PENNSYLVANIA – The 2026 midterm elections will decide control of the next U.S. Congress and key state leadership, including Pennsylvania’s statewide offices.

Before the general election, each state will hold primaries to determine which candidates appear on the November ballot.

By the numbers:

In Pennsylvania, the May primary will narrow the field of candidates who will compete in the November general election for several important posts, per Ballotpedia. 

• U.S. House of Representatives — All 17 districts will hold primaries to choose nominees.
• Pennsylvania Governor — Although both major parties’ current frontrunners are effectively unopposed in their primaries, the contest sets the stage for the November race between incumbent Gov. Josh Shapiro and Republican Stacy Garrity.
• State Legislature — all 203 seats in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives and half of the State Senate seats are up for election, with primaries deciding many general election matchups.

Dig deeper:

Pennsylvania is considered a key battleground state in the 2026 midterms, with several congressional districts expected to be highly competitive and potentially pivotal in determining which party controls the two chambers of Congress.

As of April 2026, the Republican Party controls both chambers of Congress. 

On Nov. 3, voters will cast ballots for all 435 U.S. House seats, 35 U.S. Senate seats and numerous state and local positions, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Voters will decide 33 regularly scheduled Senate seats, plus two special elections to fill the seats vacated by J.D. Vance of Ohio and Marco Rubio of Florida, who left Congress to serve as vice president and Secretary of State, respectively.

Voter registration and deadlines

What you can do:

Voters in Pennsylvania who want to take part in the state’s 2026 primary must register by Monday, May 4, according to the Pennsylvania Department of State. This deadline applies to both new registrations and updates to existing voter registrations.

The primary election will be held on Tuesday, May 19. The mail-in ballot request deadline is Tuesday, May 12. 

Voters are encouraged to check their registration status and ballot information well before these dates to ensure participation in both the primary and the November general election.

Multiple people in the Philadelphia region reported seeing a fireball in the sky Tuesday.

The American Meteor Society listed the event in its meteor sighting database, saying it had received nearly 150 reports from across the region, including in Eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Connecticut about the fireball.

According to the database, reports of the fireball came in from Doylestown, Lansdale, Willow Grove, King of Prussia and more.

Nick Brucato of Whiting shared video of it in The Pine Barrens group on Facebook and with Patch. “Took this video as fast as I could today in Whiting at 2:34 PM. Heard the loud boom minutes later,” he said.

“We were out on our deck and my wife saw it,” a Waretown resident said on the Tri-County Scanner News post. “She said it was bright white ball and then it broke apart into several pieces and then it was gone. Then the sonic boom hit!”

A meteor is the flash of moving light that becomes visible when a meteoroid — a chunk of an asteroid or a comet — hits the Earth’s atmosphere, according to the American Meteor Society.

In mid-March another meteor was the likely cause of a large boom that was felt over parts of Pennsylvania and northeastern Ohio.

The National Weather Service in Pittsburgh said it received reports from numerous people across Western Pennsylvania of the tremendous noise and a fireball in the sky on March 17.

A weather service employee caught the cause of the boom and the weather service posted it. MORE: Meteor Causes Tremendous Boom Over Parts Of PA

With reporting by Karen Wall

What data centers think of Matzie’s bill

The Data Center Coalition is watching bills like Matzie’s closely. The coalition represents companies including Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, CoreWeave and OpenAI.

Dan Diorio, vice president of state policy with the group, said the coalition is open to special utility rates for large electricity users that force these customers to pay for any grid upgrades their operations require while insulating other ratepayers from these costs. But the group opposes bills like Matzie’s that apply specifically to data centers, rather than to all electricity users over a certain size.

“If it’s a transmission line or if it’s a substation, if it’s a generating asset, of course, data centers should pay for that and will pay for that,” Diorio said.

But “no specific end user should be singled out for disparate treatment,” he said.

The coalition also opposes mandating data centers to curtail energy use during times of peak demand or bring their own new, clean power, preferring instead incentives that reward data centers for voluntarily doing so, Diorio said.

“Things like having to take interruptible service … you could see projects move across to a different state line where they didn’t have that requirement, while doing nothing to solve the ultimate shortfall within [the regional grid],” he said.

Pennsylvania lobbying records show the Data Center Coalition spent $19,632 on lobbying at the state level on the topic of “energy, information technology and utilities” during the last three months of 2025.

“Pennsylvania is a very strong, growing and important market for the data center industry,” Diorio said. “We understand concerns, and we want to be an engaged stakeholder to address those concerns, but also keep the state strong for development. And I think we can do that — I think we can find a good middle ground.”