Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey gets a hug from a tearful canvasser and supporter, Sage Velasquez, after giving a concession speech at his primary election night party on May 20 at the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers on the South Side. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/PublicSource)
Gainey won more votes and a higher percentage than he did in 2021, but O’Connor prevailed in a two-man race.
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Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey received more votes and a bigger share of the vote in Tuesday’s Democratic primary than he did in his triumphant 2021 run. But it wasn’t enough.
With just one opponent this year compared to the prior four-man field, Allegheny County Controller Corey O’Connor consolidated enough of the opposition to come out ahead, 52% to 47%.
O’Connor did well in the vote-heavy East End, where he lives and grew up while his father, the late Mayor Bob O’Connor, made the family name locally famous. He also nearly swept South Pittsburgh’s precincts, where third-place candidate Tony Moreno captured a significant share of the vote in 2021.
Gainey’s vote share compared to the 2021 primary was steady or improved in 20 of the city’s 32 wards, but a crushing blow came in the 14th Ward, the city’s most populous and a historical hub of Democratic political activity. The 14th gave Gainey 34% of its vote this year, down 10 points from 2021. Gainey also lost vote share in wards covering Shadyside, Oakland and Lawrenceville. He posted gains in the northeastern corner of the city where he lives, in the Hill District, North Side and much of South Pittsburgh.
Moreno’s 2021 Democratic primary vote share — up for grabs yesterday, with the former police detective in the GOP primary this time — appears to have mostly gone toward O’Connor. O’Connor improved on 2021 runner-up Bill Peduto’s vote share in southern wards by more than 20 points in many places, while Gainey saw increases of fewer than 10 points.
Turnout was up slightly this year at 26%, two points above the 2021 rate. There were about 2,200 more votes cast this year than in 2021 (with provisional ballots and three precincts left to count). The 14th Ward, where O’Connor surged, accounted for 911 additional votes, or 41% of the increase. Wards where Gainey fared well, including his home 12th Ward and several in the North Side, saw fewer votes cast this year.
Moreno captured the Republican nomination this year in much more traditional fashion than in 2021, when there were no names on the GOP ballot and Moreno won as a write-in candidate while losing in the Democratic primary. This year, he bested Thomas West in the city’s first competitive GOP mayoral primary since 2001, winning more than two of every three votes. West won only Shadyside and Oakland.
Charlie Wolfson is PublicSource’s local government reporter. He can be reached at charlie@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Ayla Saeed.
This article first appeared on PublicSource and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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