Four Democrats vie for party nod in new 14th
It’s easy to see why — in the race for Pennsylvania’s 14th Congressional District — the Democrats have seemingly been forgotten.
For one, their primary is absent of politicians, while the Republican race features heavyweight state legislators Guy Reschenthaler and Rick Saccone, who recently suffered an upset loss in the high-profile 18th.
The four Democrats vying for their party’s nod — Bibiana Boerio, Tom Prigg, Adam Sedlock and Bob Solomon — have built long careers in business, science and health care, and though the political makeup of the district suggests the chances are slim that the primary winner will prevail again in November, party strategists hope the “blue wave” can extend here.
With little time left before Tuesday’s primary election, the candidates spent this past weekend campaigning in the district composed of Greene, Fayette and Washington counties and most of Westmoreland.
Over a cup off coffee Saturday in Greensburg, Ms. Boerio compared her political candidacy to her more than three decades in the automotive industry: “There’s a lot of similarities between launching a campaign and launching a car.” Either way, the engines had to start fast for Ms. Boerio, who began her candidacy just eight weeks before the primary.
Ms. Boerio, of Unity, is best known for her stints as an executive at the Ford Motor Credit Co. and with Jaguar Cars, but she also was former U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak’s chief of staff. For Mr. Sestak, she was in charge of legislative policy in several areas, including health care, in which she spent time studying the Affordable Care Act.
“She combined her insightful grasp of issues with the ability to include those with differing opinions, which permitted her to provide solutions that would serve
everyone,” Mr. Sestak wrote in a statement supporting her candidacy.
Ms. Boerio described herself as a “realist and a pragmatist who wants to get things done,” criticizing those — like Dr. Solomon — who say the country could move quickly into a singlepayer health care system. Instead, she named specific bills in Congress she supports that would fix certain parts of the Affordable Care Act while slowly transitioning to single-payer.
On health care, Dr. Solomon, of North Fayette, favors a system that is funded by a government agency through taxes, which he said would decouple coverage from employment, eliminate deductibles and copays, and ensure that “everyone paying into the system would be contributing the same as or less than they were contributing before.”
He offered his views at the Burgettstown Senior Center, while residents played billiards in the background. In what could be a veiled metaphor for his congressional campaign, he talked of being good at lining up shots on the table — “You always have a good shot,” he said — but the success lies in being able to execute them.
So far, the emergency physician has run his campaign mostly with his own money. He has loaned more than $100,000 to his campaign in an effort to get his message across to voters: that he has a refined view of health care from more than three decades of hands-on experience and from studying and teaching health policy.
“That’s a combination that not only no one else has who is running for Congress this year but also doesn’t exist currently on Capitol Hill among the 535 people who are in office,” Dr. Solomon said.
He said voters want “to know the person they’re voting for really understands them and their lives,” and he criticized Ms. Boerio for talking up her experience launching a new line of cars at Jaguar.
“I just don’t see a Jaguar in every garage or every driveway in the 14th District,” Dr. Solomon said.
Mr. Prigg’s support has come mostly from social media. The Washington, Pa., native found a surprising network of supporters on Twitter from across the country, some of whom became volunteers for postcard campaigns and ended in endorsements from online groups associated with hashtags like #VetsResistSquadron, which typically rallies support for progressive veteran candidates.
“Donations are coming in from around the country,” Mr. Prigg said in an interview in Harrison City during a charity event at the volunteer fire department. “We’ve never been central, because if you pull money only locally, it’s about who you know and your wealthy connections, and I’m a normal guy who doesn’t have a lot of wealthy connections.”
The grass-roots social media mobilization is linked closely to his background as a veteran of the 82nd Airborne. Most of his professional career has been spent in the sciences, studying the brain for 16 years in labs at the University of Pittsburgh before taking a job at Carnegie Mellon University doing spinal cord research.
Mr. Prigg supports providing universal health care, eliminating student debt and putting first-time nonviolent offenders in substance abuse treatment instead of prison.
To accomplish his policy goals, he said, his scientific approach has helped him learn the issues “inside out.”
“You can’t fix something if you don’t know how it works,” Mr. Prigg said.
Mr. Sedlock, a resident of Wharton, Fayette County, has been working as a psychologist since 1992, when he opened a behavioral health clinic in Uniontown that grew to 25 employees.
On Saturday, he revisited a location from his youth, the Monessen City Park amphitheater. In the late 1960s, he played keyboard on the stage in a Santana-style groove band.
For Mr. Sedlock, whose campaign accumulated less than the $5,000 threshold for filing finance reports, the meet-and-greets and door knocking is the best way to show he’s one of them.
“We need representation by the people for the people,” he said, adding that he’s the only candidate who was born, raised, educated and employed in the district.
Mr. Sedlock, who lost a write-in campaign to Art Halvorson in his run for the 9th District in 2016, describes himself as a protector of Social Security and a proponent for a progressive tax system — and not the Republican tax plan passed late last year.
“If I made a million dollars a year, which is what a corporate CEO probably does make, they got a tax break where they could probably buy a new house,” Mr. Sedlock said. “I got a tax break that will maybe pay for gasoline.”
In what has been a surprisingly cordial primary, Mr. Sedlock hasn’t shied away from taking shots at his opponents. He pinned Ms. Boerio as a “corporate executive” who had to lay off workers, Dr. Solomon as a one-issue candidate and Mr. Prigg as someone who “jumps around everywhere” when talking policy.