McCANDLESS TOWNSHIP, Pennsylvania — Mike Turzai, speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, will announce Thursday morning that he will not seek reelection for the suburban Pittsburgh seat he has held since a 2001 special election. Turzai rose to majority leader of the state House in 2011 and became speaker in 2015.
“I’ve been honored to serve, and it’s been an amazing journey, but it’s good to move on and let another generation of leaders develop,” Turzai told the Washington Examiner. He described it as a tough decision, but he decided: “It’s time. It’s time to pass the torch on to another generation of leaders. And I’m actually quite comfortable with that.”
The fiscal conservative has represented the upper-class suburban Allegheny County 28th legislative district, including Marshall, McCandless, and Pine townships as well as Franklin Park and his home borough of Bradford Woods.
Turzai, 60, is a Notre Dame alumnus who practiced law in Pittsburgh before his first election. He and his wife Lidia, a pediatrician, are the parents of three sons: one at Notre Dame, one at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, and one a junior at North Allegheny High School.
Turzai said that his middle son, Stephen, perfectly summed up the decision when discussing the day when he no longer pitches in baseball. “Dad, whenever my last game that I pitch on the mound comes, it is going to be really difficult. It’s going to be really hard for me. But, Dad, there is going to be a last day when I pitch on the mound,” he said.
The grandson of Hungarian and Irish immigrants, Turzai’s first foray into politics was a landslide loss to former U.S. Rep. Ron Klink for the 4th Congressional District in 1998. His rebound three years later was considered nothing short of a miracle to local press and politicos. That loss to Klink, which at the time was one of the most volatile local House races, Turzai said, taught him to stick to being himself and being positive. “Something I have never forgotten,” he said.
Turzai said he has no plans to run for governor in the open race in 2022. He briefly ran for his party’s nomination for governor in 2017, though he dropped out months before the primary. Current Democratic Party Gov. Tom Wolf is term limited.
“I’m hoping that some opportunities might develop in the private sector,” he said of his post-politics plans. “I think that I can contribute in a very positive manner. I’ve worked with folks in the private sector and have always talked about how we are teammates in terms of making employers create an economic environment that employs folks with really great family-sustaining wages. It’s time to help be a part of that.”
Turzai had not faced any serious candidates in his affluent, traditionally Republican seat until 2018 when Emily Skopov, a Marshall Township Democrat, ran a competitive race. She ultimately lost to Turzai by 10 percentage points. Skopov is again seeking that seat, currently with no Democratic primary challengers.
Since 2010, when Republicans took back the majority of the state house, Turzai has guided the expansion of Republican state House seats not just in southwestern Pennsylvania, traditionally a Democratic stronghold, but also in the Scranton area, while the party held its own in the traditional Republican districts in the central and northern tier.
While his staunch fiscal conservatism has vexed both his rivals on the other side of the aisle as well as Wolf, Turzai championed school choice, pushed for a gradual privatization of the state liquor stores, and held the line on an extraction tax hitting the state’s booming natural gas industry, something that has earned him praise from the working class.
“I’ve held off a severance tax that Wolf campaigned not once, but twice on, amongst other taxes, by the way, but I saw the vision as to what it would do for communities, and communities even beyond Pittsburgh and Philadelphia,” he said.
Cherelle Parker is the majority leader of the Philadelphia City Council, a Democrat who served in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives with Turzai from 2005 to 2015. She praised Turzai for his willingness to work across the aisle. “During my tenure as chair of the Philadelphia delegation in Harrisburg [in the House of Representatives], Speaker Turzai and I may have agreed to disagree 99%. However, it was his willingness to work in a bipartisan manner that helped the City of Philadelphia enact much-needed legislation, including the cigarette tax, the tax fairness package, and an increase in the sales tax,” she told the Washington Examiner. “Such collaboration seems almost impossible in today’s hyperpartisan culture, but Speaker Turzai’s door was always open to me, and I will never forget it.”
“In Beaver County, thanks to those tax credits that we got when I was majority leader, 6,500 skilled people are building a facility on the largest construction site in North America, and it’s going to result in, what, like 700 permanent jobs and many downstream and upstream jobs as well,” Turzai said of the Shell Royal Cracker plant under construction in Monaca that was hailed as an economic “game-changer” by both Wolf and former Republican Gov. Tom Corbett, who was the state executive when the deal was made.
Turzai will make his announcement at his McCandless Township office at 11 a.m. with his wife Lidia, son Matthew, and several local House members, staff, and longtime supporters.
