Lamb reached wide spectrum of voters
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
It’s not clear when a victor will officially be declared in the closely watched March 13 special election for Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District. But if Democrat Conor Lamb is named the winner, it will be in part because of a step he took on Feb. 17, far from the national spotlight.
That’s the day Valerie Fleisher and a score of other suburban activists met with Mr. Lamb to voice their concerns about gun violence.
The school shooting at Parkland, Fla., had happened days before, and activists were “just distraught — we’re mostly moms,” said Ms. Fleisher, who founded the grassroots 412 Resistance after Donald Trump won the presidency. Mr. Lamb’s early statements about the shooting — that he favored better background checks but opposed new gun laws — left some cold.
Still, Mr. Lamb “took more than an hour just to talk to us, with [Pittsburgh Congressman] Mike Doyle and [Democratic House Whip] Steny Hoyer waiting for him upstairs. It’s not like we changed his mind, but he listened.” And in a subsequent TV debate, she said, Mr. Lamb addressed gun concerns with more nuance and empathy.
“That’s something we didn’t have with Tim Murphy,” she said, citing the former representative whose resignation after Post-Gazette’s reporting last fall created the District 18 vacancy.
If Mr. Lamb does beat RepublicanRickSaccone,adecidedly pro-gun state Representative from Elizabeth Township, it will be in part because he harnessed the energy of activists … even if he didn’t always playup their issues.
Ms. Fleisher, for one, said she knocked on more than 300 doors for Mr. Lamb. And thanks largely to the suburban vote, he won Allegheny County by 15 percentage points last Tuesday, racking up 58,655 votes to Mr. Saccone’s 43,289.
Mr. Lamb won by margins as large as 4-to-1 in parts of Mt. Lebanon, and he even won staunchly Republican Upper St. Clair — in some places by a whopping 20 percentage points.
Mr. Trump, who polls poorly among college-educated voters, had himself faltered in some USC precincts. But the scale of Mr. Saccone’s defeat appalled some conservatives. Mark Harris, a Pittsburgh Republican political consultant, tweeted that the suburban numbers were “apocalyptic” and a “total suburban wipeout.”
Mr. Lamb lost the vote in the district’s other three counties: Greene, Washington, and Westmoreland. But he didn’t have to win those areas outright — just stop the bleeding other Democrats had suffered there. He did so with help from organized labor, which estimates that some 87,000 voters in District 18 are union members or family members.
While Mr. Lamb took toned-down status-quo positions on social issues like guns, he ran to the left of some Democrats on labor issues and some economic concerns. While Mr. Saccone touted a Republican tax cut bill passed late last year, Mr. Lamb warned of the possibility that it would create a $1.5 trillion deficit — a hole Mr. Lamb said Republicans would try to fill by cutting Social Security and Medicare. Activists say that message played well with seniors in the 18th, Pennsylvania’s second-oldest district.
Terry Madonna, a veteran pollster from Franklin & Marshall College, praised Mr. Lamb for “unifying union leaders and their rank-and-file members. That’s not always easy.”
Mr. Lamb at times left some labor activists disgruntled, as during a KDKA-TV debate when he said a $15 an hour minimum wage would be too high. But even if Mr. Lamb didn’t always inspire, the prospect of beating Mr. Saccone — who had a voting record of opposing unions on numerous issues — did.
“Rick Saccone told us for a long time that he knows our members better than we do,” snarled Darrin Kelly, who became the head of the Allegheny County Labor Council late last year. “I’ve accepted that challenge.”
By contrast, Mr. Saccone’s campaign often seemed star-crossed — and occasionally double-crossed.
While national Republican groups spent eight-digit sums on his race, they castigated their candidate in conversations with reporters. When Mr. Trump held a rally daysbefore the election, nominally on Mr. Saccone’s behalf, he spoke far more about himself than about the candidate.
Only a handful of attendees could be seen wielding Sacconesigns.
Some observers say Mr. Saccone may have been hurt by the millions of dollars national Republicans spent on TV ads, many of which had a jeering tone that, for example, used cartoon sheep to link Mr. Lamb to House Democrat Nancy Pelosi.
“The ‘ Nancy Had a Little Lamb’ ads not only didn’t work, but may have backfired,” said Charlie Gerow, a longtime Harrisburg Republican political consultant. “When so much outside money comes in, there is a visceral reaction among some voters: ‘Who are you to tell me who to vote for?’”
On election night, Mr. Doyle said that Republicans “came in with a boilerplate campaign they wanted to run all around the country and it didn’t work.” The message of Mr. Lamb’s campaign, by contrast, was “vote your district,” even when the district is not in line with the national party.
Mr. Lamb may soon discover how well that strategy translates elsewhere. A new map of congressional districts, mandated by the state Supreme Court,will take effect with the May primary. Mr. Lamb is all but certain to run in the new 17th Congressional District, where he will likely face Democrats more progressive than he is.
The 17th, which joins Allegheny County suburbs and river towns with Beaver, is more Democrat-friendly than the current 18th, which Mr. Lambwill be drawn out of.
But Ms. Fleisher said that while she sometimes wished Mr. Lamb were further to the left, “his campaign had us talking to everybody. I spoke to 70-year-old Republicans, and union guys who were Obama/Trump voters. … He built a coalition of the grassroots, labor, veterans and moderates. That’s the coalition we will need.”
She has, she said, already begun circulating his next round of election petitions.