BRISTOL, Pennsylvania — Both Democrats and Republicans know if you want to win a statewide election in Pennsylvania, whether you are running for president, U.S. Senate, or governor, winning Bucks County is right up there with winning Erie County in terms of locking up the numbers to secure the state.
It was a county that eluded President Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020, when Democrats Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, respectively, both comfortably won. That all changed last year when Trump won Bucks, and Erie, and subsequently the state and the White House.
On Tuesday, Democrats enjoyed a decisive victory over Republican candidates, from school board majorities to judges, and even ousted the Republican majority in office, including District Attorney Jennifer Schorn, County Sheriff Fred Harran, Recorder of Deeds Dan McPhillips, Prothonotary Coleen Christian, and Controller Pamela Van Blunk.
Danny Ciesler, a Bristol Democrat and Army reservist, who won the sheriff’s office over Harran, said his approach to this race was simple: treat people with respect, have a message that focuses on local concerns, and earn voters’ trust that a Democrat could serve in law enforcement effectively.
“Bucks County voters in general don’t like extremism on either side. They like good government. They like people to just go in and get the job done. And in this election, we heard from a lot of voters who felt that our incumbent sheriff was allowing national politics to infect local law enforcement,” said Ceisler, following Election Day.
“My whole campaign was about getting back to the meat and potatoes mission of fundamental public safety principles, and taking the responsibilities that we were given and executing them professionally and effectively,” he said.
Ceisler, 34, admits the hard part, governing, starts today.
As someone who has been in the military since he was 18 years old, he knows the importance of separating politics from the mission when it comes to leadership.
“My job is to take the manpower and resources and put my deputies in the best position to succeed in executing their mission,” he said.
Ceisler said he will spend the next two months working with every component of the office, learning the details and nuts and bolts of each role, and figuring out how the resources of the office are currently being used to execute the mission and how it aligns with what we actually need to do.
Which means he must surround himself with experienced professionals.
“I know what my strengths are and what my weaknesses are here. I have a good amount of leadership experience. I know how to lead a team, but I’m going to bring on experienced law enforcement professionals who are going to know how to operationalize the policies that we enact,” he said.
Ceisler has been in the reserves for 15 years. He has been activated several times, including a deployment to Afghanistan with a joint special operations counterterrorism task force. He earned a Bronze Star while targeting high-value foreign terrorist targets. He also served on three crisis management teams for the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon.
What makes Bucks such a swing county is the diversity of its population, which is basically three different counties in one. Lower Bucks has always been filled with working-class voters, traditional Democrats, and Catholics who migrated here out of Philadelphia to the suburbs from post-World War II to the 1970s. Many rooted their families here with parents, children, and grandchildren all living within a stone’s throw of each other.
Central Bucks are the voters who ascended out of lower Bucks. In general, it is an upper-middle-class mix of blue-blooded Republicans and progressive suburban Democrats who aren’t fans of President Donald Trump.
Finally, there’s Upper Bucks, which has no affinity to Philly in the way lower and central do. It is filled with rolling rural hills, tidy suburbs all dotted with picturesque farmlands, colonial history, and charming covered bridges that draw tourists.
In 2023, Republicans were horrified as the balance of power on the Central Bucks School District’s school board, which previously had a 6-3 Republican majority, shifted dramatically to a 6-3 Democratic majority. This caused deep concern about the shift ahead of the presidential and U.S. Senate races the next year.
Going into October, former congressman and undersecretary of the Army Patrick Murphy, who represented this county in Congress for two cycles, said that something big was happening in Bucks County for Democrats, centering on good candidate recruitment and localized messaging that was appealing not just to Democrats but to ‘gettable’ voters who had moved toward Republicans last November.
It worked.
But nothing is permanent, as both Murphy and Ceisler warned in separate interviews. Especially in Bucks County.
Democrats had been winning Bucks County in presidential contests for decades until last year, when Trump won narrowly by a margin of just under 300 votes. That number may seem insignificant, but it’s worth considering the leap from four years earlier, when Trump lost to Biden here by over 17,000 votes. That’s a significant swing.
It wasn’t just the votes that swung red ahead of last year’s presidential elections. In July of 2024, Republicans outnumbered Democrats by 264 voters in voter registration for the first time in years. By November of last year, that margin had swelled to over 4,400.
The September numbers this year from the Pennsylvania Department of State show the Republican advantage has more than doubled to 9,815. That advantage did not translate into wins, and much of that was based on Democrats doing a good job of keeping the races local, while Republicans failed to recognize the importance of that.
ZOHRAN MAMDANI’S UNIMPRESSIVE WIN
Ceisler said the Democratic majority here in Bucks may not last forever.
“But we have an opportunity to show what we can do. This is our chance to show that Democrats can run common-sense, effective law enforcement agencies, both with the DA’s office and the sheriff’s office, and it is now incumbent upon us to do that.”