsylvania were 25 or younger when the killing occurred and almost 70% are Black people.

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro also responded to the ruling on X.

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Teen boys in Pennsylvania get probation after using AI to create fake nude photos of classmates

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Teen boys in Pennsylvania get probation after using AI to create fake nude photos of classmates


Lancaster Country Day School in Lancaster, Pa., Wednesday, March 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

LANCASTER, Pa. — Two teenage boys who used artificial intelligence to create fake nude photos of their classmates at an exclusive private school in Pennsylvania received probation Wednesday after dozens of victims described the images’ traumatizing effect on them.

The boys were 14 at the time. They admitted this month that they made about 350 images, showing at least 59 girls under 18, along with other victims who so far have not been identified.

Authorities said the boys took images of the girls from school photos, yearbooks, Instagram, TikTok and FaceTime chats in 2023 and 2024, and morphed them with images of adults depicting nudity or sexual activity.

More than 100 students and parents from Lancaster Country Day School were in court to hear victims describe the shock of having to identify their own faces in pornographic photos to detectives. Juvenile proceedings in Pennsylvania are normally closed, but this was opened by the judge, providing an unusual opportunity for the community to be seen and heard.

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The girls described the fallout — anxiety attacks, a loss of trust, problems focusing on schoolwork and a fear that the images may someday surface in unexpected ways.

The two young men stood stone-faced throughout, flanked by their lawyers and parents, as they were called pedophiles, “sick and twisted” and perverted.

“I will never understand why they did this,” one victim told Judge Leonard Brown, saying it “destroyed my innocence.”

One young woman told Brown “how excruciating it is to bring these feelings up again and again.” Another choked back tears as she excoriated one of the defendants for expressing “fake empathy” as girls confided with him about their pain, before it became known that he had been part of creating and disseminating the images. Still another said all of her friends transferred schools, and that she “needed trauma therapy to even walk around my neighborhood.”

The defendants declined several opportunities to comment to the judge, who said he had not heard either boy take responsibility or apologize.

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“This has been a regrettable, long, torturous process for everyone involved,” said Heidi Freese, defense attorney for one of the defendants. “There were very interesting, underlying legal issues surrounding the charges in this case and those will be decided on a different day in a different case.”

Brown ordered each to perform 60 hours of community service, have no contact with the victims and pay an unspecified amount of restitution. If they don’t have any additional legal problems, Brown said, the case can be expunged after two years.

As he imposed his sentence, Brown said that if they were adults, they probably would be headed for state prison. He said they should “take this opportunity to really examine” themselves.

The resolution of the Pennsylvania case comes days after three teenagers in Tennessee sued Elon Musk’s xAI, claiming the company’s Grok tools morphed their real photos into explicitly sexual images. The high school students are seeking class-action status to represent what the lawsuit says are thousands of people who were similarly victimized as minors.

The scandal in Pennsylvania led to a student protest, criminal charges against the two teenagers and the departure of leaders at the school, which says it has about 600 students K-12, class sizes averaging just 12 kids, and “an endowment in excess of $25 million.”

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Nadeem Bezar, a Philadelphia lawyer who represents at least 10 of the victims, said Tuesday he expects to file a claim “against the school and anybody else we think has culpability in these deepfakes being created and disseminated.”

He said he has not yet seen the photos but expects the legal process to determine “exactly when and where and how the school knew, how the boys created these images, what platforms they used to create these images and how they were disseminated.”

As AI has become accessible and powerful, lawmakers across the country have passed laws aimed at barring deepfakes.

President Donald Trump signed the Take it Down Act last year, making it illegal to publish intimate images including deepfakes without consent, and requiring websites and social media sites to remove such material within 48 hours of being notified by a victim.

Forty-six states now have laws addressing deepfakes, with legislation introduced in the remaining four — Alaska, Missouri, New Mexico and Ohio — according to the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.

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Associated Press writers Geoff Mulvihill in Haddonfield, New Jersey, and Holly Ramer in Concord, New Hampshire, contributed.





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