PROSPERITY, Pennsylvania — In Pennsylvania’s 46th Senate District, which takes in all of Washington and Greene counties and a sliver of southern Beaver County, a lot of the prosperity comes from underground. Consol’s Bailey Mine in Aleppo employs 699 miners in three shifts a day, six days a week, according to federal mine-safety records.
Gas drilling will bring Washington County and its municipalities $21.3 million in impact fees for 2025, and Greene County $15.2 million. The money goes to infrastructure, public safety, and other local needs.
Jodi Borello wants this state Senate seat. Her campaign materials call her a “lifelong Republican who voted for Trump three times.” They describe a small-business owner who grew up on a farm in Washington County and is fed up with both parties “siding with powerful corporations.”
They say less about the job she held until August.
Borello worked as a community organizer for the Center for Coalfield Justice from December 2022 until she resigned Aug. 3. The Washington, Pennsylvania, nonprofit group fights the region’s fossil fuel industry. She co-founded MAD-FACTS, a volunteer group that connects fracking to childhood cancer, and goes to Harrisburg each month to meet with state lawmakers. She campaigned for a 2,500-foot setback between gas facilities and homes. And in 2025, when CNX subpoenaed her for a deposition, her employer told the state Environmental Hearing Board that her advocacy “often touches on CNX’s operations.”
She has a personal grievance. In 2011, a pigging station, a facility used to send equipment through pipelines for cleaning or inspection, was built about 1,500 feet from her home in South Franklin Township. She says her family and neighbors have had health problems ever since. She testified before a statewide grand jury whose work led to criminal charges against CNX.
Borello’s concerns about her home deserve a hearing. So do voters’ questions about what her years of activism would mean for the mines, gas wells, and livelihoods she hopes to represent.
Voter records show Borello was a Republican for many years. She registered as an independent in 2008, returned to the GOP in 2017, and left it again in March. That same month, her employer announced a new political arm, Coalfield Justice Action, which would let members “endorse political candidates.”
She began gathering petition signatures as an independent in late May. On June 22, Democrat Evan Snyder, who had won the primary without opposition, withdrew. That left Borello as the only challenger to Republican state Sen. Camera Bartolotta.
“They pulled the Democrat off and put her on,” Bartolotta told the Observer-Reporter.
No evidence of an arrangement has surfaced. But as Bartolotta told the Mon Valley Independent, “A Democrat can’t win in Southwestern Pennsylvania today.” An independent with a Trump-voter story might.
Borello’s website says the campaign is “powered by people, not special interests.” As of early October, she had not had to file a campaign finance report, Spotlight PA reported. The money around her campaign is easier to see.
Spotlight PA found that Coalfield Justice Action has spent at least $10,500 on digital ads against Bartolotta and has bought cable TV time. The group is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization, so it doesn’t have to name its donors, and it reports its finances once a year. It is registered as a lobbying group, not a campaign committee. Because its ads don’t mention the election, they fall outside campaign-finance disclosure rules. It shares an executive director, Sarah Martik, and an office address with the Center for Coalfield Justice. It has also endorsed Borello.
Borello’s website also encouraged outside groups to run ads such as those already airing against Bartolotta. In a practice known as “redboxing,” campaigns publicly post their preferred messaging where outside groups legally barred from coordinating with them can find it. Her campaign told Spotlight PA that it stands by every word. Spotlight PA found no evidence of coordination between the campaign and any outside group, and this story alleges none.
The most telling document was written for donors, not voters. The national network 1.5°Climate Strategies Group says it has steered $39.2 million into climate work since 2022. On a page labeled “Internal,” it lists Coalfield Justice Action alongside the declaration “$300,050 Raised | Fundraising Goal Achieved!”
The pitch lists Martik as the presenter and identifies this race as “SD-46.” It promises “member-led strategic endorsements, a broad field program, targeted media, and community events to build the governing power needed to tackle climate and environmental justice crises.” It also names an affiliated Coalfield Power PAC and categorizes the project under “Investing in Elections for Climate.”
That is how Coalfield Justice Action pitched the race to climate donors. To voters, Borello’s campaign presents a Trump voter fed up with data centers.
The Center for Coalfield Justice, the charity affiliated with Coalfield Justice Action, receives substantial funding from major environmental foundations. The Heinz Endowments 2022 IRS filing lists a $200,000 grant to the center “to protect the region from impacts of fossil fuel use and development.” The Surdna Foundation lists two $300,000 general-support grants to the center in 2026. The center’s own IRS filings show that its annual revenue nearly doubled, rising from $3.24 million in the fiscal year ending June 2024 to $6.01 million in the year ending June 2025. Contributions and grants accounted for $5.84 million of that latest total.
The Center for Coalfield Justice’s 2025 tax return shows that its money did not all stay in Washington County. The center distributed $875,297 in grants to other organizations, according to its Schedule I. Recipients included national and out-of-state organizations such as Physicians for Social Responsibility ($99,000), Earth Island Institute and Waterkeeper Alliance ($55,000 each), the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives ($50,000), and Greenpeace Fund ($12,500).
The same return’s Schedule R lists Coalfield Justice Action as a related 501(c)(4), with its own federal employer number and an address at the charity’s East Chestnut Street building. The filing covers July 2024 through June 2025, months before the public launch, so the political arm was already set up on paper. For that year, the charity reported no grants, shared staff, shared facilities, or other transfers between the two groups.
On lobbying, the charity reported spending very little. Its Schedule C shows $779 for the year, all of it aimed at influencing public opinion and none at lobbying lawmakers directly. Over the four years from 2021 through 2024, it reported $4,434 in total, well below the $331,129 it could have spent in 2024 alone before owing federal tax on its lobbying. Borello joined its staff in December 2022, and by 2024, she was traveling to Harrisburg every month to meet with legislators. Public reporting doesn’t say whether she made those trips for the charity or on her own with MAD-FACTS, and the return doesn’t break down its lobbying.
Charity money can’t legally be used for electioneering, and there is no evidence the charity’s grants were spent on the race. Who pays for the political arm is not public.
A poll commissioned by a progressive organizing group shows why Borello’s Trump-voting image appeals to strategists on the Left. Upswing Research surveyed 400 likely voters Aug. 25–28 for Pennsylvania United, a western Pennsylvania organizing group. Its funder, the Movement Voter Project, says the group focuses on “Democratic and progressive wins” and works to “turn voters out for Democrats.”
The results were later posted on the Working Families Party’s website. Pollsters described Borello two ways. Voters who heard the Trump description backed her 71%-28%. Voters who heard her described simply as an independent backed her 59%-40%. The Trump label was worth about 12 points. Her TV ads call her a former Trump voter. There is no evidence her campaign saw or used the poll.
The same poll also tested an attack Borello was likely to face: that in Harrisburg she would “do whatever left-wing environmental groups demand to ban fracking.”
Borello lists her priorities in the Mon Valley Independent as a statewide moratorium on data centers, a higher minimum wage, money for emergency responders, cracking down on corporations, and bringing jobs to the district.
Fracking, the issue she organized around for years, isn’t on the list.
Data centers and gas are connected here, though. A 1,400-acre CNX tract in South Strabane is being marketed as a data center site. A moratorium could close off a potential new market for the region’s energy industry, and nobody would have to say the word “fracking.”
Her former employer is open about where it thinks the region is headed. After President Trump signed executive orders to boost coal, the group called the transition away from coal “necessary” and said the orders “may delay the inevitable.
It said Gov. Josh Shapiro’s (D-PA) budget gives “handouts to multibillion-dollar fracking and power companies” and “lays the groundwork for extending Pennsylvania’s dependence on a harmful, extractive fossil fuel economy.” A group that faults a Republican president and a Democratic governor from the same direction is not a centrist group. Borello’s message, that both parties side with corporations, echoes it.
A Coalfield Justice staff member said in 2024 that the group “is not out to ban fracking.” But the Heinz Endowments has said in writing what its money is for: protecting the region from the impacts of “fossil fuel use and development,” in a district where coal and gas pay for miners’ wages and township budgets.
Borello’s appeal is real. The only public poll, commissioned by the nonprofit State Navigate, shows the race tied, with 31% of voters who identify as “far right” saying they would definitely or probably vote for her.
Energy has been this district’s lifeblood since the industrial age. The Pittsburgh coal seam appears on a 1761 map of Fort Pitt, and state geologists have called it the world’s most valuable single mineral deposit. Its coal fed the steel mills that powered America’s industrial revolution.
Washington County was mining more than a million tons a year by 1886. Greene County’s big commercial mines opened after 1902, and its output has stayed high ever since. Since 1986, Greene has produced more coal than any other county in the state. Then came gas. Range Resources, which says it pioneered the Marcellus Shale two decades ago, calls Washington County home and celebrates it as the heart of its company.
For the most part, that industry has shared the land with the rolling farms and small towns around it. Longwall mines run beneath pastures, and well pads sit at the edges of hayfields. The fit has not always been easy, and Borello’s own story shows it. The industry has also built a corporate economy here. Southpointe, the office park in Cecil Township, has drawn some 300 companies, including CNX’s headquarters and Range’s regional base.
WHAT PITTSBURGH CAN TEACH THE NEXT HOUSE MAJORITY
That history frames the choice on Nov. 3. Until August, Borello was paid to organize against the industry that built much of this economy. Her former employer calls the transition away from coal “necessary,” and its political arm has pitched her race to climate donors as a way to build “governing power.” Bartolotta and the energy workers backing her cast her as a threat to the industry and the jobs it supports. Borello’s campaign makes a different case: that she is a farm-raised Washington County native standing up to corporations, data centers and both parties, and the only public poll suggests that message is reaching voters on the Right.
The outcome will measure something larger than one state Senate seat. In a district whose paychecks and township budgets still trace back to what lies underground, voters are being asked whether a candidate who fought that industry can be trusted to protect what it pays for. They are getting that question without full disclosure of who is paying to put it to them.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
