Dems bore Lamb’s centrism, unified on other core issues

JEFFERSON HILLS, PA. » To help explain Tuesday’s stunning special U.S. House election in southwestern Pennsylvania, look to Ed Karloski’s political preferences for how Democrat Conor Lamb seized the lead for a seat in a Republican stronghold.

Karloski, a steelworker and registered Democrat, voted for Republican Donald Trump as someone who appealed to his middle-class sensibilities, although he had no real love for a presidential candidate he saw as the “lesser of two evils.”

Karloski was looking for new and different people to change the tone in Washington. He is in the middle politically on debates over abortion and gun rights. As a steelworker, Trump’s steel tariffs are important to him and, as a union member, union rights are important.

For Karloski, Lamb’s positions fit his on all those issues; Saccone’s fit almost none.

“It’s time to get a younger person in there, somebody who will work with both sides of the aisle and not just be a backstop for Trump,” Karloski, 53, said after voting in this Pittsburgh suburb.

Karloski’s vote showed how Democrats tolerated Lamb’s centrist stances on certain hot-button issues, as well as his move to downplay Trump’s role in the race, while liberals, labor unions and even Democrats who supported Trump rallied around Lamb’s embrace of core party positions on issues such as Social Security and health care.

Lamb, a 33-year-old former federal prosecutor and first-time candidate, held a

roughly 600-vote lead out of more than 228,000 cast in a nationally watched election over Saccone, 60, a fourterm state lawmaker who ran as Trump’s “wingman” after compiling one of the most conservative voting records in Pennsylvania’s Legislature.

The Associated Press has not called the race. Lamb has declared victory while Saccone’s campaign has said he has no plans to concede before the counting of a few hundred remaining

ballots wraps up Tuesday.

Several months ago, few thought it possible that a Democrat could win this district. Trump thrashed Democrat Hillary Clinton there by nearly 20 percentage points in 2016’s presidential election. Former Rep. Tim Murphy, a prounion Republican who resigned in a scandal in October, had been re-elected there seven times, always easily, in a district Republicans drew for him.

On paper, the district might appear Democratic: it has more registered Democrats than Republicans. That’s a relic of union families tied to the district’s long history of coal mining and steel-making. But southwestern Pennsylvania began sending Republicans to the state Capitol and Washington in the past decade or so as blue-collar whites fled the Democratic Party.

In Tuesday’s election, it seemed more like a Democratic district again.

Democratic energy was high: Lamb won 47 of the 50 precincts with the highest percentage turnout in Allegheny County, the district’s most-populous county, according to an Associated Press analysis of the results. In 2016, Trump won 30 of the 50 highest-turnout precincts in the county.