Some folks are very upset in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

And I couldn’t be more pleased.

Democrats pulled off an astonishing upset in a special election for the Pennsylvania Senate on Tuesday night, as East Petersburg Mayor James Andrew Malone defeated Republican Josh Parsons by a 50-49 margin to flip a district Donald Trump carried by 15 points last year.

Those toplines, however, don’t tell the complete story of just how ancestrally Republican Pennsylvania’s 36th District is. Since taking its present form in Lancaster County 40 years ago, the district has always been held by the GOP, and the county as a whole has gone for a Democrat at the presidential level just once since 1856 (Lyndon Johnson just barely won it in 1964).

Local Democrats, however, were undeterred, taking heart—and advice—from their counterparts in Iowa, who flipped a comparably conservative legislative seat in January. That district, though, had gone blue as recently as 2018; the 36th never had.

As AOC put it:

There was another special election in Pennsylvania yesterday as well, but in that one the Democrat was expected to win:

And that wasn’t the only special election in the Keystone State yesterday. HD-35 was also open, due to the unexpected death of Matthew Gergely (D) on January 19 of this year. Whereas SD-36 is quite red, HD-35 is equally blue, with a PVI of D+15. So, it was not a surprise that Democrat Dan Goughnour triumphed. However, he trounced his Republican opponent by nearly 30 points, 63.4% to 35.0%. This means the Democrats hold a 1-seat majority in the lower chamber of the state legislature. In the upper chamber, it’s now 27R, 23D/I.

So it was a good day for the forces of sanity. We might just make it after all.