Incumbent Stephen Zappala declared victory in the Allegheny County district attorney race Tuesday night, nearly three hours after the polls closed. A crowd of nearly 50 people watched him call the tight race in Cupka’s Café II in the Southside. (Photo by James Paul/Pittsburgh Media Partnership)
The multi-million-dollar campaign for Allegheny County District Attorney brought national funding and endorsements to a race with both local and national implications.
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Stephen J. Zappala Jr. will continue his quarter-century tenure as Allegheny County’s top prosecutor after surviving a well-financed challenge in a race that forced the lifelong Democrat to run as a Republican.
Zappala reversed the results of the Democratic primary, won by Matt Dugan, a former public defender. The incumbent stayed politically alive by winning the Republican nomination as a write-in, then won slightly more than 51% of General Election votes despite the county’s 2-to-1 Democratic registration edge.
“First and foremost, I want to thank the voters of Allegheny County,” Zappala told supporters at his campaign’s watch party. “I think it was more a referendum of us as a community.”
“We were up against a billionaire,” he continued, in reference to George Soros, the liberal philanthropist who largely funded his campaign rival. “We had to be competitive, not just financially
Zappala said voters are “aware of some of the problems we have and some of the things that need to be done,” calling the vote “a referendum on us as a community.”
In his seventh term as district attorney, he said he’d like to explore the development of a municipal authority for the South Side and the South Side Flats. He described the area as a regional asset and said that, “rather than argue about undermanning the Pittsburgh police and not helping them do their job, we’re going to look at it a little bit differently, in a little bit more broader manner.”
In regards to the Shuman Juvenile Detention Center, Zappala said the facility’s name and “the concept of a penitentiary in and of itself — that should disappear.” He has said that greater emphasis should be placed on providing juvenile offenders with education and support, and he referenced that in his speech.
“We bring health care, education, and as a last resort, then we talk about detaining younger people, even though serious consideration has to be given because they are serious crimes that people are being accused of,” Zappala said.
He also discussed the issue of homelessness, saying that under Pittsburgh mayors Bob O’Connor and Luke Ravenstahl, there were about 250 people characterized as being homeless, and most city police officers knew them. Zappala said that Pittsburgh was unprepared for its designation as a sanctuary city under Mayor Bill Peduto, which he said caused the population of unhoused people to grow to more than 1,000.
Unhoused people, he said, are “being exploited by the nickel and dime drug dealer. So there’s a new market Downtown,” he said. “So there’s a lot we have to do tonight. We’re not going to fix everything, but we’re going to start tomorrow morning.”
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