MT. LEBANON, Pa. — Either party, if it wants to win in 2020, needs to study the April 2 special election for a state Senate seat in suburban Pittsburgh.
The lesson for Democrats: You win when moderate candidates run on local issues, such as job creation and infrastructure.
The lesson for Republicans: You lose swing voters when you try to run a national campaign in a local race.
Republican D. Raja ran ads tying Democrat Pam Iovino to New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Iovino ran ads about fixing roads and bridges. Iovino won.
The converse side of this lesson: Democrats who fully support AOC’s Green New Deal will lose the labor families who put both Conor Lamb in Congress and Pam Iovino in the state Senate.
Darrin Kelly was the force behind both Lamb’s slim win in last year’s special election in a seat Trump won by 20 percentage points and Iovino’s tight win last week in a state Senate seat Trump won by six percentage points.
Kelly, the president of the powerful Allegheny-Fayette Labor Council and a city of Pittsburgh fireman, said labor’s efforts behind Iovino’s ads and the endless door-knocking and phone calls were all about promulgating a positive message about the Navy veteran who served in President George W. Bush’s administration.
Iovino, like Lamb, is moderate and suits the pragmatic nature of the district that has swung back and forth. Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, also a Navy veteran, held the state Senate seat until last year when he was elected to Congress. Reschenthaler succeeded Democrat Matt Smith, a moderate who is now the president of the Greater Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce.
So it’s not a hair-on-fire moment for Republicans who think they have lost the suburbs forever; party-switching is the norm in this district. For Democrats it is a good lesson, though: Kelly and labor families are at the helm of the swing, and national Democrats should take notice on what issues bring voters home to them in western Pennsylvania suburbs.
“When I was knocking on doors people told me, ‘We want our roads taken care of. We want our public schools funded.’ And they were sick and tired of hearing national messages. We want the way it’s supposed to be from the bottom up, and that will be our message forever,” he said.
Kelly is in the catbird seat as the president of the labor council in one of the best economies he said the region has seen since the heady days of the steel industry. “That is largely on the backs of the energy industry and construction,” he said.
Last week the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry issued a report showing the Pittsburgh jobless rate hit 3.6%, the lowest since the beginning of the ’70s when steel was king and Terry Bradshaw was the starting quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Nearly half of them were in construction and you don’t have to look any further than the massive ethane cracker plant under construction in nearby Monaca to tell the story of the remarkable transformation this area has undergone for union families.
“Five years ago Monaca was a snapshot of everything Western Pennsylvania had lost,” he said of the Beaver County borough that was once the home of manufacturers who produced everything from iron, steel wire, glass, tile, and tubing.
“We lost our industry — not just part of it, we literally lost everything. And when you lose your main base of employment, you lose your main base of taxes, which funds our public schools, our roads, our waterways, our ability to invest in our infrastructure. That goes with everything, your health department, everything that comes of that nature,” he said.
Today it is a bustling construction site filled with scores of massive towering cranes, thanks to Shell’s decision to build a multimillion ethane cracker plant there, a construction project that is estimated to employ more than 10,000 over the next 10 years, with talks of an additional ethane hub to be located nearby as well.
“Now you look at it and it is breeding life. It is breeding a new generation of people that get to stay and live and bring up their families in Western Pennsylvania,” he said with pride.
But if the national Democrats pick a candidate who deeply supports the Green New Deal, Kelly said all of the hard work they have done locally to flip the red region to blue won’t matter.
“Oh, they’ll lose this area,” he said bluntly.
His AFL-CIO union agrees. They warned Democrats this spring the climate change legislation would affect U.S. workers. Kelly knows when you outlaw someone’s job, they are not that likely to vote for you.
