Everything You Need to Know About Next Month’s High-Stakes Supreme Court Elections in Pennsylvania 

Nearly half of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is up for reelection next month. It’s a court that could decide high-stakes cases about election rules in the leadup to the 2026 and 2028 elections. But the race may still fly under the radar for most voters because of how Pennsylvania elects judges.

Justices Christine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty, and David Wecht — three members of the court’s current 5–2 Democratic majority — are standing in retention elections, meaning they will not have opponents but voters will vote “yes” or “no” as to whether the justices should receive an additional 10-year term on the bench. Should any justice fail to win the support of a majority of voters this November, that justice would be replaced temporarily by Gov. Josh Shapiro (D), subject to confirmation by a two-thirds vote of the state senate. Voters would then elect a justice to a full term in a competitive partisan election in 2027.

Only one justice has lost a retention election since Pennsylvania first adopted them in 1968. Justice Russell Nigro lost his seat in 2005 due to widespread anger at public officials after the legislature stealthily passed a pay raise for state officials. Apart from Nigro, Pennsylvania justices have often won retention elections with around two-thirds of the vote.

If Pennsylvania’s retention elections are more competitive than they have been historically, the court’s role in determining election rules will be a big reason why. Donohue, Dougherty, and Wecht each provided essential votes, for example, in the court’s watershed 2018 ruling recognizing that partisan gerrymandering violates the state constitution’s guarantee that “elections shall be free and equal.” That decision so angered Republican legislators in the state that they filed articles of impeachment against the three justices.

Since then, the court has continued to issue high-profile rulings about voting rules shortly before and after national elections, often deciding cases in ways that make it easier for eligible voters to vote and have their ballots counted. In leadup to the 2020 election, Democrats petitioned the court to clarify the state’s new mail ballot law, Act 77, which the court interpreted to allow for ballot drop boxes and the counting of ballots that arrived to election offices up to three days after election day. Shortly after the election, the court rejected an appeal by President Donald Trump and ruled that timely received mail ballots missing a handwritten date on the envelope should nevertheless count. Months before the 2022 midterms, the court upheld the portions of Act 77 allowing any voter to vote by mail. And days before the 2024 presidential election, the court affirmed a lower court ruling allowing voters to cast a provisional ballot if their mail ballot was disqualified for missing a required privacy envelope.

But Donohue, Dougherty, and Wecht were not always aligned in those big decisions about voting rules. Wecht dissented from the 2024 privacy envelope decision, Dougherty dissented from part of the 2020 ruling on undated mail ballots, and Donohue dissented from part of the 2020 ruling that extended the deadline for returning mail ballots.

Beyond voting and election administration, the court will also likely be asked to decide the extent to which the state constitution protects access to abortions — an issue that has drawn more attention to state supreme courts in recent years than any other. Last year, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court reinstated a lawsuit challenging a state ban on Medicaid funding for abortion services, but a majority of the court was not ready to answer whether the Pennsylvania Constitution protects abortion rights. Donohue and Wecht both indicated that it does, while Dougherty wrote separately to say that the court should not yet reach that question, but that “there is little doubt the issue eventually will make its way back to this Court.”

The court has been noticeably more conservative in its rulings about criminal law and procedure and the justices standing for retention have split in several significant decisions. Over dissents from both Wecht and Donohue, the court ruled that elements of the state’s sex offender registration law did not violate state constitutional due process protections. Wecht also dissented from the court’s decision declining to answer whether “inventory searches” of the contents of an impounded vehicle are unconstitutional invasions of privacy. Donohue, meanwhile, dissented from the court’s decision that the state constitution precludes release on bail for offenses with the maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

While retention elections have not historically attracted big spending and national attention, judicial elections have changed dramatically in recent years. Political parties, donors, and other interests have increasingly understood that these courts are central to major policy fights, and that their decisions can have national implications. In this new era of state judicial politics, conservatives waged successful anti-retention campaigns in Oklahoma in 2024 and Illinois in 2020, ousting justices with the help of funding and attack ads not common to historically quiet retention elections.

Pennsylvania’s court, in particular, has already caught the attention of major political spenders — when Donohue, Wecht, and Dougherty all first reached the supreme court in a competitive partisan election in 2015, their race saw a record setting $28 million in spending (adjusted for inflation).

Candidates and outside groups have already raised and spent more than $8 million in this year’s race, making it Pennsylvania’s most expensive retention election ever. That includes more than $5 million in spending by outside groups on ads featuring some of the court’s key decisions. Pro-retention group Pennsylvanians for Judicial Fairness, which has received funding from national Democratic groups, is running an ad saying the “PA Supreme Court protected women’s reproductive rights” in its 2024 ruling. An anti-retention group tied to Pennsylvania GOP mega donor Jeffrey Yass is sending mailers accusing the court of gerrymandering the state’s congressional districts in its 2018 decision, though the ad features an image of the map the court struck down as a partisan gerrymander in that decision. By Election Day, the race could be close to the most expensive retention election ever, a record likely held by the 1986 campaign to unseat Justice Rose Bird in California which saw close to $30 million in today’s dollars.

Whether or not the race sets a spending record, the court membership that results from this year’s election will inevitably decide high-profile cases about elections, abortion rights, and more in the very near future.

Douglas Keith is a founding editor of State Court Report and the deputy director of the Judiciary Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Suggested Citation: Douglas Keith, Everything You Need to Know About Next Month’s High-Stakes Supreme Court Elections in Pennsylvania, Sᴛᴀᴛᴇ Cᴏᴜʀᴛ Rᴇᴘᴏʀᴛ(Oct. 6, 2025), https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/everything-you-need-know-about-next-months-high-stakes-supreme-court