Shane KitePennsylvania Democrat Conor Lamb eked out an improbable upset taking a House seat from Republicans in a district Trump carried by 20 points, providing the greatest evidence yet of the likelihood of a coming “blue wave” of Democratic wins forecasted for November’s midterm elections.
Lamb was up 627 votes against his Republican opponent Rick Saccone early Wednesday after Tuesday night’s special election with all precincts reporting 100 percent of ballots and all absentee forms counted.
While counting of provisional and remaining ballots will take place over the next seven days, the 500 or so left mean Lamb’s lead over Saccone is insurmountable. While a recount is possible, state law poses a tough requirement to make that happen, as Pennsylvania mandates that three voters of the same precinct must claim error or fraud.
Lamb out-fundraised Saccone by nearly $3 million, leading Republicans to pour over $10 million in outside spending into Saccone’s campaign to try to make up the difference. Democratic groups, meanwhile, spent $2.6 million to boost Lamb.
The contest pitted Lamb, a 33-year-old marine veteran and former assistant U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh, against Saccone, a 60-year-old Air Force vet and state congressman in Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives.
Lamb is a moderate democrat who is pro-gun and personally though not politically opposed to abortion. Saccone is a right-wing, anti-abortion conservative who is a proponent of “enhanced interrogation” techniques like waterboarding of terror suspects and once supported a bill to make Pennsylvania public schools display in every building the national motto “In God We Trust.”
The seat in Pennsylvania’s conservative-leaning 18th district opened up last year upon the resignation of Republican Congressman and anti-abortion advocate Tim Murphy, who resigned after it became public that he had encouraged his mistress to seek an abortion when they thought she was pregnant.
While democrats benefited again from turnout from the well-educated among suburbanites and minorities and military families, which tracked similar support leading to their party’s wins of the New Jersey and Virginia governorships last year, Lamb heavily courted and won the local labor vote, in part by contrasting his promises of union support from Saccone’s well-documented anti-union legislative history.
While garnering the support of the AFL-CIO may have been easy for Lamb, who lacks any legislative history, it nonetheless represents a significant turnaround for Democrats, who until this race appeared to have suffered waning union support amid President Trump’s populist campaign rhetoric and tax and trade policies.
That Lamb won in deeply red Pennsylvania Trump country sent a warning to Republicans that appealing to Trump’s base, coupled with the President’s tax cuts and tariff proposals, may not be sufficient planks to hold onto the House and Senate seats up for grabs in November. Saccone had called himself “wingman” to the President and said he was being “Trump before Trump” during the campaign. The 18th district seat had been held in GOP hands for 15 years.
Democrats could easily replicate what some are calling “the Lamb model” across the country, customizing it left, right, center on certain issues according to specific local inclinations and demographics.
Another worrying statistic for Republicans is that Democrats have turned 39 state legislative seats blue in the past year.
Coupled with statehouse evidence Lamb’s win makes the case stronger that a “blue wave” has indeed arisen that could flip the U.S. House of Representatives to Democratic control in the midterms. To do that, Democrats would need to win 24 GOP-held seats in November.
Lamb will have to run again in eight months under the state’s redrawn district lines after the State Supreme Court found that Republican-gerrymandered maps of the past three elections were illegal. The U.S. Supreme Court declined in February to hear an appeal from the Pennsylvania GOP.
That and other rulings could pose further challenges for Republicans as state courts seem prepared to step in and redraw maps via fairness versus partisan principles. State district lines have traditionally been drawn by the party holding power in the state, leading to strange Rorschach-like districts drawn from data-based computer programs that create borders that statistically favor the party in power and often lead to incumbent victories.
