Pennsylvania shows Dems how to win
Stay mad at Trump, and embrace differences
Anger at President Trump can inspire amazing things.
AV News reported last year that folk rock supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young might put aside its long-running feud and reunite, because they hate Trump “even more than they hate each other.” That reunion has not happened yet, but it looks like the Democratic Party might be getting the band back together. And disgust at Trump could be all it needs to stay intact — for now.
Democrat Conor Lamb, who looks to have won a special election in a western Pennsylvania congressional district that Trump carried by about 20 percentage points and Mitt Romney by 17, would not pass anyone’s purity test.
Lamb managed to present himself as pro-gun and pro-life, though he supports the Manchin-Toomey background check bill and opposes a 20week abortion ban. He successfully courted union voters despite refusing for now to support the core labor demand of a $15 minimum wage. And he won the backing and small-dollar donations of Democrats from across the nation, while vowing he would not vote for Nancy Pelosi as House speaker.
Lamb’s artful “baby splitting” could have effectively branded him as the sort of moderate Democrats are supposed to be driving from their ballot slots. Instead, he should be praised as the kind of candidate the left needs to embrace, or at least tolerate, in order to take at least one chamber of Congress.
When Democrats transform their rage at Trump into donations and volunteers and run against the Republican they’re facing, they’ve been winning. The formula worked in Virginia, Alabama and now in the Rust Belt, and could create a blue wave in November.
Yes, if new congressional maps in Pennsylvania stand, Democrats can target 25 GOP House districts where Hillary Clinton got more votes than Trump — enough to win the House without having to woo new voters. But even when your party is led by the least popular new president in polling history, incumbency has its advantages. Maps have been gerrymandered so the GOP could probably lose the popular vote by three times Trump’s losing margin and still keep its House majority. In the Senate, Democrats are defending 25 seats to the GOP’s eight, 10 of them in states Trump won.
Unless Democrats manage to put several dozen seats in play this fall, Republicans could keep the House and add several senators.
This would be a disaster from a policy standpoint. And from what we’ve seen over the past year, it would be an irreversible nightmare of historic proportions. It would vindicate the GOP focus on obstructing investigations into the Trump administration instead of digging into what is already the most felony-ridden presidential campaign in living memory, and the first president who refuses to divest from business interests that continue to occupy at least a quarter of his time.
If Democrats believe the fevered warnings they’ve been making — that Trump is a historic threat to democracy, that the GOP Congress is protecting him, that two more years of this will fry what’s left of our nerve endings — the fall elections aren’t just elections. They are a national emergency: the only possible way to put a keen eye on corruption, the Census and foreign intrusion in our elections.
That isn’t to say Democrats shouldn’t make demands on their candidates and run competitive primaries. Over 110 GOP-held districts are more Democratic than Pennsylvania’s 18th. Few nominees will triangulate to the degree Lamb has. But in a historic crisis such as what we face now, differences of opinion shouldn’t be read as differences of principle. And true anger needs to end up focusing on defeating Republicans whenever there’s a chance to defeat Republicans.
The special election Tuesday was an anomaly in several ways. A Republican congressman resigned after urging his mistress to have an abortion. Lamb avoided a tough primary. And the seat might not even exist next year.
But if Democrats heed what they’ve learned this week, anything is possible.