A state representative, an Air Force veteran and two high-powered lawyers — all women — won Democratic House primaries on Tuesday in Pennsylvania, where a record number of women ran for House seats in a year of intense political enthusiasm among female Democrats.
It was a night of victories for at least seven Democratic women running for the House in a state that has an all-male congressional delegation of 20 and a Statehouse dominated by male politicians. Female candidates showed strength in nearly every region of Pennsylvania, from the Philadelphia suburbs to the conservative southwest.
Madeleine Dean, the state House member; Chrissy Houlahan, the veteran; and Mary Gay Scanlon, one of the lawyers, each won in Philadelphia suburban districts that they are now favored to carry in November, according to results from The Associated Press. Their primary victories raise the likelihood of women cracking the state’s all-male congressional delegation.
Susan Wild, the other lawyer, won a competitive primary in the Lehigh Valley but now faces a tough general election race in a district with many blue-collar voters.
The women won in districts that were redrawn to replace a gerrymandered Republican map that the State Supreme Court ruled illegal in January. The new map of the state’s 18 House districts — and the ebullience it set off among Democrats hoping to capture the House of Representatives in the midterms — put Pennsylvania front-and-center among four states that held primaries on Tuesday.
President Trump narrowly won Pennsylvania in 2016 and Democrats, seeking to tap into grass-roots rejection of the president, badly want a version of a do-over in the midterm elections. And the state will be critical to determining whether Republicans or Democrats win control of the House in November.
Nationwide, Democrats need to flip two dozen Republican-held seats to gain a majority in the House. Under the new congressional map, Democrats have a shot at flipping at least three and possibly as many as six seats this fall in the Keystone State, most in a collar of counties around Philadelphia.
Redistricting recognized the shifting demographics that have remade the region from a once-solid Republican enclave.
But the National Republican Congressional Committee, the party’s chief spending arm, is not easily ceding races in the suburbs. The committee has reserved $7.8 million in television advertising for the fall in the Philadelphia market, a spokesman confirmed Tuesday, its largest early spending commitment of any region nationally.
Most of the money will be aimed at…
