GOP stages unusual campaign to re-elect DA

Group of Republican political professionals is backing Democrat Zappala as their nominee

One of the top GOP firms in Harrisburg is helping run his campaign. Another in Pittsburgh that used to work for Rick Santorum is making his TV ads. Together they’re building an election-season argument used by Republicans nationwide: that if his opponent wins, public safety is in jeopardy.

All this for a lifelong Democrat still registered with the party: Stephen A. Zappala Jr., Allegheny County’s 25-year incumbent district attorney.

If Mr. Zappala wins a seventh term on Nov. 7, it will be in large part because of an unusual political coalition that has mobilized to block Democratic nominee Matt Dugan from becoming the latest progressive criminal justice reformer to win a high-profile race for a top prosecutor position.

Spearheading that coalition is a small group of Republican political professionals who have spent their careers working against Democrats like Mr. Zappala.

This time, they’re positioning the Democrat as an experienced prosecutor who will keep Allegheny County safe — and saying his opponent’s policies will turn Pittsburgh into another Philadelphia or San Francisco.

“Steve may be a Democrat, and I a Republican, but I think we have similar views on law and order, which is laws need to be followed,” said Sam DeMarco, a county councilman and the county GOP chair who is widely seen as a leading architect of the party’s support for Mr. Zappala. “If you don’t like them, you could repeal them, or you could amend them, but you don’t have the luxury of being able to ignore them.”

The strange bedfellows alliance was born after Mr. Dugan defeated Mr. Zappala in the May Democratic primary. Spurred on by local GOP leaders who didn’t put up

their own candidate — including former Gov. Tom Corbett — thousands of Republican voters wrote-in Mr. Zappala’s name on their own primary ballots, making him the party’s nominee. That set up a rare general election rematch of a primary just months later.

Ben Wren, a spokesman for Mr. Zappala’s campaign, said the incumbent has been consistent in his policy views throughout his career, and always opposed policies he sees as overly progressive.

“He is still that law-and-order Democrat that he has always been,” he said.

Mr. Wren is a longtime Republican operative for the prominent Harrisburgbased firm Long Nyquist + Associates — and has worked for, among others, Mr. Santorum, Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward, R-Westmoreland, and the state GOP.

When Mr. Zappala is on next month’s ballot, he’ll be on the Republican Party line for the first time since he took office as the county’s top prosecutor in 1998 (a panel of local judges initially appointed him to fill a vacancy).

But he remains a Democrat — and said during a debate earlier this month that he would still be one if he wins.

“I think you can be a lawand-order Democrat, can’t you?” he quipped at one point.

“I’m a registered Democrat, and I have not been asked to change my party affiliation,” Mr. Zappala later added.

That makes it even more unusual, political observers said: Candidates in the past who have attracted support from the opposing party’s political class had to actually switch parties to do so. For example, the late, longtime Republican Sen. Arlen Specter defected to Democrats

in 2009 as he faced the likelihood of losing a GOP primary. He lost the 2010 Democratic primary despite support from President Barack Obama and Gov. Ed Rendell.

“I don’t want to step on anyone’s parade, but I don’t see [Mr. Zappala] as analogous to what happened to Specter because he famously switched parties in the middle of a campaign,” said Christopher Nicholas, a longtime Harrisburg-based Republican political consultant who had worked for Mr. Specter on three previous campaigns and stayed with him after his party switch. “And this is such a kind of a one-off type of deal where you lose [to] the guy in the primary, but win the write-in nomination from the other sidethat did it on its own.”

Close watchers of the race said that even if Mr. Zappala prevails and remains a Democrat, Republicans won’t mind. It’s simply a strategy to help a more moderate candidate win — and it’s likely as beneficial to the incumbent as it is to Republicans.

Larry Ceisler, a Philadelphia-based public affairs consultant who has worked on Democratic campaigns, said Mr. Zappala has historically been a better public servant than candidate for office. And Pennsylvania residents have voted for district attorneys from the minority party of their respective counties before, Mr. Ceisler said.

“Voters have been known to look at the office in a nonpartisan way,” said Mr. Ceisler, a Washington County native and longtime observer of local politics, whose firm has offices in Harrisburg and Pittsburgh.

Mr. DeMarco said it wouldn’t bother him if Mr. Zappala remains a Democrat, because of his moderate policies. He said Mr. Zappala has always been on the conservative end of his party. Mr. DeMarco argued that in Allegheny County, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by about two to one, many voters have registered as Democrats because their grandparents or parents did, but they either vote Republican or are more moderate than Mr. Dugan.

Mr. Zappala’s general election ads have been produced by BrabenderCox, a top GOP firm in Pittsburgh that has worked for Mr. Santorum, Mr. Corbett, Mike Pence, and national Republican groups, among many others. His ad campaign has taken on a tone like those seen in Republican campaigns across the country, painting Mr. Dugan as soft on crime. His first commercial of the general election warned that “the same extremists who created” crime in Philadelphia and San Francisco “want Pittsburgh to be their next social justice experiment.”

“I’m Stephen Zappala, your district attorney,” Mr. Zappala says in the ad. “I’ve dedicated my career to protecting you and your family. I will never permit your safety to become an experiment.”

Democrats have a simple answer: to brand Mr. Zappala as a Republican.

One Dugan campaign ad accuses Mr. Zappala of jailing a young woman after she had a miscarriage and siding with the NRA to oppose stricter gun laws after the 2018 Squirrel Hill synagogue shooting.

“Fact: It’s time to vote out Republican Steve Zappala,” the ad says.

One local Democratic strategist said it will be an “uphill battle” for the incumbent to win, even with cross-party support.

“I think people know the Zappala family and they know they are lifelong Democrats,” Mr. DiSarro said. “And it’s going to be very difficult, in my opinion, for the Dugan campaign to suggest that well, he’s just a Republican, and trying to pretend to be a Democrat.”