City turnout propelled Moyle
Published: June 6, 2009
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share thisMost people thought Lackawanna County Assistant District Attorney Frank Castellano would win the Republican nomination for county judge.
His 558-vote victory wasn't resounding but good enough to get him to round two - the November election.
That's where he will run into perhaps the biggest surprise of the primary election, a fellow prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Margaret Bisignani Moyle, whose big Democratic victory turned heads.
With the help of her "kitchen Cabinet" and "bunch of housewives," as she puts it, she put herself in position to become the county's second woman judge.
A lack of time has prevented a close look at the precinct-by-precinct vote totals in the judge race until this week. What we found was what you often find in judicial elections: When the candidates can't talk about issues - and judicial candidates really can't, because there are rules about that - voters usually rely on other factors.
This is not to demean how hard each candidate worked to get elected. Attorney Jim Tierney and Mr. Castellano were out seriously campaigning way before Mrs. Moyle or Magisterial District Judge John P. Pesota even decided to get into the race. Once they joined, Mrs. Moyle and the magisterial judge ran more than respectable campaigns. Heck, they finished one-two on the Democratic side.
It's also not to discount the damaging effect that questions about Mr. Tierney's large accident insurance settlement had on his campaign. That had to hurt because he finished dead last on both tickets. He spent a lot of money on television long before anybody else, and the commercials clearly didn't help.
Nonetheless, the voting says he might have done so poorly and the others as well as they did at least partly because of geography. On the Republican side, party was still a factor, too.
Mrs. Moyle lives in Scranton, home to the county's largest Democratic voting bloc. She won the Democratic nomination.
What happened in Scranton just about defined the Democratic race. According to the latest totals available, Judge Pesota finished 4,609 votes behind Mrs. Moyle in the overall race. She beat Judge Pesota in Scranton by 4,793 votes. So she won by winning the city big and basically playing the judge to a tie in the rest of the county.
What that also means is that the huge turnout for a primary - almost 47 percent - in the Scranton mayor's race was probably a big help to her campaign. A key to whether she can win in the fall is making sure those same voters turn out. That could be difficult because the mayor's race is all but over with Mayor Chris Doherty winning both nominations. A lively city council contest could help her.
Besides Scranton, Mrs. Moyle also won the Downvalley and the Abingtons, now home to many ex-Democrats and not so many Republicans any more, but also home to some of Mrs. Moyle's top supporters - Patty Lawler and Clarks Summit Borough Council President Gerry Carey among them.
Mr. Tierney, who grew up in Carbondale and lives in Greenfield Twp., controlled his turf, winning the city of Carbondale and the Upvalley.
Mr. Pesota, a Dickson City resident and the magisterial district judge for the Midvalley, won that region.
Mr. Castellano, a Dunmore native who lives in Moscow, won Dunmore and North Pocono.
His Republican victory, as the only Republican in the race, showed party affiliation can still matter.
By region, the Republican race was identical, except that Mr. Castellano won the Abingtons, still home to lots of Republicans, and the Downvalley - people forget all the Republican voters still around in Old Forge and Taylor. In both regions, Mrs. Moyle finished second.
She was also the one who finished only 558 votes overall behind Mr. Castellano on the Republican side.
For the county Democratic Party, which practically kept Mr. Tierney's endorsement a secret when it happened, the primary was a major defeat because he lost. If you count the party's inability to get John E.V. Pieski elected twice, Mark Walsh's loss to Vito Geroulo and Mr. Tierney's loss, its record in electing Democratic judges is way too mixed based on its overwhelming voter registration advantage.
Getting behind Mrs. Moyle and helping her win could show the party still has some muscle.
Come to think of it, what we have coming up is a quasi-rematch of the 2001 race for district attorney.
Republican DA Andy Jarbola will surely want to see Mr. Castellano win while the county Democratic Party is headed by attorney Harry McGrath, who lost to Mr. Jarbola in that DA race.
Hey, this could be fun.
BORYS KRAWCZENIUK, The Times-Tribune politics reporter, writes Random Notes.
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