Scheller-Dellicker race close
Winner of GOP primary for Lehigh Valley congressional seat will challenge Wild
A rematch of the 2020 election in Pennsylvania’s 7th District could play out this fall if Lisa Scheller’s early lead against her opponent, Kevin Dellicker, holds out in the Republican race to challenge incumbent Susan Wild.
As of 10:07 p.m., Scheller had 14,509 votes and Dellicker had 13,477, with 66% of the expected vote reported.
Scheller is a former Lehigh County commissioner and CEO of her family’s manufacturing company, Silberline Manufacturing.
It’s Scheller’s second time vying for Wild’s seat. She won the Republican nomination over Dean Browning, another former Lehigh County commissioner, in 2020.
Scheller has said she is running to “protect the American dream and to stop the Democrats from turning it into a socialist nightmare.”
The mainstream Republican favorite, she secured endorsements from Republican figures such as House Minority Speaker Kevin McCarthy and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise. She received $400,000 in donations through WinRed, a Republican fundraising platform endorsed by the Republican National Committee.
Donald Trump endorsed Scheller in 2020, but did not weigh in this year.
The general election race this fall will be competitive.
Wild is seen as a vulnerable incumbent because she won re-election in 2020 by just four points.
FiveThirtyEight considers the 7th congressional district “highly competitive” with a slight Republican lean. Election forecasts on Cook Political Report and 270toWin rate the race a toss-up, with Wild slightly favored.
Because of redistricting, the district now includes all of conservative Carbon County, making the race even tougher for Wild. Wild, who was first elected in 2018, ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination.
If Scheller wins this fall, she wants to bring a business perspective to Congress and will advocate for lowering taxes and workforce development. She hopes to bring down government spending, restrict immigration, tackle the opioid epidemic and limit public schools’ ability to teach lessons on racism.
She has taken strong positions on controversial issues such as critical race theory, saying the sociological theory, rarely taught at the K-12 level, is teaching children to hate America. She said allowing transgender girls to compete in sports is “destroying the dreams of young women.”
She called Act 77, a 2019 Pennsylvania state law that legalized universal vote-bymail, unconstitutional and said if elected, she would “kill” the For The People Act, a House Bill passed by Democrats that aims to expand voting access.
Dellicker, a New Tripoli native, sees himself as a “grassroots” challenger to Scheller. He’s raised a fraction of the money Scheller has and has not received any support from mainstream Republican figures. But he has run an active campaign, holding events, meet and greets and town halls nearly every day in the months leading up to the primary.
Dellicker frequently criticized Scheller’s business operations in China: Silberline Manufacturing has two locations in the country and plans to open a plant in there in 2023. He calls her business locations in the country a conflict of interest, but Scheller maintains that her business is “100% American owned.”
Dellicker invited Scheller to eight different policy debates, but Scheller accepted just once.
Scheller served as a Lehigh County Commissioner between 2012 and 2016, and was prompted to run by a 16% tax hike Lehigh County enacted in 2010. In 2012, she helped pass a budget with a 3% tax cut.