Browning holds significant lead in three-way contest
Former Lehigh County Commissioner Dean Browning opened up a big lead on two opponents Tuesday evening in a three-way contest for the Republican nomination to the Lehigh Valley’s new 14th Senate District.
With 99% of the expected vote tallied, the Associated Press unofficially showed Browning with 8,560 votes, Cindy Miller with 5,043 and Omy Maldonado with 3,508.
The new version of the 14th was created during the once-a-decade legislative map redrawing process carried out by the Legislative Reapportionment Commission.
The process lasted months and resulted in new maps for the 203
House and 50 Senate districts based on 2020 census data. Those maps will be used in elections over the next decade.
The existing 14th District, which will become obsolete at the end of November, includes Carbon County and part of Luzerne. The new 14th is in the heart of the Lehigh Valley and includes parts of Lehigh and Northampton counties.
A major factor in its creation was that no incumbent lives within its borders.
The incumbent of the existing 14th, John Yudichak — the Senate’s only independent member who formerly was a Democrat — objected to the new maps. He said they diminished representation of northeastern Pennsylvania and called their creation an “act of political aggression.”
Yudichak is not seeking re-election to any Harrisburg office.
The map-drawing commission described the new 14th as a district where minority communities could have an impact on the election, particularly because there is no incumbent.
The district has a voting-age population that is 38% minority community members, and 26% of its voting-age residents identify as Latino. The split between parties among voting-age residents is about 54% Democratic and 46% Republican.
The district stretches from Emmaus through most of Allentown north to the big expanses of Lehigh, Moore and Bushkill townships.
Three Democrats and three Republicans were seeking the seat.
Among the Republicans, Browning, 66, is a former Lehigh County commissioner who ran twice for Congress, unsucessfully. Maldonado, 32, has never run for elective office. Miller, 62, has been elected a Lehigh Township supervisor twice and ran unsuccessfully for a state House seat in 2016.
Browning is a retired chief financial officer who — when asked recently about the state’s election process — said there is a surge of mistrust in the results that is related to newly adopted voting mechanisms that include mail-in ballots and drop boxes.
Maldonado, a management consultant who is Latino and served eight years in the Marine Corps, said the widespread use of mail-in ballots in elections that started in 2019 is “a recipe for fraud,” and election law reforms need to occur.
Miller, a commercial real estate specialist, said her feelings about the need for election reform were shown last year, when she led the drafting of a township resolution that condemned mail-in ballots, drop boxes and a lack of voter ID. The resolution was approved and later rescinded.
Late Tuesday, unofficial returns in the Democratic primary showed Nick Miller with a lead on both Tara Zrinski and Yamelisa Taveras.
Miller, an Allentown School Board member, had 8,369 votes, Zrinski had 8,326 and Taveras 3,037 in unofficial returns with 84% of the expected vote from both Northampton and Lehigh counties.