The special election for Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District is this Tuesday, March 13, and Republicans are not letting up on their desperate effort to win this House seat in a heavily gerrymandered red district that won’t even exist in November’s elections. On Saturday, Donald Trump flew in to try to bail out state Rep. Rick Saccone (and to deliver an unhinged Trump speech for the ages), but that was just one piece of the effort:
Nearly every corner of the national party was involved in the final push over the weekend — from the Republican National Committee, which deployed staffers from Washington to knock on doors; to a cash-flush GOP super PAC that orchestrated an under-the-radar effort to diminish Democratic hopeful Conor Lamb’s standing with liberal voters; to the powerful Koch political network, which is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a mail and field deployment campaign ahead of Tuesday’s closely-watched special election. [...]
By the end of the weekend, Republicans had dropped more than $8 million on TV ads, outspending Democrats nearly two-to-one, according to media buying figures. In an indication of just how much capital the administration is expending on the contest, Donald Trump Jr. is slated to campaign with Saccone on Monday, two days after his father staged a rally.
This is a candidate no one thinks very highly of:
Trump thinks Saccone is a terrible, "weak" candidate, according to four sources who've spoken to the president about him. [...]
The thing that most irks senior Republicans involved in the race: Saccone has been a lousy fundraiser. Lamb has outraised Saccone by a staggering margin — nearly 500 percent.
But because this is also a district Donald Trump won by nearly 20 points, Republicans know just how bad it will look if their guy loses—they can try all they want to blame it on Saccone’s lousy fundraising and amateurish social media presence, but any Republican should have been able to win this at a walk. That’s why Trump has to be all in, and is. Win or lose, it’s news that this was a race.
It's a good sign for Democrats that Conor Lamb is close and Republicans are nervous. It'll be a heckuva lot better if Conor Lamb wins. Help make that happen by making calls to get out the vote for Lamb.