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Tuesday night marked the end of Mayor Ed Gainey’s hopes to hold onto his seat, but his evening watch party at the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers on the South Side felt more like a wake than a funeral.
As the night grew increasingly grim and Allegheny County Controller Corey O’Connor’s lead over the mayor grew further out of reach, Gainey supporters were laughing, chatting, and listening to the increasingly loud mix from the DJ in the corner. Even when the race was called a little after 10 p.m., the mood barely shifted.
Partly that’s because there were no screens displaying returns — usually a focal point for such events. Those who were interested in keeping up with the vote gathered to squint at each others’ phones. Some put off looking at the numbers altogether — or claimed to do so.
When Gainey arrived in the room, after the race had been called with O’Connor up by more than 5 percentage points, there was a burst of applause.
“I'm not gonna leave the stage until I put something in the atmosphere that continues to bring the change that we need,” Gainey said.
Gainey critics of all sorts have been writing political obituaries for months — for his administration and for Pittsburgh’s progressive movement. That message has only gotten louder following his loss. But on Tuesday night, Gainey exhorted activists and progressives not to give up.
“Don't be defeated. … Be glad of the progress that we made,” Gainey said. “We ain’t done yet.”
Other supporters, too, celebrated the coalition he’d put together — one that includes police accountability advocates and other social-justice activists, union representatives, and other progressive leaders. None seemed interested in eulogizing the cause just yet.
“The work we did together was the work to build a Pittsburgh for the many, not the few,” Deputy Mayor Jake Pawlak said. “And it's going to continue … until we win here again.”
Whether the outcome represents an ebb for progressive politics is far from clear. Some of Gainey’s wounds were self-inflicted: A drop in homicide rates was clouded by the embarrassing departure of a police chief who preferred to referee college basketball games. Promises to extract more revenue from big nonprofits such as UPMC never came to fruition. As the war in Gaza resulted in anxieties and antagonisms at home, Gainey’s approach alienated some hardliners without satisfying anyone.
But Gainey didn’t just lose the race: O’Connor won it.
As noted here before, progressives have succeeded partly because the political establishment failed to see them coming. Sara Innamorato won her party's nomination for Allegheny County Executive in 2023, for example, while its established traditional factions — old-school Democrats such as former Treasurer John Weinstein and more socially liberal but business-friendly technocrats — focused on each other. While established Democrats relied on stale political tactics, progressives amplified their messages with support from groups that had national reach.
O'Connor's campaign is the first to effectively counter that approach, having tapped its own network of outside-spending groups and national donors — some shrouded in mystery. And it boasted a strong local ground game led by campaign manager Ben Forstate, a veteran of Bill Peduto’s loss to Gainey in 2021 but also of a comfortable win by Congressman Chris Deluzio in a 2024 election that was otherwise brutal for Democrats.
And his campaign appealed to factions who had once been at war with each other. You could see that at O’Connor’s own election-night gathering.
No one was hiding the vote tallies there: Supporters milled about in Nova Place as large-screen TVs displayed the county's election return site alongside campaign ads. And while the crowd wasn't what you would call diverse, it contained former Peduto staffers as well as those tied to O'Connor's father, the late former Mayor Bob O’Connor, and his successor, Luke Ravenstahl.
Some attendees joked about how the event was a sort of reunion for prior administrations, but these aren’t tribes you would ordinarily put together, at least not where glass beer bottles are readily at hand.
Such tensions could resurface as administration posts are staffed, as priorities are set. But maybe no city politician is as well positioned to reconcile them as O'Connor, through his name and his approach to politics: young by Pittsburgh politics standards, but also an older Democrat's idea of what a younger Democrat should be.
Coalitions are built from such alliances, and progressives have played that game, too: Movement standard-bearer Bethany Hallam, for one, helped create a majority on Allegheny County Council by joining with an old-school faction tied to none other than ... John Weinstein.
O’Connor arguably flipped that script.
The make-up of the crowds on election night, and of the districts where O’Connor struggled with voters most, suggest a risk of racial fault lines going forward. But at least at the start of the campaign, some activists who were staunch Gainey supporters said they didn’t see O’Connor as a reactionary. And O’Connor has time to address such fissures. Even before the election-night celebration ended, City Council President Dan Lavelle — a Gainey backer — could be seen making a goodwill visit at Nova Place.
Back at Gainey’s event, some of Gainey’s allies on City Council speculated about what would become of some of his signature policies.
“I think that the efforts that the Gainey administration started on affordable housing and housing all across the city have provided incredible momentum, really transformative programs that I hope we continue under whatever administration,” said City Councilor Deb Gross.
Progressive advocacy groups didn’t seem ready to throw in the towel, either. Pittsburgh United’s Alex Wallach Hanson, for one, said that both O’Connor and Gainey espoused progressive goals — which his organization looks forward to seeing O’Connor work toward reaching.
“Corey O'Connor ran a campaign on a similar message of saying, ‘I'm gonna be a progressive who builds affordable housing, protects Pittsburgh from Trump and ICE, and delivers on community safety,’” he said. “Voters across the city, organizations across all sorts of issues, [will] look forward to seeing Corey deliver on the promises from the campaign.”
Or as Gainey put it, gesturing at his gathered supporters: “Look what we got growing. Once the seed has been watered, it never stops.”
