Voters to Dems: Avoid Pelosi clones in Trumpland
More than $10 million of Republican spending couldn’t slow down a 33-year-old Democrat running in a special election for a Pennsylvania congressional district that in 2016 went for President Trump by 20 points. Even a lastminute visit from the president to “Trump Country” wasn’t enough to pull the GOP candidate clearly over the finish line.
A win is better than a loss, and Conor Lamb’s apparent narrow victory in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District — he leads by 627 votes, with a recount and a Republican legal challenge possible — is good news for the out-of-power Democratic Party trying to corral its anti-Trump fervor into electoral victories.
But before Nancy Pelosi starts moving into the House speaker’s office, there are a number of reasons a Democratic wave could peter out before crashing ashore in November.
For one, Lamb ran as a Republican-lite rather than a full-throated Democrat. He was anti-Pelosi, and opposed single-payer health care. Lamb not only declined to join the chorus of Democratic voices calling for more gun control, he actually went the other way by opposing a ban on assault weapons and featuring an AR-15 in one of his commercials.
For Democrats to regain the levers of power, they need more wins in Trump country, where their candidates can’t run as clones of Pelosi or U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Lamb didn’t have a primary, enabling him to run up the middle and pick off traditional Republican or disaffected Trump voters.
It’s still an open question if the liberal base will allow that to happen across the country, especially with the emerging “Tea Party of the left in the Democratic Party.” Those are the words of Dan Lipinski, a seven-term Democratic congressman from Illinois, who is facing a primary challenge because his left-wing credentials don’t pass the liberal litmus test.
In Houston, the national Democratic Party is under fire for putting its thumb on the scale for its preferred candidate over the insurgent, a move that Bernie Sanders ripped as “appalling” and “unacceptable.”
On the Senate side, early indicators are also not promising about the Democratic ability to compete in red states. A recent Axios/Survey Monkey poll showed five Democratic senators in Trump states trailing a generic Republican in head-tohead match-ups, a gulf likely to widen as actual Republican candidates come into the picture. The rising GOP fortunes coincide with the increasing popularity of the tax cuts that all five of the Democratic senators opposed.
It would have been easy for moderate Democrats to support the tax cuts, but they didn’t. Now, desperate to burnish their bipartisan bona fides, all five of those vulnerable Democratic senators have signed onto a Republican effort to roll back the more onerous regulations in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, an effort near and dear to Warren’s heart.
It’s smart politics for Democrats in Trump country, but Warren was unwilling to look the other way and give her endangered colleagues a pass. She lambasted fellow Democrats, calling their betrayal a “stab in the heart.” Warren blasted her colleagues by name for supporting what she dubbed “The Bank Lobbyist Act,” leading to headlines like this from Politico: “Schumer struggles to quell Warren-led rebellion.”
Warren’s attacks grew so vicious that even fellow liberal and ex-U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, whose name is on the law in question, called it “a mistake.”
This kind of infighting usually takes place on the GOP side. During the height of the Tea Party wave in 2010 and 2012, Republicans nominated ultra-conservative candidates in parts of the country where they were unelectable.
Of course, it’s possible none of this will matter. If blue state voters turn out in droves to register their unhappiness with President Trump, the backlash could be enough for Democrats to pick up the 24 seats needed to regain the House.
To regain national relevance, however, Democrats have to win in those parts of the country that Hillary Clinton this week derided as “backwards.” While their apparent win in Pennsylvania this week provides a shortterm boost, it may not address their long-term challenges.