Voters in the North Hills tasked with filling the seat vacated by former Speaker of the House Mike Turzai will likely keep the seat in the GOP’s hands.

Republican Rob Mercuri of Pine is on track to defeat Democrat Emily Skopov of Marshall to win a two-year term as the state House District 28 representative, which comprises McCandless, Pine, Marshall, Franklin Park and Bradford Woods.

A Republican has held the seat since 1969. Turzai served for 20 years before he resigned in June to take a job as general counsel with Peoples, the Pittsburgh-based gas utility.

Votes for all 46 voting precincts have been tallied, and the Allegheny County officials said late Wednesday that about 90 percent of mail ballots had been scanned and counted, with about 35,413 such ballots still needing to be tabulated out of the 348,485 returned in all.

Unofficial results show that Mercuri received 22,663 votes, or 54.19% of the 41,822 ballots cast to defeat Skopov, who got 19,122 votes, or 45.72%.

There were 36 write-in votes.

Turnout for the 28th District race, which has 53,284 registered voters, was 57.41% — higher than in Allegheny County, where 56.26% of the 942,849 registered voters went to the polls.

Mercuri, 38, got on the ticket by defeating Libby Blackburn and Mike Heckmann in the spring primary. Skopov, 53, ran unopposed for her party’s nomination. In 2018, she picked up 45.6% of the vote in a failed bid to unseat Turzai.

A native of West Deer, Mercuri is a 2000 graduate of Deer Lakes High School and attended the United States Military Academy at West Point before being deployed to Iraq as a member of an embedded military training unit.

He completed his military service as a captain and was awarded the Bronze Star medal. He attended night school classes at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and worked for two accounting firms in New York City before being recruited by Pittsburgh-based PNC, where he works as a senior vice president and financial risk manager.

He and his wife, Kelsey, operate a small pack-and-ship business in Wexford.

State representatives make $88,610 a year plus fringe benefits and a $177 per diem.

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