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1. How Lancaster fell

By Kyle Sammin
 

When Republican Ryan Aument ran for the state Senate in 2018, he won by 33 percentage points. In 2022, he was unopposed. But when he resigned at the end of 2024 to work for U.S. Senator Dave McCormick, his former seat flipped to a Democrat, James Malone, by a narrow margin of 482 votes.

How did this happen? Does it suggest larger changes in the Pennsylvania electorate? And will Malone be able to hold the seat when it comes up for election again in 2026?

Why It Matters. We don’t yet know from the election results who turned out, only that there were fewer of them. But it is clear from the data that one of two things happened: either the people of northern Lancaster County became fifteen percent more Democratic since November, or Democrats did a better job of turning out their people than Republicans.

It’s pretty clear that it’s the latter.

That’s important because it sends a message about how future campaigns in this state must be conducted. A generation ago, Republicans had a big advantage on high-propensity voters — the kind of people who never miss an election or a primary, year in and year out. Democrats had more of the every-four-years voter who only turns out for the big ones. 

That’s flipped, another consequence of the party shift that has swept the nation since Trump came down the escalator in 2015 and announced he was running for President.

Pennsylvania Republicans: learn from this.

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2. Giving students fish and teaching principals to be fishermen

By Guy Ciarrocchi
 

In 1996, Don Parsons, then Chairman and co-founder of CTDI, poked his head into his son Jerry’s office at CTDI and “volunteered” him to help the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart and the Archdiocese of Philadelphia build a brand new Bishop Shanahan high school (BSHS) in Downingtown. Today, nearly 1,000 students attend the three-story building on a multi-acre campus. Since that day, not only was BSHS built, but also a foundation was created with professional staff and a board of directors. Amazingly, nine-figures in donations have been raised and distributed to Catholic schools and to students of all faiths, across the five-county Archdiocese. 

The Foundation for Catholic Education (FCE) does all of that and more. Along the way, they’ve donated money to make Catholic education more affordable for tens of thousands of students, helped keep dozens of schools from closing, promoted programs for students with special needs, and created and distributed a robotics program (with support and direction from Bentley Systems in Exton).

Why It Matters. True stewardship is donating one’s time, one’s treasurers and one’s talents — that is the embodiment of the 2025 version of the FCE.

Since creating SPAT, the all too-recent heartbreaking process of closing elementary schools has stopped. And over the last few years, a historic change is happening. School enrollment is growing — even as families and schools are battling with inflation. Through gifts of money and expertise, the Catholic schools in the region are growing — again, serving children of all races and religions. When those schools stay open, not only are there opportunities for the local students, but also the community does not have an enormous, vacant, dark building sitting in its midst.

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3. Lightning Round

• Wally Nunn: Waiting for the tooth fairy

• Christine Flowers: First, kill all the lawyers?

• Beth Ann Rosica: So much ado about nothing — closing the Dept of Ed might help students

• Marisa Wise: Cyber school has been the best choice for me

• Ben Mannes: The political malpractice of the Philadelphia Republican Party

• Jeff Hurvitz: The world deserves to hear about America

• Thom Nickels: From hidden river to historic hills, Manayunk through the years

• Lawmakers’ perks: free Penn State football tickets

• Paul Davis: Springtime for armed robbers

4. Podcast

5. What we're reading

The first iPhone came out in 2007, and since that time it and other smart phones have slowly begun dominating our lives, sometimes for good, but often for ill. In 2024, people finally started pushing back at one of the most harmful aspects of the smart phone revolution: its stranglehold on our kids.
 

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt led the way with his book, The Anxious Generation, which laid out the problem and suggested some solutions. The book succeeded even beyond its author’s wildest dreams. As Haidt and Zach Rausch write this week at The Free Press, the message appealed to millions of parents and teachers who “were exhausted from competing for their students’ attention against platforms designed by multibillion-dollar companies to grab and hold attention.”

The book is one every parent should read. In the meantime, the article gives a breakdown about the new emerging norms on how to keep your kids’ phones from monopolizing their attention and distracting them from school, family, and many of the other good things in life.