Pennsylvania race to test how tax law viewed
Special election could be preview of midterm strategies.
NORTH HUNTINGDON, PA. — In southwest Pennsylvania, Democratic congressional hopeful Conor Lamb hammers the new Republican tax law as a gift to corporations and the wealthy that will add to the national debt and give the GOP-led Congress an excuse to gut Social Security and Medicare.
Rick Saccone, Lamb’s opponent in the 18th Congressional District that wraps around Pittsburgh, says the sweeping tax changes will goose the economy and give Americans bigger paychecks. National Republican groups, meanwhile, are blanketing television stations here with ads to tell voters that Lamb simply doesn’t want them to have lower taxes.
It’s a defining fault line ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, and the outcome for Lamb could serve as a guidepost for Democrats as they try to reclaim a House majority this November.
Democrats must flip at least 24 GOP-held seats to regain a majority, and the Pennsylvania seat — in a district Trump won by almost 20 points in 2016 — would be an unexpected boost.
The emphasis being placed on taxes ahead of the March 13 special election here also may remind the power players in Washington that the midterm elections will not revolve exclusively around the tempests that regularly consume the nation’s capital — the Russia investigations, a lingering immigration stalemate, the occasional government shutdown. The November outcome will turn as much or more on voters’ fundamental impressions about how Congress is affecting their wallets, now and in the future.
“Voters care about the economy and health care,” Lamb said. But as Lamb tries to make his race about those bread-and-butter matters, he’s getting hammered by Republicans.
The GOP’s House campaign committee has aired a television ad hailing Saccone as a faithful tax cutter and accusing Lamb of using “the same crummy words” as Pelosi to decry the tax bill. Pelosi has mocked some U.S. corporations for giving employees one-time bonuses after the tax cuts; she called them “crumbs” in comparison to benefits for many large businesses and their executives.
Lamb doesn’t usually describe bonuses or wage hikes as crumbs when talking to voters — though he’s used the word before in at least one interview. His preferred description is to call the law a “betrayal” of middle-class households.
“It’s great we got tax relief for the working class and middle class, too, but we could have had that without adding a penny to the national debt,” the former federal prosecutor told about 150 voters at a recent campaign stop.
He said Republicans had to “give tax relief to their donors, to the 1 percent and big corporations,” while setting up Speaker Paul Ryan’s longterm aims of limiting the price tag of Medicare and Social Security.
“Paul Ryan came out and said it the very next day,” Lamb said, referring to Ryan’s comments after Congress passed the tax law. The speaker told a Denver radio station, “We’re going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform.”