PENNSYLVANIA, USA — The race for Pennsylvania's 10th Congressional District between Republican incumbent Rep. Scott Perry and Democrat Janelle Stelson has been highly contested this election season.
The district has modestly favored Republicans since it was redrawn in 2018, and Trump won it by 4 percentage points in 2020. But as Perry runs for a seventh term, he faces a vigorous challenge.
Once a registered Republican herself, Stelson is on the hunt for Republicans and right-leaning voters who may be willing to break away from Perry. Like Democrats across the country, she has focused on voters concerned that Republicans could enact federal restrictions on abortion and reproductive care. Perry has in the past sponsored legislation to ban abortions.
“Abortion really crosses all party lines,” she said. “I’ve had elderly Republican women tell me, ‘No government and no Scott Perry is going to tell me what to do with my body.’"
Stelson is also leaning on her background as a local news anchor, casting herself as someone voters can trust.
“Because she was on the news for so many years, she feels like she was a part of your household,” said Vickie Washington, a 71-year-old retiree in York who said she plans to vote for Stelson.
Stelson has raised over $1 million more than Perry, forcing top House Republicans to come to his aid as they try to hold their narrow majority.
Scroll over the map below to see vote totals for each candidate for each county in the 10th Congressional District.
When will all the votes be counted in Pennsylvania?
Several factors contribute to a relatively slow vote counting process in Pennsylvania.
Under Pennsylvania law, elections officials must wait until 7 a.m. ET on Election Day before they can begin to process ballots cast by mail and prepare them to be counted. The release of mail voting results cannot begin until after polls have closed. Because of the overall volume of mail ballots — they comprised almost a quarter of the total vote in the 2022 midterm elections — and the varying amounts of time it takes the state’s 67 counties to tally these votes, determining a winner in a highly competitive race could take several days, as it did in the 2020 presidential election.
The first vote results reported after polls close are expected to come from mail ballots. Results from later in the night are expected to be a mix of mail votes and votes cast in person on Election Day. Once the vote counting stretches into the day after Election Day and beyond, the vote results are once again expected to come mostly from mail ballots.
Overall, votes cast by mail have tended to favor Democrats, ever since the issue of early and mail voting became highly politicized during the 2020 election. This means the Democratic candidate in a competitive contest could take an early lead in the vote count in the initial vote reports after polls close, even though the race may tighten considerably as more votes are tabulated.
In 2020, Biden took an early, temporary lead after mail voting results began to be released shortly after polls closed at 8 p.m. ET. By about 10 p.m. ET, Trump took the lead as more results from Election Day voting were released. By early Wednesday morning, Trump led Biden by nearly 700,000 votes, but that lead would gradually shrink as more mail ballots were tabulated. Biden eventually retook the lead by Friday morning.
The suburban “collar counties” around Philadelphia are key battlegrounds and have been trending toward Democrats in recent years. In statewide elections, Republican candidates tend to win overwhelmingly in rural areas statewide, while Democrats rely on lopsided support in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
Erie and Northampton counties on opposite sides of the state may also hold clues on election night. They are two of only 10 counties across all the presidential battlegrounds that voted for Trump in 2016 and flipped to Biden in 2020.
The Associated Press doesn’t make projections and will declare a winner only when it has determined there is no scenario that would allow the trailing candidates to close the gap. If a race hasn’t been called, the AP will continue to cover any newsworthy developments, like candidate concessions or declarations of victory. In doing so, the AP will make clear it hasn’t declared a winner and explain why.
In Pennsylvania, races with a vote margin of 0.5 percentage points or less are subject to an automatic recount. The AP may declare a winner in a race that is eligible for a recount if it can determine the lead is too large for a recount or legal challenge to change the outcome.
>Below: A map showing U.S. House of Representative election results across the country and the balance of power:
