Protest exemplifies GOP swing-district strategy
Street demonstration, ad campaigns target competitive seats like Wild’s
Waving Donald Trump flags and chanting “four more years,” the president’s allies took their counter-impeachment campaign on the road Thursday to put pressure on Lehigh Valley Congresswoman Susan Wild.
Gathering across the street from Wild’s Allentown office at lunchtime Thursday, roughly 50 people carried signs reading “Keep America Great” and other signature Trump slogans as they chanted up to Wild’s office to “Do your job!”
The protest was part of a series organized across the country by Trump’s reelection campaign and the Republican National Committee. Although the event was punctuated by one woman who yelled “Impeach Wild,” attendees largely directed their frustration at Democrats broadly.
James Santo, a 65-year-old retiree from Wind Gap, said he believes the impeachment inquiry has been motivated by partisanship and not facts. He questioned why the Democraticcontrolled U.S. House of Representatives didn’t take a vote to formally launch the impeachment probe prompted by the president’s phone call urging the Ukrainian leader to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
“In all fairness, they should have a straight vote and have everybody on the record,” Santo said.
The GOP campaign, dubbed “Stop the Madness,” targets Democrats whose seats are considered
competitive next year. Similar protests have been orchestrated in the suburban Pittsburgh district of Rep. Conor Lamb, in addition to potential swing districts in Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona and other states.
The RNC wasn’t the only national GOP visitor to Pennsylvania on Thursday: Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia, a key ally of Trump on Capitol Hill and the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary panel, headlined the Northampton County Republican Committee dinner that evening, where he planned to talk about policy victories the party could communicate to the electorate but expected questions on the impeachment probe.
In an interview before the fundraiser at the Hotel Bethlehem, Collins criticized the impeachment process as “partisan” and blamed recent poll numbers favoring impeachment as the result of “the steady drumbeat of a one-sided argument from the Democrats.”
“The poll right now is simply a snapshot in time,” he said. “As time goes on, people will see that this is just another … [example of the Democrats] chasing to get rid of the president as they have for a long time now.”
In addition to the protests, RNC also has launched $2 million in television and digital ads in the districts of 60 vulnerable
Democrats, including Wild and Lamb. Those ads also are targeting Reps. Matt Cartwright of Lackawanna County; Mary Gay Scanlon of Delaware County; and Chrissy Houlahan of Chester County.
The Congressional Leadership Fund, the main GOP super PAC focused on House races, has also launched ads criticizing Cartwright and Lamb for their support of the impeachment inquiry. Meanwhile, a Democratic group with close ties to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is running ads in many of those same districts, seeking to counter the framing that Democrats are solely focused on impeachment.
At Thursday’s protest, that was a concern for Nicole Gross, 53, who lives outside Wild’s district in Bucks County. “While they’re doing this phony baloney, they’re not addressing the opioid epidemic, education or immigration,” Gross said.
Lawrence Tabas, chairman of the state Republican Party, accused the freshman lawmaker of not working on issues that affect her constituents. Instead, Tabas accused her of jumping on “the Nancy Pelosi impeachment train.”
“It started with Russia. It then went to [former special counsel Robert] Mueller. Now Democrats have this bogus Ukrainian claim because they know they cannot beat Donald Trump at the polls next year,” said Tabas, who was joined at the rally by Bernie Comfort, chairwoman of Trump’s reelection effort in Pennsylvania, and Tom Carroll, the Republican nominee in the Northampton County district attorney race. “This is an act of desperation, but who can blame them because we have one of the best economies we’ve had in decades.”
It was unclear if Wild was in the targeted office. In comments and at recent events, Wild has sought to counter the idea that Democrats are only focused on impeachment.
She had resisted calls to support an inquiry into the president’s action until the days after revelations about the whistleblower complaint, when a swell of her colleagues moved in support of an impeachment investigation and Pelosi announced the probe.
Wild said last week that she hasn’t heard much about impeachment as she travels the district, but that calls to her office on the matter have been overwhelmingly in favor of the inquiry. Wild drew applause during her town hall meeting when she said constituents are more interested in what Congress is doing on issues like reducing prescription drug prices.
Her 7th District, which includes Lehigh, Northampton and part of southern Monroe counties, is viewed as one of the most competitive congressional seats in the country.
The district leans Democratic in voter registration and Wild won the district by 10 points in November. But those district voters backed Democrat Hillary Clinton by only 1 percentage point in 2016, when Northampton County was one of three previously Democratic counties in the state that Trump flipped in his favor.
Wild’s staff sent an email survey Wednesday asking constituents their views of the impeachment probe.
“Do you think President Trump’s own admissions to the phone call with President Zelensky, the White House’s summary of the phone call, and the intelligence community’s whistleblower complaint show an unprecedented abuse of presidential power?” read one question from Wild’s impeachment survey.
Below the questions, Wild added that she “will continue to be laser-focused on improving the everyday lives of hardworking Pennsylvanians across the Greater Lehigh Valley and advancing my important work on the Education & Labor, Foreign Affairs, and Ethics Committees.”
“The last thing I wanted to do when I came to Congress was focus on impeachment and my priorities have remained unchanged,” Wild said in a statement Thursday.
Public opinion polls conducted since the Ukraine saga began to unfold have shown rising support for impeachment among voters across the ideological spectrum.
A national Fox News poll released Wednesday found 51% of registered voters support impeaching Trump and removing him from office, sparking a Twitter rant by Trump. An additional 4% favor impeachment but not removing Trump, and 40% oppose impeachment.
Those favoring impeachment and removal in the Fox poll jumped 9 percentage points compared with July, with key portions of Trump’s base — white evangelicals, white men without a college degree and rural white voters — among those moving in support of impeachment. Among suburban women, a demographic that will be pivotal in next year’s election, nearly six in 10 support Trump’s removal.
Tom Campione, a Hellertown resident and part of the Lehigh Valley Tea Party, said he doesn’t trust recent polls that show more registered voters support impeachment, saying Trump defied polls in winning the 2016 election.
“We have something called the Constitution,” Campione said. “That’s better than any poll.”