The most important thing about Tuesday’s special election in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District will be the result, of course. Will Democrat Conor Lamb be able to win this deep red district, or will that partisan skew and $10 million in Republican spending pull state Rep. Rick Saccone over the finish line? If Saccone wins, will a narrow margin still send a warning to Republicans about what’s coming in November? But it’s also important to look at what Republicans are campaigning on in this race—and what they aren’t. Republican groups have stopped trying to sell the Republican tax law—the major legislative win that was supposed to be their big selling point for November’s elections—in ads, pivoting instead to attacks on immigrants and Nancy Pelosi.
What does it mean that taxes aren’t a winner for Republicans in Pennsylvania’s 18th? Greg Sargent explains:
The reason the downplaying of Trump’s tax plan — and the emphasis instead on hot-button issues such as immigration — matter can be found in the makeup of this district. This is a place where Trump’s claim that his tax cuts are good for working people should carry weight. Trump won it by 20 points, and it has many of the sort of working-class white voters who apparently looked to Trump as an economic savior. But it turns out that this fact may explain why the tax cuts are not sufficiently resonating.
“This is more of a populist district than it is a conservative district,” Mike Mikus, a Democratic strategist from southwestern Pennsylvania who ran a previous race in that district, told me today, referring to the leanings of voters in steel and coal country in places such as Washington, Westmoreland and Greene counties, which Trump carried in 2016 by 61-36, 64-33 and 70-28, respectively. Those are huge margins, a reminder that this district is mostly deep, deep, deep Trump country.
Still, Mikus argued to me that the district is more “economically diverse” than is commonly understood, with a large chunk of the more educated voters coming from the suburbs of Pittsburgh in Allegheny County. But this, too, highlights something important. Republicans hope that the tax plan will also stanch losses among college-educated and suburban white voters who might stomach Trump’s excesses and vote their bottom lines instead. Yet it seems clear that Lamb will do well in those areas, perhaps mirroring places such as Virginia, where Trump’s sexist, racist and xenophobic provocations are shifting white suburban voters toward Democrats and supercharging turnout among them to boot.
In very rough translation, the tax law didn’t help working- and middle-class voters enough to juice their enthusiasm about Republicans, and a decent chunk of people who are wealthy enough to get a tax cut are being turned off and outright alienated by the overt bigotry and crudeness of the Trump-era Republican Party. Is this Pennsylvania district a harbinger for November—not just of the swing away from Republicans, but of the messages that will succeed?
Help Conor Lamb get out the vote!