Republicans Steel For A Loss In Trump Country Special Election
WASHINGTON, Pa. ― Dwight Harris, 40, is a registered Republican who enthusiastically voted for Donald Trump and is largely satisfied with the choice he made.
Harris, a second-generation coal miner tired of people who feel “entitled” to government handouts, is exactly the kind of voter that Republican congressional candidates need to count on in a difficult election year.
But when a canvassing team from the United Steel Workers labor union knocked on Harris’ door on Thursday afternoon, Harris let them know that he was already planning to vote for Democrat Conor Lamb in Tuesday’s special congressional election.
The reason was simple: His union, the United Mine Workers of America, had informed him that Lamb supports bipartisan congressional legislation to plug the hole in the union’s troubled pension fund.
Republican Rick Saccone, on the other hand, “won’t even talk to our union at all about the pensions or anything,” Harris said.
For more news videos visit Yahoo View.
That left Harris no choice but to go with Lamb, with whom he disagrees on other issues. “I can’t cut my own throat,” he said.
Attrition from union members like Harris is part of a perfect political storm brewing for Republicans in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District, where over 80,000 people ― from more than one-fifth of households ― belong to unions. Unions, many of which have endorsed the district’s Republican candidate in the past, have mobilized in full force against Saccone, whose anti-union record includes support for right-to-work laws.
Along with union drop-off from the GOP, higher than normal Democratic enthusiasm, suburban moderate voters’ frustration with the president and an especially weak Republican candidate have converged to endanger the GOP hold on a favorably gerrymandered district that Trump won by nearly 20 percentage points in 2016.
The GOP-held seat, which stretches from the suburbs of Pittsburgh to rural coal country on the border with West Virginia, came up for grabs after eight-term Republican Rep. Tim Murphy resigned in October. (The anti-abortion rights congressman was caught urging a woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair to get an abortion.)
On paper, the special election will have a limited impact on the balance of power in Congress. Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court redrew the district boundaries in February, enabling Lamb to run again in November in the new 17th Congressional District, which went for Trump by just 3 points.
However, even a temporary victory in solid red territory would devastate Republican morale and turbocharge Democratic enthusiasm ahead of the midterm elections. It would signal that no district is safe from the political blowback to Trump’s presidency and diminish his political capital in Congress.
As a result, national Republican groups have gone all in to prop up Saccone’s campaign, spending millions of dollars on television advertisements, direct mail literature and field canvassers.
But in spite of outside spending that was at one point 17 times greater than that of Democratic groups, Saccone and Lamb are neck-and-neck in the few available public polls of the race.
Trump, recognizing he will get some of the blame if Saccone loses, has tried to engineer a last-minute turnaround for the flagging candidate. He held a packed rally for Saccone at the Pittsburgh airport on Saturday night where he nicknamed the Democratic contender “Lamb the Sham.” Trump has since been admonishing his followers on Twitter to turn out for Saccone, who will be “much better for steel and business.”
