One race could topple Nancy Pelosi
Some months ago, the Democratic nominee in the March 13 special congressional election in a conservative Pennsylvania district sought to inoculate himself politically by announcing he would not back Nancy Pelosi for speaker if his party recaptures the House in November.
Congress needs “new leadership on both sides,” former Marine captain and prosecutor Conor Lamb said, expressing publicly a widespread private view among Democrats. He was trying to avoid being tied to the liberal San Franciscan whom Republicans have made their chief political target in many prior congressional races, most recently last June in Georgia.
No such luck. Republicans launched an ad saying the Democratic candidate, if elected, would “join Pelosi’s liberal flock.” In a debate, the GOP candidate, state Rep. Rick Saccone, said Lamb “surrounds himself (with) all of Nancy Pelosi’s sock puppets,” prompting Lamb to run a counter-ad, calling it “a big lie” that “the biggest issue in this campaign is Nancy Pelosi.”
The race to replace a Republican who resigned after disclosure he had pressed his mistress to have an abortion appears to be close, and the outcome will reverberate far beyond southwestern Pennsylvania.
A Democratic victory, in a district President Donald Trump carried in 2016 by 19 percent, would be yet another sign the GOP is headed for big trouble in November’s mid-term congressional elections. But if Lamb loses, even the fact that it is a GOP district won’t still the growing disquiet in Democratic ranks about Pelosi’s future.
Pelosi has been the strongest House Democratic leader in a generation and an unrivaled fundraiser. Even so, Republicans have capitalized on the 77-year-old minority leader’s current national unpopularity to make her a political albatross for her party, threatening the loss of an election next November that, by all normal political rules, the Democrats should win.
Democratic failure to recapture the House would surely spell the end of her 15-year tenure as the top House Democrat and probably those of her fellow septuagenarians, Minority Whip Steny Hoyer and Assistant Democratic Leader Jim Clyburn. But a Lamb defeat in two weeks might increase pressure on her to step down voluntarily, as unlikely as that seems.
In this circumstance, the March 13 election has assumed far more than the ordinary attention paid to a special congressional race, even though pundits and party strategists regularly read far more into such contests than they really mean. Whatever the outcome, however, the result is likely to extend last year’s pattern of Democratic candidates outpolling Hillary Clinton’s 2016 showing—and even the base Democratic vote—in areas from the blue Virginia suburbs to some bright red parts of Oklahoma.
Those showings—in which the Democrats have flipped about 35 previously Republican legislative seats—stem largely from anti-Trump energy that has produced larger than normal Democratic turnouts. Further, a lack of enthusiasm among Republicans has held down the GOP vote.
If that pattern is repeated in November, when reduced turnout often benefits Republicans, it will boost Democratic chances of regaining the House majority they lost eight years ago, when the GOP benefitted from a similar pattern in former President Barack Obama’s first mid-term election.
Analysts regard presidential approval as a key factor in voter turnout for mid-term elections and, despite some modest recent increases, virtually all polls show Trump is well below the 50 percent level, which is the break-even point for an incumbent party to avoid significant losses. In recent appearances, such as last Friday’s speech before the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump has cited the incumbent party’s normal pattern of midterm losses and appealed to his hard-core supporters to turn out in strength to avoid that outcome in November.
Much more will be at stake than the mere ability of House Democrats to supplant their GOP counterparts in setting the legislative agenda. With control of the House—or the Senate— comes control of its formidable oversight and investigative authority, which the current GOP majorities have prevented from being directed at Trump.
In addition, though party leaders soft-pedal the idea, many Democrats see achievement of a House majority as the first step in launching impeachment proceedings to drive Trump out of office, even though the next Senate is likely to be sufficiently balanced to make conviction extremely unlikely.
While Trump’s long-term future and Pelosi’s more immediate fate may command the post-election headlines, the outcome may have less impact on the two candidates. Under the congressional redistricting plan adopted recently by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, the contours of the district will change significantly next November, and neither Saccone nor Lamb currently lives within its new boundaries.