Pennsylvania’s Mandate for Moderation
The 2025 Pittsburgh mayoral election delivered a resounding message that most progressive activists would prefer to ignore. Corey O’Connor, who defeated incumbent Ed Gainey in the Democratic primary, achieved high levels of off-year turnout and secured more than 80% of the vote against fedora-wearing perennial Republican candidate Tony Moreno. The margin represented a mandate for the moderate alternative to Gainey’s gaffe-filled progressive tenure.
O’Connor’s campaign centered on competence and pragmatism rather than transformative policy proposals. With many details yet to be worked out, he promised better basic services and fiscal responsibility, the bread-and-butter governance that matters to voters. The margin tells you everything: Pittsburgh voters wanted less ideology, more execution.
The same pattern emerged in Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court retention elections, though the process itself warrants scrutiny. All three justices won retention by approximately 23 percentage points. Voters concerned about further right-wing incursions into areas like abortion access spent $9.8 million to rubber-stamp outcomes in a system that has seen only one justice lose retention since 1968. As I argued in the Post-Gazette, nonpartisan judicial retention represents the worst possible judicial selection method for ensuring accountability. It combines false democratic legitimacy with zero meaningful oversight, wasting money on predetermined outcomes while letting voters believe they’re exercising substantive choice — but voters stayed the course nevertheless.
Such centrist, status quo ante Trump results align with a broader trend across the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. Abigail Spanberger won Virginia’s gubernatorial race in a landslide, becoming the first Democrat to win by double digits since 1985. Her campaign focused on affordability and economic concerns, not progressive wish lists. Spanberger, a former CIA officer, built her political career on projecting competence and centrism in a competitive suburban district. She exported that formula statewide and won convincingly.
New Jersey elected Mikie Sherrill governor by 13 points, 56% to 43%. Sherrill, a former Navy pilot and federal prosecutor, ran on cutting waste and improving government efficiency while avoiding the culture war flashpoints that energize far-left radicals but alienate persuadable voters. Both women built credibility through professional backgrounds that signal school-superintendent seriousness rather than ideological fervor.
This represents a sharp contrast to New York City, where Zohran Mamdani became mayor and progressive activists celebrated a democratic socialist capturing America’s largest city. The celebration ignores the opponent. Mamdani faced Andrew Cuomo, a tarnished second-generation ex-governor running as an Independent after years of scandal and public disgrace (his jacked brother Chris, disgraced but less so, ought to have run in his stead), and Republican Curtis Sliwa, a legendary cat-loving vigilante and eccentric who never had a realistic path to victory in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly seven to one. Calling this a progressive mandate requires overlooking that Mamdani won because Democrats vote for Democrats in New York City, not because voters embraced his Democratic Socialists of America-lite platform.
Compare Mamdani’s path to those of Spanberger and Sherrill. They won competitive states where Republicans remain viable, attracting persuadable voters and independents with campaigns focused on affordability and competence. Mamdani won a heavily Democratic city against damaged goods and the latest oddball Republican sacrificial lamb. These are not equivalent victories, and treating them as such distorts the actual story of 2025.
The progressive narrative holds that Democratic voters hunger for bold transformative change, that moderation represents timidity and capitulation to conservative framing. The 2025 results suggest otherwise. When given clear choices, voters in competitive environments picked the moderates who talked about making government work rather than revolutionizing society with people’s bodegas and free gender-affirming healthcare.
O’Connor’s huge margin of victory in a city gradually delivering more Republican votes in national elections speaks louder than any progressive’s narrow win in a safe blue enclave.
Activists have spent the past decade arguing that Democrats lose when they abandon progressive principles and fail to offer a choice instead of an echo. Not so: Spanberger and Sherrill won by double digits while explicitly rejecting progressive orthodoxy. O’Connor, the son of a former mayor, won in a landslide by positioning himself as the return-to-normalcy alternative to a progressive incumbent. Voters want to reward candidates who focus on practical governance over ideological purity.
O’Connor, Spanberger, and Sherrill didn’t promise to transform America or dismantle systems of oppression. They promised to fix roads, improve schools, cut costs, and make local and state government function even as the federal government remains closed for business. Voters responded enthusiastically and will now await the results. Progressives can celebrate Mamdani’s New York City victory all they want, but the big story is what happened in Pittsburgh, Virginia, and New Jersey, where moderates again proved that day-in, day-out governance still sells.
