LOWER MACUNGIE TWP., Pa. — Former state lawmaker Republican Gary Day and political newcomer Democrat Stefanie Rafes are set to face off in the 187th district with an open field.
Incumbent Ryan Mackenzie opted to face down Susan Wilds for the 7th Congressional District.
Day served in the 187th seat for 14 years until losing his seat to Ryan Mackenzie in 2022 when redistricting pitted them against each other.
Day currently resides in Heidelberg Township.
Rafes, a physician's assistant for Du Cardiology who resides in Lower Macungie Township, said she became involved with the Lehigh County Democratic Party in 2023, inspired by her parents' experiences in social work and environmental activism, healthcare inequities and protecting public education.
She grew up and attended school in Whitehall Township, then attended Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. She lived for a time in Southern California, then returned to the Lehigh Valley.
She said she would work to listen to and represent everyone in the district, saying the needs of those in Lynn Township are different from those in Macungie.
Day is director of policy and director of district operations for freshman state Sen. Jarrett Coleman — so despite losing his state House seat, he had not drifted far from Harrisburg.
He said working under Coleman has "relit the fire again" for his desire to get back into public service, and hit the ground running with his priorities set on senior care and slowing down government spending and inflation.
He said his experience in solving problems and writing legislation while having strong knowledge of the region would give him a big strength in office.
The recently redistricted 187th formerly included Kutztown and Fogelsville, but now surrounds Slatington and creeps down into Macungie and part of Emmaus.
Rafes said she has been endorsed by Gov. Josh Shapiro, Lehigh Valley AFL-CIO, PSEA PACE and Planned Parenthood of PA.
Day says he has been endorsed by the Pennsylvania Chamber and the National Federation of Independent Businesses.
Economics and inflation
Day said his experience on the state House Appropriations Committee has given him an eye for watching government spending.
And he accuses high spending of being a cause of current inflation and urges greater fiscal responsibility.
Regarding development, Day said Harrisburg should work more with local planning agencies and put state assets toward handling the growth the area has experienced in recent years.
He said he believes housing costs are starting to stabilize within the growing district, but work needs to be done toward identifying and incentivizing investment in underserved groups with an emphasis on owner-occupied housing.
Rafes said raising the minimum wage should be considered if higher prices across the board in the economy are here to stay.
For housing, she said she wants a greater focus on ensuring enough affordable housing is present.
She said she supports open space preservation.
She says on her campaign website that the area has had an overproliferation of warehouses and that development needs to make sense environmentally while preserving farmland and open space.
Education
Rafes' campaign website says public education should be supported more with the state's $14 billion in financial reserves rather than an overreliance on local property tax.
She said she is glad to see a large boost in education funding and greater district equity in the most recent budget.
She said that from conversations with education professionals, she worries that charter schools often can have worse performance than traditional public schools.
She said she would not be in favor of schools that remove funds from public schools.
Day said charter schools are an important balance to provide choice and supports the current system of compensation at the cost which districts say takes to educate a child.
He said in the past he supported greater funding and said that during his prior time in office he wished for an improvement in education funding, which was done in the state's most recent budget after the state supreme court ordered the legislature to do so.
Healthcare
As a professional in the field, Rafes stated one of her primary focuses was on healthcare reform.
In 2015, she said, a diagnosis of breast cancer opened her eyes to issues of healthcare access. She said she only was able to get coverage she needed because of the Affordable Care Act.
She said she also had seen struggles with medical debt among her family, including her father, who filed medical bankruptcy after going through two kidney transplants.
"Going through that was a very eye-opening experience, and then going through the pandemic again made me realize that we need more people in government with healthcare backgrounds," Rafes said.
She said her efforts would focus on relieving medical debt, lowering the cost of health insurance premiums, expanding benefits for adults and children with disabilities and working to lower prescription drug prices.
Regarding healthcare, Day emphasized current workforce shortfalls in healthcare and said that his time on the aging committee in the legislature during the COVID-19 pandemic alerted him to the stresses and dangers that healthcare professionals can face.
He said more needs to be done to ensure healthcare providers are trained and equipped properly and give opportunities for people to start working at lower certification levels and work their way up with greater training.
Abortion and reproductive rights
On the specific issue of abortion access, Day has in the past voted to restrict access to abortion.
He voted for a vetoed bill that would restrict abortion to 20 weeks that didn't allow exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest, or those with seriously malformed fetuses.
He also voted for a constitutional amendment package that stated women had no guaranteed right to abortion and a bill that prohibited abortions because of a prenatal diagnosis of Down Syndrome.
Day said he would find "every way to support the mom and the baby," and would seek up-to-date information based on viability outside of the womb.
He referenced the case of incarcerated former physician Kermit Gosnell —a Philadelphia doctor sentenced to life in prison for the murder of babies born alive during botched or illegal abortion procedures, and the death of a woman in his care as a reason to restrict access to the procedure.
Rafes in contrast said that she is pro-choice, and that she believes that women's healthcare is under attack in the two years since the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning the standard set by Roe vs. Wade.
"I really understand the nuances of pregnancy and reproductive care and women's health," she said.
"And things were going fine for those 50 years when women had the power to make their own decisions about their pregnancies and their plans for their lives."
She said as restrictions have risen in other states, so too have cases of women who have nearly lost their lives or fertility because they were not able to legally access the healthcare they needed, which can come in the form of abortion.
