PA Dems Won't Talk About the Bill That Could Cost Them ‘26
A billboard went up in Scranton this month inviting Gov. Josh Shapiro to “be normal.” The sign, funded by Voices of Americans, a newly formed conservative nonprofit, is part of a five-figure multichannel campaign targeting Shapiro and House Democratic leaders for blocking Senate Bill 9, the Save Women's Sports Act. Additional billboards are going up along Interstate 83 in Harrisburg, with sports radio ads featuring Paula Scanlan, the former University of Pennsylvania swimmer and team captain who competed alongside transgender NCAA champion Lia Thomas.
SB 9 would bar transgender athletes from competing on women’s teams at public high schools and colleges in Pennsylvania. The bill passed the Republican-controlled Senate last May with unanimous GOP support and five Democratic votes. It has since stalled in the Democratic-led House, where leadership has used procedural maneuvers to prevent a floor vote. Shapiro, who called the bill’s supporters “extremists” last July, has refused to say whether he would sign or veto it. Polling from Franklin & Marshall, Pew, and the New York Times/Ipsos consistently shows 64-79% of voters support the ban. Republicans see the issue as a trap, and they are building the midterm infrastructure to spring it.
To get a better understanding of the state of play, this report features interviews with several Pennsylvania Republicans about SB 9. All of them responded. Leading Democrats, including Gov. Shapiro, Sen. John Fetterman, and Rep. Summer Lee, were contacted for interviews. None of them responded.
How the Bill Stalled
The five Senate Democrats who crossed over were Sens. Lisa Boscola, Marty Flynn, James Andrew Malone, Nick Miller, and Christine Tartaglione. When House Republicans attempted a discharge resolution to force a vote last July, Education Committee Chairman Rep. Peter Schweyer (D-Allentown) re-referred the bill to the Health Committee, resetting the 15-day clock. The vote to re-refer was 14-12, strictly along party lines.
The bill’s text includes a provision that it shall not restrict eligibility for students to participate on teams designated for their own sex or on coed teams. It addresses one specific question: whether biological males should compete on teams designated for females.
The Governor’s Moving Target
Shapiro’s position on this legislation has moved several times, and the full arc warrants careful review. In 2021, when social justice concerns were ascendant and a similar bill was headed for Gov. Tom Wolf’s desk, then-Attorney General Shapiro tweeted that the legislation was “nothing more than cruel, designed to discriminate against transgender youth who just want to play sports like their peers.” Advocacy groups like the Pennsylvania Youth Congress circulated assurances early in 2025 that Shapiro would veto any such bill.
By July 2025, when Shapiro made his first public comments on SB 9 as governor, the tone had slightly shifted. He called the bill’s supporters “extremist politicians like Donald Trump, Doug Mastriano, and these others,” but would not say whether he would veto it. Instead, he punted to the PIAA, arguing that local scholastic sports officials should regulate participation on a case-by-case basis.
Then came his December feature interview with The Atlantic, where a more moderate-sounding Shapiro said sports officials, not politicians, should make the rules, but acknowledged when pressed that his personal view was different: trans youths don’t “deserve an unfair advantage on the playing field.” In January, when Axios reporter Holly Otterbein quizzed nearly 20 Democrats viewed as possible 2028 presidential contenders on trans rights, most declined to comment or didn’t respond. Kamala Harris, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, J.B. Pritzker, Cory Booker, Andy Beshear, Chris Murphy, Ro Khanna, and Gavin Newsom all either ignored the questions or refused to answer. Shapiro was one of only three who engaged at all. His spokesperson pointed Otterbein back to the Atlantic interview and noted that Shapiro had taken legal action against the Trump administration over its efforts to block gender-transition care for children (those efforts are supported by an overwhelming majority of Americans, per Pew polling from February 2025).
To recap: the bill was “cruel” in 2021; its supporters were “extremists” in July 2025; trans kids don’t deserve an “unfair advantage” by December 2025; the governor’s office is simultaneously fighting Trump on gender-transition care while refusing to commit on SB 9, and when a reporter at Axios asks a direct question that other inquiring minds surely want to know, Shapiro’s team sends her to a prior interview rather than give a new answer.
The Republicans Who Called Back
Jason Richey, a K&L Gates attorney and candidate for lieutenant governor, took time out from campaigning to discuss SB 9. Richey was an academic All-American wrestler at Allegheny College and coached a women’s wrestling team, noting correctly that women’s wrestling is one of the fastest-growing women’s sports in the country. When asked whether, in his qualified judgment as someone who has both wrestled men and coached women, biological males competing on women’s teams would affect the sport, he didn't hesitate: “There are innate biological differences, and something like that would hamper the impressive growth of women’s wrestling.” He added: “The governor has said the people who voted for SB 9 are extremists. Meanwhile, this bill polls very well across both parties. As I say when I travel around the state, talking to people who are still or who used to be Democrats: don't feel bad about leaving the party, because it left you long ago.”
State Treasurer and gubernatorial candidate Stacy Garrity responded with a written statement: “We need to foster and expand these opportunities, not impede them, and as Governor I will work to protect women's athletics and prohibit biological men from participating in girls' sports.”
State Rep. Jonathan Fritz, who represents Wayne and Susquehanna counties in the 111th District, called the issue one he sees from only one side: “Since the inception of Title IX fifty years ago, there has been a separate space for our female athletes. It’s about respect, safety, and fairness.” Fritz credits sports with changing his own life trajectory and said the locker room dimension of the issue is personal: “I have a daughter, and frankly, it sickens me. A woman's right to privacy while getting changed is violated.”
State Sen. Judy Ward, the bill’s sponsor, represents the 30th Senatorial District covering Blair, Fulton, Huntingdon, Juniata, and Mifflin counties. A registered nurse by training, Ward said, “This is an 80/20 issue that goes to the heart of why something like Title IX exists, which was creating opportunities for women.” She added: “This is also a completely different issue than tolerance or acceptance in school. SB 9 is about ensuring safe spaces like locker rooms without biological males present as well as a level playing field for sports that can help you win scholarships and other valuable awards.”
Ward has hosted Paula Scanlan and fellow swimmer Riley Gaines at the Capitol, along with other female athletes who testified about SB 9’s importance. She recalled a moment that stuck with her: after a Republican-led press conference in May, Education Committee Chairman Schweyer told a group of high school girls advocating for SB 9 that the bill would not get out of his committee. Ward, who witnessed the exchange, told the Daily Caller at the time that Schweyer was “the dream crusher” to the young women. She said, “Can you imagine that, right in front of them?” She noted “they’re just playing politics" with an issue that has so much support its passage should have been a layup.
Ward also pushed back on the argument that the small number of current cases makes legislation unnecessary. The PIAA told WHYY it knew of just one transgender athlete participating in high school sports in Pennsylvania, and the New York Times reported fewer than 10 among 510,000 college athletes nationwide. Ward’s concern is that without explicit statutory language, those numbers could grow, making an already divisive issue harder and more confusing to resolve later. “If you don’t draw a clear line now,” she said, “you’re inviting more cases and more conflict, and that doesn't help anyone, including transgender students who deserve clarity about where they stand.”
The Political Trap
The polling, as noted, is not ambiguous, and it cuts across party lines. Here is what should concern anyone running for elected office: if the number of affected athletes is so small that many moderate Democrats can call SB 9 a “nothingburger,” then the cost of passing it is negligible while the cost of blocking it is enormous. Every Pennsylvania politician needs to be on record on this, and the refusal to take a position is itself a position. If you think the bill addresses a non-issue, pass it and get back to affordability, healthcare, and the economic concerns that actually top voter priority lists. The argument that “it’s so few people, why legislate?” cuts both ways: if it’s so few people, why risk alienating another female athlete who lost her college scholarship slot or (like Riley Gaines) a chance at a national title over this?
One prominent Pennsylvania Democrat who spoke on background put it to me in terms the party’s consultant class would recognize. A politician like Bill Clinton, he said, would have listened to an advisor like James Carville, figured out how to neutralize the issue with a signing ceremony and some carefully chosen language about compassion and inclusion, and moved on to the economic ground where Democrats are stronger in 2026. Carville himself has been saying as much publicly for months, ripping his party for alienating male voters with messaging he considers tone-deaf and condescending. At a February event at the University of Georgia, Carville went further, accusing Democrats of “cultural arrogance” and warning: “If you sound like you're on NPR, you're doomed.”
The former officeholder’s point was simple: Clinton would have read the polls and the tea leaves, applied his John Hancock to SB 9, and then taken other, more popular steps to show the party’s left that he still cared about trans acceptance and inclusion in every other area of public life. Doing so would have taken the issue off the table before Republicans could weaponize it. Instead, Pennsylvania Democrats are letting a niche question about competitive athletics metastasize into a broader referendum on whether the party trusts voters to hold reasonable positions.
The Voices of Americans campaign is explicitly targeting the four U.S. House districts held by Republicans that Democrats hope to flip in 2026: the 1st, 7th, 8th, and 10th. The nonprofit’s founder and president, political consultant Albert Eisenberg, has described the billboard campaign as an “opening salvo” in the midterms. “Once they start feeling real political consequence," Eisenberg told me, “the center cannot hold, or rather, the intransigent left cannot hold.” Republicans watched Trump spend $215 million on “Kamala is for they/them” ads in 2024 and saw that the Harris campaign's strategy of talking around the issue did not work. The GOP understands it is forcing Democrats to own an unpopular niche position in a year where structural factors like the economy and healthcare otherwise favor the left.
This is the new version of the pro-life/pro-choice semantic trap that paralyzed politicians in the 1990s and 2000s, when Catholic candidates like Joe Biden contorted themselves into incoherent positions rather than giving a straight answer – though they ultimately conceded to their party’s left flank in the end. The difference is that the polling here is much more lopsided against the progressive position, and the number of people directly affected is far, far smaller. Resolving this would cost Democrats almost nothing. Continuing to dodge it, as 2024 showed, will cost them plenty.
That election-season gut punch of a billboard in Scranton will come down eventually. The procedural games and non-answers will not age as well as the Democrats blocking SB 9 seem to think.
