Women win; men falling to the forces of testosterone
As a public service, today we are going to discuss the latest primary elections. And I promise there will be some sex scandals.
But first — wow, women are on the move. The big election story on Tuesday was in Pennsylvania, whose 18-member delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives is currently composed of 18 men. (Well, OK, 16 men and two vacancies due to men who abruptly left town. As we will see, Pennsylvania is having some trouble hanging on to its representatives.)
Next year there could conceivably be seven women.
In the past, if I told you the Democrats had nominated seven women for Congress you might have cynically assumed Pennsylvania had seven districts where the party was so outnumbered the Republicans would triumph if they nominated a collie. But no, four of these are likely Democratic wins. And whatever happens, the state is guaranteed to get at least one congresswoman — there’s a Philadelphia area district with female nominees on both sides.
Meanwhile, incumbent Republicans are falling like flies. Rep. Patrick Meehan resigned recently after he used taxpayer money to pay off a former aide who accused him of sexual harassment. He claimed he was a faithful husband who simply regarded the staffer as a “soul mate.”
Meehan was the second Pennsylvania Republican House member to fall to the forces of testosterone recently. You may remember that Tim Murphy, an avid anti-abortion crusader, had to resign from his seat after word got out that he’d urged his former mistress to consider terminating a possible pregnancy. When the ex-lover complained about his lack of consistency, she got a text from Murphy’s cellphone saying: “I get what you say about my March for Life messages. I’ve never written them. Staff does them.”
Murphy’s seat then went to Democrat Conor Lamb in a super-dramatic special election. Lamb is still in office. (I know it’s only been a month, but the way things go in this state I thought you’d need some reassurance.)
He’s running this fall in a new district drawn by court order. The redistricting story is super-important, but we’re going to skip the details.
Charlie Dent, a moderate Republican, had already been planning to retire at the end of the year. But suddenly, he was leaving right away. And off he went.
Dent didn’t really offer an explanation. But use your imagination.
Democrats have great hopes that his successor will be Susan Wild, an attorney. And that Costello’s district will be taken by Chrissy Houlahan, a businesswoman and former Air Force engineer.
Pennsylvania wasn’t the only state nominating congressional candidates this week.
Over in Idaho, Paulette Jordan won the Democratic nomination for governor to replace the departing Butch Otter. If she wins — and no Democrat has done that since the year “Driving Miss Daisy” won the Best Picture award — she’d become the first Native American governor.
On the other side, Rep. Raúl Labrador lost the race for the Republican governor’s nomination. This is not going to make any impact on your life, but I just wanted to point out, sadly, that we will probably never again have a chance to use “Raúl Labrador” and “Butch Otter” in the same sentence.