Tight contest seen as bellwether
TRAFFORD, Pa. — Barbara DeFelice spent a bright but chilly afternoon preparing her garden for spring, not hand-wringing over a congressional special election just days away. She decided months ago to back Republican Rick Saccone for one reason: opposition to abortion rights.
“He shares my values,” said the 64-year-old retiree. “I just don’t understand that people say we shouldn’t put lobsters into hot, boiling water ... but we can kill babies.”
Nearby in this uppermiddle-class enclave outside Pittsburgh, engineer Carol Heinecke, 57, offered another reason for supporting Saccone: President Trump. “Rick’s going to support everything he’s doing,” she said.
Such attitudes will be the difference should Saccone emerge victorious Tuesday in his surprisingly tight matchup against Democrat Conor Lamb.
The 60-year-old state lawmaker has struggled unexpectedly with an electorate that favored Trump by 20 percentage points just 16 months ago. He needs the residents of Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District to nationalize their choice and make him a proxy for what they already think about Washington, the president and the issues that define their party affiliation.
The outcome Tuesday will reverberate nationally. Democrats must flip 24 GOP-held seats to claim a House majority, and an upset will embolden them as they look to win in places where the party has lost ground in recent decades. Republicans, meanwhile, would be shaken about their prospects in this tempestuous era of Trump, who has twice visited the district on Saccone’s behalf, most recently Saturday night.
Saccone has tried at times to make the race about experience, touting his four decades in the public and private sector, from an Air Force career and stint in North Korea to his current job as a college professor. He sometimes mocks his 33-year-old opponent as having “no record at all.”
But that, by itself, hasn’t given Saccone much traction against Lamb, a Marine veteran and former federal prosecutor. Lamb hails from an established Allegheny County political family and pitches himself as independentminded.
Lamb keeps to party orthodoxy on unions. He blasts the new Republican tax law as a gift to the wealthy and a threat to Social Security and Medicare. “People have paid into these programs over the course of a lifetime,” Lamb told more than 300 retired coal miners and Democratic activists Sunday in Waynesburg, 40 miles south of Pittsburgh. “I do not believe, as (Republican House Speaker) Paul Ryan does, that these are entitlements or another form of welfare.”
At the same time, Lamb opposes sweeping gun restrictions, endorses Trump’s new steel tariffs, avoids attacking the president, and tells voters he wouldn’t back Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco for speaker if Democrats won a House majority.
The party didn’t even run opponents against the previous congressman, Republican Tim Murphy, in 2014 and 2016. Murphy resigned in October amid a sex scandal.