In 2018, covering our first midterm election, we followed the ultimately unsuccessful campaign of an electoral upstart named Jess King.
King was a progressive candidate touting ideas like Medicare for All and a higher minimum wage in Pennsylvania’s deep-red 11th District. Her campaign seemed improbable at the time.
Her opponent, conservative Republican Lloyd Smucker, had won his previous race by roughly 10 points. In 2018, the district was gerrymandered to be even more Republican.
Despite the long odds, King made an argument we hadn’t heard before. Even though she was running as a Democrat, her pitch to voters was not exclusively partisan.
“I think what we see is that voters aren’t necessarily on the left-right spectrum as much as they are on a bottom-to-top spectrum,” King told us at a campaign event. “We need to talk more about two political parties that have sold out to special interests.”
Call it the inequality proposition or a power-to-the-people mantra, King made it clear that viewing politics through the prism of party was not only outdated, but destructive.
Ultimately, her pitch fell short. She lost to Smucker.
But the 2026 election may have proved that King was simply ahead of the curve. Alongside historic wins for Democrats, her message re-emerged with new potency among an electorate increasingly angry with the status quo, regardless of party.
“You hear people talking about this top-down message instead of this left-right message,” said Pennsylvania state Representative-elect Ce-Ce Gerlach. Gerlach won with the help of the Working Families Party and the progressive group Lehigh Valley Stands Up.
She said her message of economic populism trumped party politics.
“People are struggling. People don’t want to hear all this rhetoric about Republican, Democrat, socialist, progressive. No one wants to hear all that,” she told us.
This year, we spent two weeks in Pennsylvania’s Republican-held 7th District, which includes Gerlach’s seat. It covers much of the Lehigh Valley, including the cities of Allentown and Easton.
The voters we spoke to shared a similar perspective. Concentrated wealth, corruption, and even the Epstein files were top of mind. What we didn’t hear much about was Democrats or Republicans.
“60 million Americans live from paycheck to paycheck,” a voter named Thomas Fantini told us. “It’s a travesty that, in the greatest country in the world, we’re the only country that doesn’t have universal healthcare.”
His concerns were similar to many voters in the district. Voters were making pragmatic demands for better policy, rarely couched in the language of partisanship.
Indeed, activists say the election was a referendum on a political system unable to solve serious problems.
“By no means do we think that this election was simply pro-Democratic or anti-Republican,” said Mary Collier, an organizer with Lehigh Valley Stands Up. “It was very much about affordability. How much people are paying for gas, how much they are struggling, and hoping for change.”
Collier points to several candidates her organization backed as proof: Rachel Cuevas, Meriam Sabih, and Jeff Warren all flipped Republican-held state House seats. All ran on a purposely progressive agenda.
“We have been sowing the seeds for a while,” Collier said.
Those seeds go back further than this cycle.
Lancaster Stands Up, a sister group, was central to King’s 2018 campaign. Since then, it and the other chapters of Pennsylvania Stands Up have turned their focus to local races.
This year, that work culminated in a Democratic trifecta in Pennsylvania. The party took control of the state Senate while holding the House and the governor’s mansion.
Collier says the priority now is making sure the newly empowered majority delivers, regardless of party affiliation.
“Otherwise, we’ll be back to square one.”
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