In one of the most-watched primaries in Allegheny County this year, attorney and first-time candidate Brittany Bloam defeated Pat Catena, the president of County Council, for the Democratic nomination in a suburban state House district.
The result in the 45th District wasn’t close. Bloam, a 40-year-old Robinson resident, won by 30 points over an opponent with years worth of media attention due to his council leadership role. It could be a sign of continued change in the region’s politics and the way candidates are chosen.
Tom Duerr, a Democratic political operative and former County Council member, said Catena appeared to be relying on the fact that he was endorsed by the Allegheny County Democratic Committee and some labor unions to carry him to victory.
“That just doesn’t work anymore,” Duerr said. “People just don’t care. You need to give them a vision of how you want to improve their lives.”
Bloam attributed her win to an effort to communicate with individual voters directly.
“We made a really focused effort to meet voters where they were at, and we knocked on the doors of over 10,000 voters,” Bloam said. “That work to get the voters’ trust really resonated with a lot of people.”
Duerr, who did not work for either campaign in the race but volunteered for the Bloam campaign, also pointed to the waning influence of the Weinstein family, which has wielded political might in the city’s western suburbs for generations, as a factor. Mel Weinstein chaired Catena’s campaign.
“Not only did [Bloam] win against the Weinstein machine in that area, she obliterated them,” Duerr said. “If you’re going to see a changing of the guard in that part of the county, people will look to this race as a turning point. For the longest time, you did not challenge the Weinstein family. You did not do it. And this year someone not only challenged them but beat them handily.”
Neither Weinstein nor Catena responded to phone calls and texts requesting comment.
J.J. Abbott, a Democratic operative in Harrisburg who worked for former Gov. Tom Wolf and former County Controller Chelsa Wagner, said the decentralization of election information in the digital age has weakened former political power brokers in Southwestern Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
“The centers of power that existed and were the deciders in the past aren’t the same as they were before,” said Abbott, who was not involved in the District 45 race.
Bloam said she encountered voters who were “ready for new leadership and new energy” on the campaign trail.
Shifting dollars and endorsements
Just as Mel’s son and longtime County Treasurer John Weinstein lost a 2023 county executive primary driven by a relatively new style of politics, Catena fell short this week. He received few formal endorsements (though he did net the coveted county committee endorsement). His campaign raised little money aside from a major transfer from Catena’s County Council campaign account, which itself is funded largely by contributions from Catena’s personal finances.
Bloam raised more money than Catena, $128,000 to $91,000, and drew nearly all of it from grassroots donors and other elected officials and organizations. She was endorsed by Democratic state lawmakers from a range of ideological factions, as well as groups that have wielded increasing influence over Democratic primaries in the region in recent years: Planned Parenthood, the Pennsylvania Working Families Party, the Service Employees International Union and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 5, among others.
Catena’s endorsement list contains some groups that have traditionally been key to local Democratic politics, but of late have found themselves on the losing end of some primaries: The Pittsburgh Regional Building Trades Council, the Pennsylvania Laborers union, Pittsburgh’s Fraternal Order of Police lodge, and perhaps most notably, the Allegheny County Democratic Committee. Officials from the party committee could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
“If you’re not doing the blocking and tackling and making sure you’re getting to those voters that are within those institutional endorsements, there’s only so much that someone’s name is going to get you anymore,” Abbott said. “It’s really about having a strong organizing strategy and it seemed like [Bloam] ran a strong operation for that.”
While a candidate with name recognition and institutional party backing could expect to win in the past, Duerr said votes don’t come as easily these days.
“Support is not given, it is earned,” Duerr said. “You have to re-earn that support every cycle, whether you have been an elected official or not.”
He credited Bloam’s campaign with knocking on a “seismic ton” of doors ahead of the vote, and said she may have benefited from the scarcity of other competitive primaries in the county, allowing idle volunteers from other areas to head to the Ohio Valley to help her campaign.
Controversial mailer didn’t help
And then there was the campaign mailer, sent and endorsed by Catena’s campaign, that roiled the race in its final weeks. The mailer attacked Bloam as being too far to the left for the district, and called out in capitalized, underlined text that she was supported by an “extreme left group that advocates for transgender athletes in our sports.”
Backlash to Catena was swift. Council members who attended his campaign kickoff suddenly began supporting an effort to remove him as council president. Pro-LGBTQ groups and advocates showed up to a council meeting to criticize him and call for him to step down from council and the House primary. He met with one such group over the weekend, but it left the meeting maintaining its call for Catena to resign.
In a county where it used to be commonplace for some Democratic legislators to hold socially conservative views, including on LGBTQ issues and abortion rights, such views are virtually invisible in the county’s Democratic delegation now. The flurry of backlash, and lack of public defense of Catena except from some conservative corners, is further evidence of that.
“I think it was a failure to recognize how these suburbs were changing and how the Democratic electorate — the mood that they’re in,” Abbott said. “They don’t want to see Democrats parrotting Republican attacks.”
Duerr said, though, that evidence suggests the mailer issue was not decisive in the race. It didn’t hit the headlines until long after mail-in voters began casting ballots. (Bloam won 58% of the mail-in vote.) It may have expanded Bloam’s margin a bit, he said.
The mailer could be decisive for Catena’s future role on County Council, though. A week after his unsuccessful bid for a new elective office, Catena could be stripped of his current honorific: At least eight members of council have said they intend to remove him from the council presidency he has held since 2020, with a vote possible Tuesday.
Seven members signed a press release May 13 stating they would support a motion to end Catena’s presidency. They’re all members of the new, unofficial progressive majority on council, and almost all have joined council within the last two election cycles: Jordan Botta, Dan Grzybek, Bethany Hallam, Paul Klein, Kathleen Madonna-Emmerling, Alex Rose and Lissa Geiger Shulman. An eighth member, DeWitt Walton, made a motion at the May 12 meeting to remove Catena.
Though the county charter simply says the president serves “at the pleasure of council,” council solicitor Frederick Frank told Public Source that a simple majority vote — eight of the 15 members — would be enough to remove its president.
Catena’s council colleagues are not expected to try to oust him from his council seat entirely. The charter requires a two-thirds majority to do that, and only permits the move if a member is legally unqualified for office, commits embezzlement or a similar “infamous crime,” is found to be incapacitated by a court or fails to perform his duties for 60 days.
Catena was reelected last year and his current term expires at the end of 2029.
Charlie Wolfson is the local government reporter for Pittsburgh’s Public Source. He can be reached at charlie@publicsource.org.
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