Longtime Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. defeated challenger Matt Dugan by more than 3 percentage points in a battle for the county’s top law enforcement post.
The GOP nominee Zappala had collected 51.55% of the roughly 365,000 votes counted by Wednesday morning, with 99.7% of precincts reporting. Democratic nominee Dugan had 48.35% of the vote, according to unofficial results.
Mail-in and absentee ballot results posted shortly after polls closed at 8 p.m. showed Dugan with a sizable lead, but mail-in voting has skewed heavily Democratic since 2020. As results from polling places started rolling in, Dugan’s lead narrowed. Zappala assumed his first lead of the night at 10 p.m.
The Associated Press declared Zappala the winner around 11 p.m.
Zappala took the stage at an event at Cupka’s II on Pittsburgh’s South Side just after 10:30 p.m. with his wife Mary, three of their four sons and former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett standing beside him.
At that time, he didn’t explicitly declare himself the winner, but with more than 99% of the vote in, Zappala’s margin was comfortable enough for him to thank a long list of supporters and talk about the future.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” Zappala said in an 11-minute speech in which he mentioned tackling homelessness, problems on the South Side and addressing juvenile crime. “There’s a lot we have to do. Tonight we’re not going to fix everything, but we’re going to start tomorrow morning.”
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Dugan, the county’s former chief public defender, ran as a progressive seeking to reform the criminal justice system. The 44-year-old from Moon advocated eliminating cash bail, lowering incarceration rates and seeking ways other than criminal convictions to address low-level, nonviolent crimes driven by poverty, mental illness and drug addiction.
In sizing up Zappala’s quarter-century leading the DA’s office, which today has a $22 million budget and more than 100 lawyers, Dugan criticized the incumbent as arrogant, stagnant and lacking leadership. He campaigned as a safety-minded candidate with new ideas and painted Zappala as being out-of-touch.
“I’m very, very proud of the work that we’ve done,” he said at an event at Riley’s Pour House in Carnegie. “I’m proud that we talked about the issues from Day One. I don’t plan on going away.”
Zappala, 66, of Fox Chapel, portrayed Dugan as someone who has no idea how to protect the public.
Over the past several weeks, Republican political consulting firm Brabender Cox churned out ominous TV and online ads, including one warning that Dugan’s progressive leadership would plunge Pittsburgh into chaos and mayhem and another claiming that Dugan told victims of violent rape to “shut up.”
Dugan said he would be as tough as anyone on serious and violent crime, and that he would not push for the wholesale elimination of arrests for entire categories of crimes. He also denied Zappala’s claims that he churlishly addressed rape victims.
The DA’s race was the third-most expensive contest in the state behind races for a Pennsylvania Supreme Court seat and Allegheny County executive, according to political ad tracker AdImpact.
Liberal billionaire George Soros’ Pennsylvania Justice and Public Safety PAC gave Dugan more than $1 million worth in in-kind contributions, most of which paid for commercials.
That dwarfed the $67,000 that Dugan raised from individual contributors. Zappala raised more than 10 times as much.
Despite their differing philosophies, Zappala and Dugan shared one thing in common. Neither one has ever prosecuted a case.
Zappala, the son of a state Supreme Court justice, was practicing municipal and civil law when a group of judges chose him in a closed-door vote in December 1997 to replace outgoing District Attorney Robert Colville, who had been elected as an Allegheny County Common Pleas judge.
Two years later, Zappala fended off an election challenge from W. Christopher Conrad, a former top homicide prosecutor in the district attorney’s office who also competed for the judges’ appointment vote in 1997. Zappala wound up firing Conrad in one of his first acts as district attorney.
That campaign would mark the last time that Zappala would face an election challenge until 2019. That year, Turahn Jenkins, an administrator in the public defender’s office and a member of a new group of progressive-minded attorneys in the county, challenged Zappala in the Democratic primary.
Zappala won, but another public defender, Lisa Middleman, took up the progressive mantle and ran as an independent against Zappala in the general election.
This spring, Dugan convincingly won the Democratic primary, capturing nearly 56% of the votes cast compared to Zappala’s 44%.
Zappala, however, earned enough Republican write-in votes to appear on the November ballot as the GOP nominee.
Zappala said he has remained a registered Democrat and was interested only in making Allegheny County safer, not in getting bogged down by political battles and the parties’ policy positions.