This week’s biggest Winners & Losers

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dave McCormick is starting the year in a financially formidable position. The former hedge fund executive, who is looking to take on U.S. Sen. Bob Casey in this year’s general election, raised approximately $5.4 million in the fourth quarter of 2024, and also contributed an additional $1 million of his own money to the campaign. Casey, meanwhile, brought in $3.6 million in the most recent quarter – 92% of which came from donations under $100, according to the Casey campaign.

These are Penn’s Woods; we’re just living in them. An effort by the National Park Service to update Philadelphia’s Welcome Park and remove the William Penn statue was derailed after online outrage and conservative commentators spread the news over the weekend. Within 72 hours, NPS reversed its decision, meaning the statue of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania’s founder will remain.

Elizabethtown native Pete Brubaker and Neil Finkenbinder, a 2-year-old from Duncannon, are statewide champions after participating in the Pennsylvania Farm Show’s first-ever mullet contest on Monday. Brubaker and his curly locks took home the Over-18 prize, while Finkenbinder found victory in the Under-18 category after his parents entered him into the contest on a whim, per PennLive.

The now-former chair of the Philadelphia City Commissioners – the three-person board tasked with overseeing the city’s elections and voter registration – was ousted this week after attempting to pass more centralized rules for the board chair. Democrat Lisa Deeley, now vice chair, was supplanted by Democrat Omar Sabir, who had the backing of Republican Seth Bluestein. Deeley’s proposed rule changes, along with her effort to retain the role as chair, fell short in a year when the city and commonwealth’s votes could have a major impact on the presidential election.

This week marked the end of an era for an oft-broken fixture of the Pennsylvania Capitol’s architecture: the Capitol’s East Wing escalators. The state Department of General Services announced this week that the escalators will be replaced with a grand staircase as part of a multimillion-dollar renovation project in the Capitol’s East Wing potentially bringing an end to the escalators' operational outages – as well as all the memes made along the way. 

The Internal Revenue Service has allegedly seized more than $400,000 in cash from Rick Goodling, the former national director of compliance for the Georgia-based skill game developer Pace-O-Matic, amid an investigation into his personal tax filing, according to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star. Goodling is a former Pennsylvania State Police corporal who reportedly resigned from Pace-O-Matic after the company learned of the IRS investigation, per the report.