This week’s biggest Winners & Losers

Polling numbers are one thing, but votes on the ground are another. And for Pennsylvania Republicans, voter registration numbers continue to be a positive note for the party. New data shows that voter registration among Republicans is four times higher than it is among Democrats in the commonwealth, with the GOP registering more than 21,000 voters in July compared to Democrats’ roughly 5,000.

A judge ruled this week that Washington County violated state law when election workers refused to tell voters that their mail-in ballots had been rejected and wouldn’t be counted in last April’s primary election, according to the AP.  The result, a favorable ruling for the local NAACP branch, is one of several election-related lawsuits being fought in state courts. Now, the county must notify any voter whose mail-in ballot is rejected because of an error so the voter has an opportunity to challenge the decision or cast a provisional ballot.

Keep your focus on the Pennsylvanians in Paris. The Summer Olympics may have wrapped up but there are nearly a dozen Pennsylvanians competing in the 2024 Paralympics, which kicked off this week in France. The athletes include paratriathlete Emelia Perry, who is carrying the banner as the only athlete from Philadelphia. It’s also the first time all paralympic sports will be broadcast live.

With a population of not quite 7,000, Philadelphia, Mississippi is not often confused with its Pennsylvania namesake. But earlier this week, McCormick mistook the Southern burg for the commonwealth’s largest city in a since-deleted post on X, blaming a shooting linked to an alleged MS-13 gang member who’d reportedly entered the U.S. illegally on the “radical open border policies” of Democrats Bob Casey, his Senate-race opponent, and Kamala Harris. It was low-hanging fruit for Sen. John Fetterman, whose X riposte lamented that “things like this tend to happen for people who live in Connecticut,” a jab at McCormick’s Nutmeg State residency.

In a variation on the classic two-timer-puts-the-love-notes-in-the-wrong-envelopes, the Lehigh Valley Member of Congress was caught doing the 2024 Democrats’ version: She sent constituents letters expressing, er, wildly divergent perspectives on the Israel-Gaza conflict. To make matters worse, her May correspondents were a mother-daughter pair who had written urging Wild to support Israel. With one letter affirming Israel’s “right to defend itself” and the other lamenting the “unspeakable tragedy” in Gaza, the House Ethics Committee’s top Democrat exposed her party’s most dangerous rift this election year.

A review by state Auditor General Tim DeFoor found a list of shortcomings in the state agency’s oversight of fees paid to pharmacy benefit managers in the Medicaid program. DeFoor, the commonwealth’s elected fiscal watchdog, revealed this week DHS allowed $7 million in improper “spread pricing” in the Medicaid program in 2022. Citing a lack of transparency, DeFoor said spread pricing, which is tied to the amount of a claim and can result in significantly higher prescription costs, is taking place due to unclear state law regarding transmission fees, spread pricing and pass-through pricing.