Oakmont's Carrie DelRosso holds small lead over House Minority Leader Frank Dermody
A first-term Republican councilwoman from Oakmont held a small lead Friday over House Minority Leader Frank Dermody with thousands of votes yet to be counted in Allegheny and Westmoreland counties.
The state’s unofficial election results on Thursday showed Carrie DelRosso’s early lead tighten to a margin of just 4 percentage points, or 1,248 votes. She held a lead of nearly 15 points on Wednesday. That lead tightened by Thursday as more votes were counted.
A DelRosso win would bring a new face to the 33rd District state House seat. Dermody, 69, of Oakmont has held the seat since 1991.
The 33rd District includes parts of Allegheny and Westmoreland counties. In the Alle-Kiski Valley, it includes Arnold, Brackenridge, Cheswick, East Deer, Frazer, Harmar, part of Harrison, Indiana Township, New Kensington, Oakmont, Springdale, Springdale Township and Tarentum.
Allegheny County officials said late Wednesday that about 90% 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.
Those votes were set to be counted by a sworn-in Return Board starting Friday.
As of Wednesday afternoon, Westmoreland County officials said more than half of the county’s 60,167 mail-in ballots had been counted. By Friday, officials had another 4,000 votes to count.
DelRosso and Dermody could not be reached for comment in the days following the Nov. 3 election.
State and county officials have said it could take days to count all the state’s votes.
G. Terry Madonna, the director for Franklin & Marshall’s Center for Politics and Public Affairs, said this race is a classic example of top-ticket influence.
“Republican candidates were helped by Trump at the top of the ticket because of the large percentage of straight-party votes,” he said, adding that not all of Allegheny County votes Democratic.
Madonna called Dermody’s clout in Harrisburg “pretty extensive,” saying DelRosso’s potential win is significant because she could represent the Republican Party’s steadfast power hold in the state House and Senate.
“They’re consistently able to control the flow of legislation,” he said of Republicans.
DelRosso, 45, a Scranton native who lives in Oakmont, announced her plans to run against Dermody last November. She studied at the University of Pittsburgh and served on event committees for the American Cancer Society.
She was elected to Oakmont Council in 2017 and worked as a public relations officer for several area school districts, including Penn Hills, Plum and Riverview. Her firm provides services to private sector clients and municipalities.
Dermody handily defeated Republican challenger Joshua Nulph in 2018.
Unlike Nulph’s, DelRosso’s campaign was well funded, and her campaign and others that backed her ran a significant number of television ads.
Remove the ads from your TribLIVE reading experience but still support the journalists who create the content with TribLIVE Ad-Free.