If yard signs and a small sam­pling of Squir­rel Hill Dem­o­crats are any in­di­ca­tor, Pa­tel ap­pears primed to win the neigh­bor­hood.

Judy Kenal, 67, said she "was ex­tremely im­pressed with Bha­vini's track record of com­mu­nity ser­vice." And the 14th Ward Inde­pen­dent Demo­cratic Club, which backed Lee dur­ing her run for state rep­re­sen­ta­tive in 2018 and again for Con­gress in 2022, de­cided re­cently to back the chal­lenger.

Jane Louik, a club vice pres­i­dent who runs the elec­tion en­dorse­ment pro­cess, said an in­flux of new mem­bers in the six weeks be­fore the vote — at least 120 peo­ple — has helped tilt the scales in fa­vor of Pa­tel. Louik said she per­son­ally sup­ports Lee but has seen a great shift in think­ing in the club in the weeks lead­ing up to the vote April 23.

And Louik said the Pa­tel en­dorse­ment is a bit more nu­anced than the me­dia is por­tray­ing it.

"I can't tell if it's more anti-Lee or if it's pro-Is­rael ... (be­cause) some of the new mem­bers who want to elect Pa­tel have some mis­giv­ings about (Is­raeli Prime Min­is­ter Ben­ja­min) Netan­yahu," Louik said. "I think there are a num­ber of rea­sons."

Despite the at­ten­tion in Squir­rel Hill, it is just one neigh­bor­hood of a dis­trict that stretches well be­yond the con­fines of Pitts­burgh, out into the Mon Val­ley and the strip malls and sub­urbs of east­ern Al­le­gheny and west­ern West­more­land coun­ties.

In some ways, Lee is try­ing to na­tion­al­ize a lo­cal race, while Pa­tel is try­ing to ap­peal to enough vot­ing groups in the dis­trict to win, ac­cord­ing to po­lit­i­cal ob­serv­ers.

A sam­pling of a few dozen vot­ers across the dis­trict in­di­cates many still want to do more re­search be­fore vot­ing, even if they're lean­ing one way or an­other.

But there are likely two ma­jor fac­tions: a pro­gres­sive base an­chored in Pitts­burgh and the im­me­di­ate sub­urbs ver­sus more mod­er­ate vot­ers who may want to shift to a less po­lar­iz­ing, more mod­er­ate can­di­date.

Pro­gres­sives tend to turn out heav­ily in pri­ma­ries, po­lit­i­cos said. That means Lee will be dif­fi­cult to beat, un­less Pa­tel can draw mod­er­ate vot­ers to the polls.

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