Do you even remember a judicial election? In all the time you’ve been a voter — making choices and casting ballots — do you ever recall a campaign for a Pennsylvania judge at any level?

Probably not.

In Pennsylvania, judicial elections typically have been the blunt side of partisanship. Presidential, gubernatorial and legislative races are sharp sword fights over who is the most Democratic or most Republican. Running for judge has been more of a pillow fight. You might get a hard wallop upside the head, but you aren’t going to get cut.

That’s partly because judges don’t have to pick sides. In what seems an acknowledgment of a judge’s role to weigh decisions without bias, judicial candidates can cross-file, appearing on both ballots. It’s a statement that the job is more important than the party.

At least, it was.

In Allegheny County’s Common Pleas Court race, all 13 candidates were Democrats. That’s not surprising — Allegheny is one of Pennsylvania’s deepest-­blue strongholds. The closer you get to the core of Pittsburgh, the harder it is to get elected as a Republican.

It was even harder this year. It wasn’t just that the winners were Democrats. It was that the ones who cross-filed fared worse than those who ran only as Democrats. The five who landed on the general election ballot solely as Republican nominees after failing to make the Democratic cut didn’t just lose — they finished at the bottom.

If that’s confusing, it should be. To appear on the Republican ballot in Allegheny County’s general election can mean you aren’t really a Republican at all — just a Democrat who didn’t win in the primary.

Ask District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr., who won his seventh term in 2023 after losing the Democratic primary but securing enough write-in votes to appear in the general election as a Republican. The same thing happened to mayoral candidate Tony Moreno in 2021; this year, Moreno cut to the chase and ran as a GOP candidate from the start.

Political analyst Joseph Sabino Mistick called the judicial results “the curse of cross-filing.” What was once an advantage, he said, “became a detriment.” Voters saw the “R” and the “D” next to the same name and refused to check the box.

That’s something to view with caution. It points toward an intractable partisanship that looks only at the cover and never opens the book.

Cross-filing used to be a way to appeal to more people. It also could signal a lack of ideology. Now that same ambiguity can look like disloyalty. Is this candidate nonpartisan — or just pretending to be?

Abigail Gardner, Allegheny County’s communications director and a former campaign manager, called cross-filing “an anchor around your neck.”

That shift has national roots, and we are at least three presidential cycles into sinking deeper into the quicksand of pure politics.

That’s bad in every race. It’s particularly bad for judges.

Pennsylvania judges, unlike federal ones, are elected rather than appointed. They have the opportunity to stand above political obligations.

When we make judicial races more partisan, we invite partisan outcomes. Cross-filing was one way we could avoid that. By rejecting cross-filed candidates, we turn our backs on one of the last corners of our government that didn’t have to be polarized.

What happened in Allegheny County isn’t just a tally. It’s a harbinger of where we’re headed.

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