Voters have spoken in Pa. What the results mean for the high courts, and for 2024.

Tuesday was another big night for the blue party in Pennsylvania.

Democrats Dan McCaffery, Matthew Wolf and Jill Beck were elected to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, Commonwealth Court and Superior Court, respectively. A yet-undeclared win for Timika Lane — who held a narrow 43,000-vote lead over Republican Maria Battista for a second Superior Court seat — would give Democrats a clean sweep of the statewide judicial races this cycle.

The results come just a year after Democrats in the state captured a vacant U.S. Senate seat, flipped the state House of Representatives and won the governorship by 15 points.

Onward to 2024: Pa.'s 2023 municipal elections are behind us. A peek at what's at stake in critical 2024.

"When I look at the results in Pennsylvania, what I see is the continuation of that trend," said Joseph Morris, chair of the political science department at Mercyhurst University in Erie. "Democratic voters, while they may be concerned about (President) Joe Biden as the nominee ... have no lack of enthusiasm when it comes to voting."

"Abortion has proven to be a strong motivator for voters, and we've seen that since the Dobbs decision," he added.

Pennsylvania's judicial system at a glance

McCaffery's Supreme Court win rebuilds the 5-2 advantage Democrats briefly lost when Chief Justice Max Baer died last year.

The Democratic Superior Court majority would climb to 8-6 if Lane's lead were to stand up, with McCaffery's current seat being vacated and subject to potential appointment and a special election in 2024. Incumbent Superior Judges Jack Panella, a Democrat, and Victor Stabile, a Republican, were retained by voters in this week's election.

For Commonwealth Court, Wolf's victory cuts the GOP majority from 5-3 to 5-4 in replacing Republican Kevin Brobson, who left this body for a Supreme Court seat in 2022.

Early returns suggest turnout this year was fairly typical for a municipal election. Pennsylvania Department of State statistics show participation rates of 28% in 2015, 26% in 2017, 32% in 2019 and 33% in 2021 — all less than half of the 77% who voted in the 2020 presidential election.

While this year's outcomes didn't flip any court majorities in Pennsylvania, they certainly set a tone for 2024, according to Alison Dagnes of Shippensburg University.

Is Pennsylvania still a swing state?

Dagnes, a professor and chair of her university's political science department, agrees with Morris about the abortion topic. She said voters in Ohio and across much of the country have rejected recent Republican-led efforts to restrict access.

"Nationwide, abortion continues to be a winning argument for the Democrats and that's because they lost the abortion fight in 2022 with the Dobbs decision," she said.

With many voters perhaps motivated by this topic, Democratic candidates who favor abortion rights have managed to shrug off otherwise unfavorable headwinds. Registration figures have shifted toward Republicans (plus-20,000) and independent or third-party voters (plus-24,000) since this year's primary, with Democratic ranks shrinking slightly.

For this reason and others, Dagnes said dismissing Pennsylvania as no longer "purple" based on recent results would be an overreaction.

"It really depends on candidate quality and the effectiveness of campaigns," she said, adding that top-ticket 2022 figures such as state Sen. Doug Mastriano and Mehmet Oz were too far-right for most voters. "I don't see Pennsylvania turning (purely) 'blue.'"

She noted that Trump and Biden won their respective presidential races by 44,000 and 80,000 in 2016 and 2020 — remarkable for a state with nearly 9 million voters.

Carnegie Mellon University associate teaching professor Stacy Rosenberg said she, too, believes improved GOP candidate quality could make all the difference in 2024. She doesn't necessarily expect this year's election outcome to be indicative of what happens next year.

"I do not think that Pennsylvania is a lock in for Democratic candidates, so the Democratic Party cannot be complacent," Rosenberg said.

"The big question will be whether the Republicans or the Democrats can get the swing voters. People are obviously frustrated with the choices they've had within the two-party system."

Bruce Siwy is a reporter for the USA TODAY Network's Pennsylvania state capital bureau. He can be reached at bsiwy@gannett.com or on X at @BruceSiwy.

This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: PA judicial election results for 2023