When Democrats swept all three open seats on the PA Supreme Court in 2015 to take a 5-2 majority, it changed the course of Pennsylvania for an entire decade.
For example:
When the state Supreme Court un-gerrymandered Congressional maps in 2017, the U.S. House delegation went from 5D-13R to 9D-9R in just one election cycle.
When the Court appointed a truly neutral fifth member of the PA legislative reapportionment commission after the 2020 census, the GOP-rigged legislative maps were undone, and Democrats flipped the State House with a one-seat majority for the first time in twelve years.
In 2025, the same three justices we helped elect in 2015 — Justices Christine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty, and David Wecht — will stand for retention elections, with the Court majority once again on the line. A loss of more than one seat would result in enough open seats for the GOP to retake the majority on the Court in 2027 and hold it through the rest of the decade (and the next redistricting).
Maintaining the Democratic majority on the PA Supreme Court is now crucial for abortion rights, voting rights, workers’ rights, and preventing gerrymandering at the Congressional and state levels.
“Retention Elections”: What They Are, Why They Matter
In Pennsylvania’s retention elections, voters make a simple “yes” or “no” vote on incumbent judges, with a simple majority winning a 10-year retention. No political affiliations or challengers are listed on the ballot, focusing solely on judges’ qualifications and performance. If a judge loses a retention election, a special election is held in the next odd-numbered year (in this case, 2027).
If we lost one or more retention elections in 2025, Gov. Shapiro could appoint interim justices, but they would need confirmation by two-thirds of the GOP-controlled State Senate — a highly unlikely outcome. Instead, this would likely result in vacancies until special elections in 2027. Losing all three critical retentions would create a 2D-2R deadlocked court. Furthermore, any losses in retention elections will result in very expensive open-seat elections in 2027. If we lose all three seats in 2025, the special elections in 2027 would cost $100M minimum, so it is also in all of our interests to win less costly retention elections in 2025.
Plan Overview
Main Goal: Implement a robust, statewide communications and field operation to win the PA Supreme Court retention elections, designed to educate and resonate with the electorate on these key races.
Additional Objectives:
➔ Assess the electorate’s understanding of retention races through a research program.
➔ Build a robust communications coalition.
➔ Convene in-state partners to begin planning an aligned “Vote Yes” field strategy.
Research: Assess voter views on retention elections and critical issues that may impact them or their communities.
Voter Education: Raise public awareness about retention elections and increase understanding of the impacts of fair and impartial courts.
Digital Engagement: Begin voter education and engagement around the stakes of the 2025 judicial elections with key audience segments.
Campus Vote: Engage and educate students on campuses across the commonwealth on the importance of the state judiciary.
BIPOC Engagement: Begin early engagement with BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) communities.
Neighborhood Captains Program: Localized relational organizing program to engage, educate, and mobilize voters.
Working Families Party
One Pennsylvania
Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance
Make The Road Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania United
Pennsylvania Stands Up
Action Together NEPA
Philly Neighborhood Networks
215 PA
Free The Ballot
Reclaim PA
Straight Ahead
Spotlight: Neighborhood Captains Program
Traditionally, the largest-scale door-knocking programs follow a “quantity over quality” approach: Hire as many canvassers as possible to knock as many doors as possible. But how effective is this tactic for reaching, persuading, and mobilizing voters? There is growing concern that, with scale, comes diminishing impact. In addition, this approach does little to support local and state groups’ organizing goals, including engaging people in year-round activities beyond voting. Unfortunately, when funding is scarce, late, and subject to the “boom and bust” of the election cycle, it is sometimes groups’ option of last resort. In a perennial battleground state like Pennsylvania, this problem is particularly acute.
After the 2024 elections, MVP and our Pennsylvania partners came together to address this problem before the 2026 and 2028 elections. The result? A Neighborhood Captains Program to help win the 2025 PA Supreme Court retention elections — and set the stage for success in 2026 and beyond.
Short-Term Goals:
Maximize Democratic turnout for the retention elections by minimizing undervoting due to “ballot roll-off” (in which voters fill out their ballot for some races but leave other races blank).
Help groups grow their grassroots bases by recruiting and retaining new members and leaders.
Long-Term Goals:
Improve direct voter contact rates relative to traditional paid canvass programs.
Build up local trusted messengers in a time of fewer and fewer trusted institutions.
Build durable, independent political power to advance bold policy progress.
Who: MVP partner Working Families Party is coordinating seventeen groups — many of which are also MVP partners, including One PA, Pennsylvania United PAC, and Make the Road Action.
What: A Neighborhood Captain program leading voter outreach in 500+ precincts across 22 counties. Each organization will recruit 100-160 Captains to persuade and mobilize Black, Latiné, AAPI, and working-class voters in the election. On Election Day, Captains will become poll greeters, reducing ballot roll-off and maximizing turnout for the Supreme Court elections.
Where: Key districts in Philadelphia, Allegheny County, Lehigh Valley, and Philadelphia suburbs.
As of this writing, partners have recruited 985 Captains, with 600+ already trained and knocking doors.
Captains take responsibility for geographically concentrated target universes of about 250 voters each.
Captains are responsible for 1) attending two training sessions, 2) knocking their list of doors three times (where conversations progress from issue education to explicitly electoral asks), and 3) Election-Day poll-greeting conversations and “knock-and-drag” canvassing (i.e., contacting voters who said they would vote and haven’t yet, paired with an offer of an actual ride to the polls).
Captains receive a stipend and political education, the opportunity to connect with other Captains, and ongoing engagement in partners’ other activities.
MVP is the seed funder of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) designed to assess the effectiveness of this approach as an alternative to traditional paid canvassing models. This project aims to test the assumption that limited electoral impact is the result of canvassing efforts not being rooted in relationship-based organizing, and that a relationship-based voter-engagement approach can increase both electoral impact and engagement in groups’ organizing activities.
MVP connected Working Families Party with renowned elections data scientist David Nickerson, who will run an RCT to answer three questions about the impact of this approach: 1) Does it produce greater vote turnout, and if so, by how much? 2) Does it persuade voters to support the Yes vote on Supreme Court retention, and if so, by how much? 3) Are contacted voters more likely to take action (come to an event, sign a petition, volunteer, etc.) with the partner organizations?
The Captains program is a concrete and systematizable approach to using relational organizing to scale up voter outreach. If it is successful at turning out more voters than the cold-canvass approach, it could point toward a path that truly integrates core organizing with voter mobilization and maximizes the capacity of both. This is where the experiment comes in. We need empirical proof that this approach to voter outreach can have a greater impact than the typical approach (or that it does not, in which case we’ll need to do more research to understand why not). That proof would encourage the replication of this model.
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