....building, especially when compared to some truly horrible state capitols around the country.

https://www.thrillist.com/travel/nation/worst-state-capitol-buildings

Link to tweet

Am hoping this will come to fruition. We so need this here to send a message.

The redistricting after the census for the state legislature that went on behind the scenes and was little talked about, shows the big difference from 2010. In 2010, the map was gerrymandered under a GOP governor, GOP legislature, and GOP-majority state Supreme Court. Even when the old map was challenged in court, it was only modified around the fringes but still severely gerrymandered with its final 2012 version.

THIS go-around, we had a Democratic governor and (D)-majority state Supreme Court and they were able to get the crap 2012 map closer to fair districts in 2021. It was expected that Democrats would pick up some long-denied seats to reflect our still-majority registration advantage, but the prevailing "Dems-suck and are unenthusiastic" media narrative pretty much pooh-poohed any possibility of us taking control of what became a large number of swing seats, instead implying they would remain in GOP hands. This was basically the media buying into the nonsense that "land votes" and actual people living there are just ancillary because "red swaths" were assumed to represents millions of GOP votes and not the actual thousands of dairy cows or elk.

I.e., the "red mirage" thinking that has been infused in the media, masked the reality on the ground.

house districts shifted from the declining population west to the growing population east. The idea that Dems could flip the state House was talked about, but as more of a long shot than a realistic one.

This is why state House majority R leader Kerry Benninghoff threw a hissy fit and was the lone no vote for approving (4-1) the legislative redistricting map drawn by the commission of which he was a part. The commission made just marginal changes to the state senate map so R senate leader Kim Ward was happy and voted to approve.

until I started getting primary election materials and newsletters from a Rep. I had never heard of. I've literally lived in the same district (with various Reps during that time, and after a couple residence moves) for almost 30 years, and suddenly boom! I'm literally a block from the new line and scraped into an adjacent district.

The incumbent, a (D), ended up getting primaried this past spring, so we are all starting from scratch.

The gerrymandered state legislative seats, even when challenged and slightly modified in 2012, were still an egregious gerrymander thanks to the trifecta the GOP had in state government (including the judiciary). We are finally getting the benefit of "fair districts" by having some "say" thanks to a (D) governor and (D)-majority state Supreme Court during a census period.

As an interesting note - one of the seats moved to the east ended up in Lancaster County so Lancaster was able to now have 2 (D)s coming out of the county (including a new one from the city proper).

There was barely time to notify anyone about the district map changes, precinct polling, etc., because it didn't become official until just before the election. For all I know they're still fighting it, not that it matters anymore.

There was one in Montco - the 151st that was still outstanding and that one seems to have the higher (D) potential as a swing seat.

Todd Stephens is the R incumbent in the 151st. He led by 26 in the last update I could find. MontCo still has mailed ballots that need further examination to determine the voter's intent, provisional ballots and overseas/military ballots to count, but don't know how many of those are in the 151st. There might be military ballots as HD 151 abuts Joint Base (formerly NAS) Willow Grove.

Matt Moffa lead by 2 votes in the 142nd at the last update I could find.

because I had to see where the heck they were! I also added voter registration stats to the post from the SOS site (as of yesterday's release) -

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1074&pid=17864

primary, about half of Moffa's vote was from mailed in ballots. If there are any of those left to count in this HD, those probably favor Moffa. In any event, this race will qualify for a recount.

that confirmed what I had suspected before but that despite the narrative of "Democrats use mail ballots" (implying "only" ) and "Republicans vote in person" (again implying "only" ), the report was that about 70% of the voters here in Philly voted "in person".

Since we had pretty much all of our polling locations back and available (vs 2020 when we only had maybe a quarter of them), then people went back to business as usual and voted in person. I did the mail ballot anyway just to get my vote banked early.