Help us improve in just 2 minutes—share your thoughts in our reader survey.
Mike Heckmann
Mike Heckmann (Republican Party) ran for election to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives to represent District 28. He lost in the Republican primary on June 2, 2020.
Heckmann completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2020. Click here to read the survey answers.
Biography
Mike Heckmann was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He earned an undergraduate degree from the NYU Stern School of Business in 2013. He earned a graduate degree from Vanderbilt Law School in 2016. Heckmann's career experience includes working as a legislative staff member for the Pennsylvania House Republican Caucus.[1]
Elections
2020
See also: Pennsylvania House of Representatives elections, 2020
General election
General election for Pennsylvania House of Representatives District 28
Rob Mercuri defeated Emily Skopov in the general election for Pennsylvania House of Representatives District 28 on November 3, 2020.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ |  | Rob Mercuri (R)  | 53.7 | 23,806 |
 | Emily Skopov (D) | 46.3 | 20,500 | |
| Total votes: 44,306 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Democratic primary election
Democratic primary for Pennsylvania House of Representatives District 28
Emily Skopov advanced from the Democratic primary for Pennsylvania House of Representatives District 28 on June 2, 2020.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Emily Skopov | 100.0 | 7,908 |
| Total votes: 7,908 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Republican primary election
Republican primary for Pennsylvania House of Representatives District 28
Rob Mercuri defeated Libby Blackburn and Mike Heckmann in the Republican primary for Pennsylvania House of Representatives District 28 on June 2, 2020.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Rob Mercuri | 60.4 | 3,633 |
| Libby Blackburn | 22.2 | 1,333 | ||
 | Mike Heckmann | 17.4 | 1,049 | |
| Total votes: 6,015 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Campaign finance
Campaign themes
2020
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Mike Heckmann completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2020. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Heckmann's responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
| Collapse all
With my directly-applicable background and ability to hit the ground running from day one, I am the best choice for this community as it transitions from a long-time incumbent to having a freshman legislator in Harrisburg.
I have worked deeply on issues including public education policy and funding, redistricting reform, and PA's public pension debt- all crucial issues for the 28th District and our entire state. I will bring with me thoughtful, novel solutions to some of these long-standing issues, as a legislator already prepared to draft, caucus, and pass bills.
I am also an observant Catholic and a quadruplet; I am deeply committed to protecting unborn children from abortion, as well as helping women facing difficult circumstances to choose life for their children.
My father and now brother have been teachers at NA since 1979, and we have been deeply involved throughout this community over the past 40 years.
I am prepared, experienced, and excited to serve both the local and legislative roles of our community's state representative, and I would be honored to have your vote in June and November.- Compassionately Pro-Life; I believe we have an obligation to protect all unborn children from abortion, as well as an obligation to assist mothers and fathers facing uncertainty in their ability to become parents. Pennsylvania funds a group known as Real Alternatives that assists these families, and that funding should be protected from current attacks, and expanded. It is also vital that we protect the bipartisan compromise prohibiting taxpayer funding of abortions; there is currently a lawsuit seeking to have Pennsylvania's ban on that funding reversed, and to require the state to adopt a funding policy that could never pass our House or Senate. PA's Constitution should be amended to prevent this injustice from occurring.
- Supports great, locally-controlled public schools; Pennsylvania, and the 28th District, have some of the best schools in the nation- PA also has some that perform horribly. We must protect what is working- keeping local taxes in the communities that already largely pay their own way- while seeking innovative solutions to improve the education offered to students in schools that are underperforming. Pittsburgh Public Schools receives twice the national average in per-student funding- and $100 million more than PA's own "fair" funding formula says that it needs- and still has neighborhood schools with abysmal outcomes for students. Clearly funding is not the problem; we need to think creatively to find new ways to serve these communities.
- Transparent payment of our pension debts, alleviating property taxes; PA has a horribly underfunded pension system, a result of bad decisions made by both parties in Harrisburg during the 2000's. We are now making progress on the long road to adequately funding our pension obligations, but the method we use to pay school pension obligations is unfair, opaque, and destructive to system of locally controlled schools. Although the pension mess was created in Harrisburg, half of cost of paying down that debt is shifted to local school boards and their property taxes. This destroys public confidence in local control of schools, and hides the true cost of past mistakes. These payments must be shifted to Harrisburg and out of local property taxes.
Bringing those benefits to all parts of our state requires thoughtful, engaged policy-making. It requires us to listen to and trust the voices of Pennsylvanians from every region of our state, especially those which have not rebounded from the collapse of steel and coal decades ago.
We have abundant blessings of natural resources, geography, and workforce skills. We need to maximize our utilization of those blessings, with pro-growth resource policies, continued pro-growth construction policies to keep our housing costs reasonable, and smart balancing of our tax burden, including in reducing our highest-in-the-nation corporate tax rate. We need to continue to attract Americans fed up with the high cost of living and low quality of life in the NYC area, California, or an increasing number of other cities.
A community of 63,000 people can, truly, be its own distinct community- and the 28th District certainly fits that description, with very close ties among our five municipalities. As a legislator or a candidate, it provides the opportunity to personally know or speak to a large portion of your voters & constituents, and to deeply discuss your policies and the votes that you make.
That will be particularly beneficial for the 28th District as we transition from being represented by the Speaker of the House to having a freshman legislator providing our voice in Harrisburg.
We need to be deliberate in not repeating those mistakes; committing ourselves to making 100% of our actuarially required payments each year. We also need to be transparent in how we do so- shifting the tax burden away from local school boards and property taxes and back to Harrisburg where the issue was created.
Note: Ballotpedia reserves the right to edit Candidate Connection survey responses. Any edits made by Ballotpedia will be clearly marked with [brackets] for the public. If the candidate disagrees with an edit, he or she may request the full removal of the survey response from Ballotpedia.org. Ballotpedia does not edit or correct typographical errors unless the candidate's campaign requests it.
See also
2020 Elections
External links
Footnotes
- ↑ Information submitted to Ballotpedia through the Candidate Connection survey on April 26, 2020
