O'Connor took 53 percent of the vote against Mayor Ed Gainey. “Your voices and your call for accountable leadership and growth have been heard in this Democratic primary,” O’Connor told a crowd of supporters at Nova Place in Allegheny Center.
He pulled off a rare defeat of a sitting mayor, denying Gainey a second term after pummeling him with more than $1 million worth of mostly negative advertisements leading up to the vote. “Pittsburgh deserves better,” O’Connor declared in December, and proceeded to scathe Gainey’s handling of city finances, police leadership and economic development during more than three years in the office.
Flanked by supporters chanting his name, O’Connor declared that “we are going to win in the fall.” He echoed his campaign promises of enhancing the city’s police force, delivering affordable housing for all and supporting businesses of “all sizes.”
At the center of his address was the idea of pushing Pittsburgh into an era of growth, via a strategy that would begin with families first. He also said a “neighborhood-oriented” approach was necessary. This would mean investing in the city’s small business district instead of “doing study after study.”
O’Connor called for unity in the Democratic Party during and after his speech. To those who didn’t vote for him, he said, “Let’s sit down [and] have the conversation.”
“This has been a wonderful four years,” Gainey said in a concession speech at the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers headquarters in South Side. “We didn’t put a crack in the glass ceiling. We shattered it.”
Gainey told his supporters that the coalition of voters that helped him prevail four years ago will remain “on the rise” despite the setback.
“Don’t be defeated,” Gainey said. “Don’t be sad. Be glad of the progress that we made. It would have been easy for me to bow to power but it was more exhilarating to fight them for you.”
A Heavy Favorite
O’Connor will be a heavy favorite in the general election due to the large Democratic majority that has picked all of Pittsburgh’s mayors since the 1930s.
Tony Moreno, a retired police detective from Brighton Heights, is the Republican mayoral nominee for the second time. He was an unlikely GOP champion in 2021, first running in the Democratic primary and ultimately winning the Republican nod through write-in votes.
There was no write-in effort this time as city Republicans had a competitive mayoral primary for the first time since 2001. Moreno defeated Thomas West, a Lawrenceville clothing store owner.
O’Connor, 40, is just the second challenger to unseat a Pittsburgh mayor running for reelection in nearly a century. The other was Gainey, who beat then-Mayor Bill Peduto in 2021.
O’Connor’s win comes as the city and nation are in a very different place than they were when social justice activists and a restless electorate took down Peduto and swept Gainey into office.
Then, the nation was wobbling out of the pandemic’s economic shock and Joe Biden was beginning his presidency. Now, Donald Trump is back in the White House and city leaders are wondering how his push for massive spending cuts will reshape the city the next mayor will lead.
Then, Democratic politics was dominated by calls for police reform, with the protests following the murder of George Floyd fresh in the national mind. Now, neither candidate centered police accountability in their campaign, and both focused on economic and housing concerns after those issues were central to last year’s presidential race.
O’Connor spent much of the campaign criticizing Gainey’s record, typical of a challenger. He will have his work cut out for him to make good on promises to build more affordable housing units than Gainey did, add officers to the police force and stabilize city finances that he has said are in disarray.
His economic development platform includes a 90-neighborhood “cleanup program,” a promise to remediate blighted buildings and a pledge to invest $10 million in 10 business districts about the city — an idea similar to the Peduto-era program Avenues of Hope, which targeted investment at Pittsburgh’s Black business communities.
O'Connor faulted Gainey for not overseeing enough affordable housing construction and said he would alter the city’s permitting and zoning system to encourage development. PublicSource reported in March that the city’s real estate and development industries were donating largely to O’Connor, and some industry leaders said they did so because they found it too burdensome to navigate Pittsburgh’s zoning and permitting process under Gainey.
Challenges Lie Ahead
Finding a permanent police chief will be near the top of the next mayor’s to-do list. O’Connor blasted Gainey throughout the campaign for failing to secure a permanent one. Gainey’s first pick, Larry Scirotto, quit last year to referee college basketball and his pick to succeed Scirotto resigned before being confirmed by City Council.
Perhaps the most daunting challenge in 2026 and beyond lies in the city’s balance sheet, which O’Connor said contains a looming disaster.
Real estate tax revenue has been depressed by changes to the assessment process and post-pandemic teleworking trends. The city’s current five-year plan projects the rainy day fund to shrink from $208 million at the start of 2024 to $72 million at the end of 2029. Avoiding that fate would require cuts to staff or services, a revenue boost, or both.
O’Connor’s argument that Gainey has overseen decline in Pittsburgh was rebutted last week by new data from the U.S. Census Bureau, which estimated that Pittsburgh grew by more than 1% last year and sustained modest net growth across the first four years of this decade — a major development considering the city’s decades of mostly steady decline since the 1980s.
Son of a Former Mayor
O’Connor grew up in Squirrel Hill and attended Central Catholic High School, where he later coached golf. His father, Bob O’Connor, became a City Council member when Corey was 7, became mayor when the son was 22 and died of brain cancer less than a year after that, in 2006.
Corey O’Connor rarely talked about his father on the campaign trail this year, but has spent decades following his example. After graduating from Duquesne University and working for a few years in the office of former U.S. Rep. Mike Doyle, he ran for his father’s old City Council seat in 2011 using money left over from his late father’s campaign account.
He stayed in the seat for a decade before being appointed Allegheny County controller, but soon turned his gaze on his father’s highest achievement, the mayor’s office that his father reached, but held so briefly.
His political foes debate how much he truly accomplished as a member of council, but he was doubtlessly present for significant moments in Pittsburgh’s history. He served alongside the mayor who succeeded his father, Luke Ravenstahl, through eight years of Peduto’s tenure and the progressive shift that brought Gainey into City Hall. The city emerged from state financial oversight during his decade on council, neighborhoods like Lawrenceville and the Strip District were transformed and unfathomable tragedy came to Pittsburgh with the Tree of Life shooting.
The city was finding its footing as a medical and educational hub when O’Connor entered public life, and it faces some comparable turbulence today. The local economy is still evolving to the post-pandemic reality, and the Trump administration’s proposed budget cuts could reshape numerous city institutions, including City Hall.
This article was published by PublicSource. Read the original here.
