How a Supreme Court election next week could shape the 2024 race

A state Supreme Court race in Pennsylvania could bring Republicans one step closer to having influence over the rules for the 2024 election as a GOP candidate attempts to become the third conservative judge and potential tiebreaker in the state’s high court.

Republican Montgomery County of Common Pleas Judge Carolyn Carluccio will face off against Democratic Superior Court Judge Daniel McCaffery in the general election on Nov. 7 to replace the late Democratic Justice Max Baer. Democrats control the 4-2 majority, so a Republican win would not immediately affect the state’s ideological makeup, but it would give Republicans one more vote in favor of right-leaning policies that could have a significant impact in 2024.

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It also will alert the Republican Party whether Pennsylvania is ready to move away from hard-line conservative methods to favor a centrist GOP platform to combat Democratic policies, as Carluccio was considered the establishment candidate when she defeated right-wing candidate Patricia McCullough in May.

A win for Carluccio would be a significant step away from candidates such as Doug Mastriano, who lost the 2022 gubernatorial race to Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) and was backed by former President Donald Trump. Several Trump-endorsed candidates, including Mastriano, beat out centrist Republicans in the primaries but lost to Democrats in the midterm elections, leading to a less-than-expected performance by the GOP.

A Republican win from Carluccio would give Democrats the edge of having the tiebreaking vote if cases fall along party lines, meaning that Carluccio would not give Republicans a clear shot at making conservative policy decisions in 2024. But, having another Republican vote on the court could give conservatives an edge in important voting cases because Democratic judges have recently sided with conservative justices in some instances.

In October 2022, Democratic Chief Justice Debra Todd sided with Republicans in favor of reversing a lower court’s decision that allowed counties to help voters fix errors, such as their signature, on mail ballots. The final ruling, 3-3, kept the lower court’s decision in place.

Democratic Justice Kevin Dougherty joined Republicans in November 2022 in agreeing that setting aside absentee or mail-in ballots that are received in undated or incorrectly dated outer envelopes for the 2022 general election would not be a violation of federal law.

An extra vote in either of these cases, both of which were deadlocked, could have influenced the outcomes and potentially changed the way votes are counted in the Keystone State. Both Carluccio and McCaffery said in statements to Politico Weekly Score that they would not prejudge potential cases.

Carluccio said she does “have concerns about the conflicting, and sometimes unclear, undated ballot decisions made by the court in 2023, 2022, and 2020 [about the state’s mail ballots]. I believe our laws must be applied as written, and certainly, our election laws must be applied consistently across all counties, regardless of the election year.”

McCaffery said the state’s mail ballot law was “passed with broad bipartisan support” and “any challenge to voting rights must be viewed in the context of promoting a fair and robust election process, free from fraud or voter manipulation.”

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The outcome of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court race could also be the deciding vote in any litigation involving Trump and the 2024 election because Pennsylvania was one of several states that saw challenges to the results of the 2020 election over the former president’s debunked claims that it was stolen. If such a case in 2024 were to come before the vote, Carluccio or McCaffery could be the deciding vote.

McCaffery had the lead in a poll from the conservative Commonwealth Foundation that came out last month. Democrats are narrowly outspending Republicans on the airwaves, but it has drawn millions of dollars from national groups over the last several months.