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Credit: CP Illustration: Jeff Schreckengost

Given the towering wave of ads crashing over the commonwealth, you probably already know that the 2024 general election is 20 days off.

This year’s ballot is pretty straightforward for voters in Greater Pittsburgh. Unless you live in Wilkinsburg, you won’t have any local measures to vote on (more on that inside this issue). That leaves seven races for regional, statewide, and national officials, ranging from your Representative in Congress up to President of the United States.

There’s one very familiar name on this ballot — former President Donald J. Trump is campaigning a third time for the country’s highest office. The themes are much the same as when he rode down his golden escalator in 2015: immigrants are “rapists;” Democrats are weak, stupid, and/or cowardly; and Trump is supposedly the only man who can save us from this quagmire.

We know exactly what we’d be getting here. Accordingly, Trump’s candidate chart looks a bit different from the others in this issue. Before bubbling in your choice for President, we’d encourage you to remember life in June 2020 or January 2021. If you’d like to return to those halcyon days — or leave them firmly in the past — your decision at the top of the ballot is clear.

Meanwhile, there are contests for the U.S. Senate and House and several prominent positions in Harrisburg. As befits a swing state, polls show most of these races are tight. Pennsylvania, for better or worse, is as purple as it gets in a year when just a few votes could decide the whole shebang.

So, go vote. We’ve got info on the candidates, Wilkinsburg’s Home Rule decision, and the ways local antifascists are thwarting Pittsburgh’s neo-Nazis. You have until Oct. 29 to request a mail-in or absentee ballot. Otherwise, you know what to do on Nov. 5!

Colin Williams
News Editor