PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — What an election year it was. Philadelphia was the belle of the ball, and Pennsylvania in general got a ton of attention from President-elect Donald Trump, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner had no luck trying to stop Elon Musk from running a million-dollar giveaway for registered Republicans. But the Pennsylvania Supreme Court delivered a death blow to the state GOP’s two-year effort to impeach him.
It was a year to remember for New Jersey politics, too, with the corruption conviction of the state's senior U.S. senator, Democrat Bob Menendez — and a spirited battle to replace him.
And with the election of a Congresswoman Sarah McBride, Delaware made a mark on history with another first.
But let's start with the town of Butler, where a—thankfully—failed assassination attempt propelled Trump to legendary status among his fans.
Butler, Pa.: July 13, 2024
On July 13, Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, tried and failed to assassinate Trump at a rally in Butler. The bullet grazed Trump’s right ear, and Secret Service agents pulled him away from the stage bleeding as he raised his fist to the sky.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is Crooks did kill 50-year-old Corey Comperatore of Butler County. And he wounded 57-year-old David Dutch of Westmoreland County and 74-year-old James Copenhaver of Allegheny County.
A Secret Service sniper did not miss when he shot back at Crooks.
The FBI's investigation revealed the gun Crooks used was purchased legally, and Crooks was not a known threat prior to the incident. It also revealed no evidence of a co-conspirator or accomplice or any sign of foreign involvement.
According to investigators, Crooks had meticulously planned the attack and that he was not driven by a specific political ideology but rather a desire to find a significant “target of opportunity” to attack. Before the Butler shooting, investigators say, Crooks had considered targeting Biden, too, and the Republican and Democratic national conventions.
The attempt on his life seemed to burnish Trump as a hero among many of his fans and, just days later at the RNC in Milwaukee, delegates were seen wearing bandages on their right ears. On Oct. 5, Trump returned to Butler for another rally, urging supporters to deliver an Election Day victory.
New Jersey elects first Korean American senator
In New Jersey, one political star rose as another one fell, and fell hard. A jury in July found U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez guilty on all 16 counts against him in federal court, including bribery, obstruction of justice, acting as a foreign agent and honest services wire fraud.
Menendez, a powerful senator and chair of the Committee on Foreign Relations, who had served the state from 2006 until his resignation in August, used his influence to benefit New Jersey businessmen and the governments of Egypt and Qatar in return for hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes. Federal investigators found piles of cash and gold bars at Menendez’s home.
He will be sentenced at the end of January. His wife, Nadine, also charged in the case, faces trial separately in February.
As Menendez's trial moved forward, the race to replace him led to a spirited primary showdown between Congressman Andy Kim and New Jersey First Lady Tammy Murphy, as well as a takedown of the state’s Democratic Party machine.
Kim opposed New Jersey’s so-called county-line primary ballot system, unique among states, which listed candidates favored by party leaders in a single column and relegated challengers’ names to separate columns in “ballot Siberia.” Widely viewed as helping establishment-backed candidates, Kim called it “cynical” manipulation and he challenged it in federal court.
Murphy, who had that crucial support from county party leaders, had said she was open to discussing changes to the primary ballot — after the primary. But as she began to lag Kim in polls, she dropped out of the race in March, saying, “I will not in good conscience waste resources tearing down a fellow Democrat.”
Kim and two other candidates won the federal lawsuit, and a federal appeals court upheld the decision. Kim sailed through the primary to face Republican hotel owner Curtis Bashaw in the general election in a contest grounded in a rare and refreshing civility.
Kim beat Bashaw by about 9 points on Election Day.
Gov. Phil Murphy had appointed former chief of staff George Helmy to hold the Senate seat after Menendez’s resignation. After Kim’s victory, Murphy appointed him to the seat before the official start of his term, and he was sworn in Dec. 9, giving him a headstart over other incoming senators, who will be sworn in next month.
All eyes on Philadelphia
For a full year, Pennsylvania was the biggest prize among swing states, as over $1 billion was spent on political ads in the commonwealth. That placed Philadelphia—with its hundreds of thousands of Democratic votes—right at the center of one of the most remarkable presidential races in history.
At first, President Joe Biden broke his pledge to serve only one term and leapt into campaign mode with frequent visits to the area—first, late last year to burnish his pro-union bona fides, then in the new year to volunteer at Philabundance and, later, to visit Girard College and a Mt. Airy church service to court Black votes.
Then, whatever momentum Biden may have had, all but stopped with a disastrous debate against Trump on June 27. A month later, he stepped aside and threw his support behind Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate to replace him.
The focus on Philadelphia and Pennsylvania continued. Gov. Josh Shapiro made Harris’ short list as a potential running mate. Harris choosing Philadelphia as the city to debut the new full Democratic ticket fueled speculation that she had settled on Shapiro, as did a poorly timed social media video from Mayor Cherelle Parker.
On Aug. 6, Harris made her first public appearance with her running mate, the avuncular Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, at Temple University’s Liacouras Center. Later that month, in a rant on Truth Social, Trump dismissed Shapiro as a “highly overrated Jewish governor.”
The National Constitution Center hosted what would be the only Trump-Harris debate on Sept. 10, which he initially sought to cancel when she became the candidate. But Trump eventually agreed to go through with it, and all eyes were on Philly again, with much riding on Harris outperforming not only Trump but also Biden.
A week later in Philadelphia, the vice president sat for an interview with members of the National Association of Black Journalists, after a funeral prevented her from making an appearance at the group’s convention in Chicago earlier in the summer, as Trump had done. Harris’ September interview in Philadelphia was notable mostly because Trump’s NABJ interview on July 31 is when he called the vice president’s racial identity into question minutes after calling himself “the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln.”
In October, Harris spoke to a group of Republicans at Washington Crossing State Park in New Jersey, and she sat for a conversation with former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney in Malvern. She visited again to get a pastrami sandwich and thank volunteers at Famous 4th Street Deli in South Philadelphia before taking questions from undecided voters at a CNN town hall in Delco. And just days later, she was back in Philly for a whirlwind spin through a church, a West Philly barbershop, a bookstore, a Puerto Rican restaurant and a youth athletic center.
On Oct. 14, a Trump rally at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center in Montgomery County turned into a private DJ session after two medical emergencies interrupted the Q&A. Trump stopped taking questions and had the event center techs queue up an eclectic 40-minute playlist including Luciano Pavarotti’s “Ave Maria,” the Village People’s “YMCA" and Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U," as he bopped around on stage. He walked away as “Memory” from “Cats” played to the waning crowd.
Days later, Trump was in Feasterville-Trevose, Bucks County, working the fry station at a McDonald's, where he staged an impromptu news conference, answering reporters’ questions through the drive-thru window. And before the month was out, he took part in a roundtable discussion with seniors in Drexel Hill.
Harris and Walz capped their campaign with a star-studded rally outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art on the night before Election Day, drawing thousands of people to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway to see Harris, Jazmine Sullivan, The Roots, DJ Jazzy Jeff, Ricky Martin, Lady Gaga and Oprah Winfrey.
It wasn’t enough. Only 65% of Philadelphia voters turned out to repay such lavish attention. And though just 12% of registered voters in the city are Republicans, Trump got nearly 20% of the vote in Philadelphia and won Pennsylvania.
Bob Brady vs. Kamala Harris
Voter turnout in Philadelphia was about 50,000 fewer less than that of the 2020 election. There was a lot of finger-pointing between party officials and the campaign, afterward, about what went wrong—but no clear answers.
Philadelphia Democratic Committee Chairman Bob Brady said Harris never met with him and criticized her campaign for not giving him enough money to fund door-knocking campaigns across the city: “I would have liked to see … the national campaign coordinate with us a little bit. … Show us some respect. Didn’t happen.”
A spokesperson for Harris struck right back with a photo of Brady standing between Harris and Walz, saying the campaign knocked on 2 million doors the weekend before Election Day — “2 million more doors than Bob Brady’s organization can claim to have knocked during his entire tenure as party chairman.”
The spokesperson went on to characterize “Brady’s decades-long practice of fleecing campaigns for money to make up for his own lack of fundraising ability or leadership” as a “worthless endeavor.”
Bob Casey vs. Dave McCormick
After a bitter campaign and election results close enough to trigger an automatic recount, former hedge fund manager Dave McCormick ended the hopes of longtime incumbent Bob Casey of representing Pennsylvania for a fourth term in the U.S. Senate.
The Associated Press called the race on Nov. 7 for the Republican, with 99% of votes counted, reasoning that Casey had no mathematical path to victory. But it was more than two weeks after Election Day that the Democrat finally conceded the election.
The torturous ballot-counting process became a national spectacle, full of hours-long county election board meetings, social media outrage, lawsuits and accusations that some election officials were openly flouting the law.
Republicans said Democrats were trying to count “illegal votes.” Casey’s campaign said Republicans wanted to throw out enough provisional ballots accepted by county boards to prevent him from winning.
As bickering between campaigns, political parties and county elections officials reached its peak, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that any mail-in or absentee ballots that did not meet specific election code requirements could not be counted, calling out Democratic-majority election boards in Montgomery, Philadelphia and Bucks counties in particular, saying local elections officials do not have the authority to ignore election code provisions they believe are unconstitutional.
Just two years ago, when McCormick was losing to celebrity heart surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz in the Pennsylvania Republican primary contest for U.S. Senate, he took a position more aligned with that of Casey in a failed eleventh-hour bid to close the gap in votes. In that case, McCormick’s lawyer told a state judge that the object of Pennsylvania’s election law is to let people vote, “not to play games of ‘gotcha’ with them.”
Larry Krasner vs. Elon Musk
At a Trump campaign rally in Harrisburg, on Oct. 19, billionaire Elon Musk vowed to give away $1 million to a randomly chosen registered Republican in one of seven battleground states every day until Election Day. All they had to do was sign a petition declaring their support for the First and Second amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
More than 1 million people from Pennsylvania and six other battleground states — Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Michigan — registered for the sweepstakes.
A week before Election Day, Philadelphia’s Democratic district attorney, Larry Krasner, filed suit to stop the scheme, saying it violated Pennsylvania law.
The first three winners came from Pennsylvania in the days leading up to the state's Oct. 21 voter registration deadline, Krasner said. He called it “political marketing masquerading as a lottery,” “a grift” and “a scam" that was designed to influence a national election.
Musk’s lawyers called it “core political speech.”
In Common Pleas Court, in Philadelphia, Musk’s America PAC and his lawyers revealed the $1 million recipients did not win by chance: They were paid spokespeople, known to the group and vetted ahead of time; the PAC made the recipients sign nondisclosure agreements, so they couldn’t reveal the truth about how they got the money; and the winners knew they would be called on stage and presented a big cardboard “check” but not specifically that they would win the money.
Krasner said that contradicted what Musk promised, but a judge said the D.A. failed to show that it was an illegal lottery. And, because America PAC knew ahead of time that there would be no more winners from Pennsylvania, Krasner's legal bid to shut down the sweepstakes under Pennsylvania law was moot, he said.
Musk did not attend the hearing, but he did commit more than $70 million to America PAC to boost Donald Trump's presidential campaign.
Another first for The First State
With the election of 34-year-old state Sen. Sarah McBride to Congress, Delaware sent the first known transgender U.S. representative to Washington. Through her campaign, McBride said she was not running for Congress to make history, but rather “to make historic progress for Delawareans.”
After scoring an easy Democrat primary win in September, McBride breezed past Republican John Whalen IIII, a retired construction company owner and former state trooper, in the race for Delaware’s lone House seat. It came amid an election year deluged with campaign ads demeaning trans people, and legislation in Republican-governed states around the country aiming to curb their rights.
Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina was quick to welcome her new colleague by picking a fight about who can use the bathroom at the U.S. Capitol. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., enacted her proposal to ban transgender people from using restrooms that correspond to their gender identity.
“I’m not here to fight about bathrooms,” the McBride wrote in a statement.
“There is so much joy and so much awe in having this opportunity, and I will not let anyone take that away from me. I am simply there to do the job just like anyone else,” McBride told The Associated Press.