If a congressional campaign won’t tell you the candidate’s schedule two weeks out from a tight special election, it’s a safe bet to go to an American Legion post (it doesn’t matter which one, any post will do) and simply wait. This is how I found myself at a Friday night fish fry at American Legion Post 760 in rural western Pennsylvania.
Republican congressional hopeful Rick Saccone showed up right on cue, about an hour after I arrived. As the mustachioed state legislator made the rounds that night, shaking hands and, presumably, kissing babies, some Trump supporters told me they were excited to vote for him. But others whispered that they were planning to support the other guy, because they had met him in person a few weeks back and he seemed nice. Underneath Saccone’s carefree exterior, there had to be some unease: A Monmouth University poll places him just three points ahead of Democrat Conor Lamb, in an area that has been a Republican stronghold for nearly two decades. And the Cook Political Report switched its assessment of the election from “lean Republican” to “toss-up” on February 27.
Lamb, a 33-year-old retired Marine and former prosecutor, is running as a conservative Democrat in the 18th District, which went for Trump by 20 points in 2016. The election’s winner will serve only a seven-month term before its victor will have to face voters again in November, so the race is more significant for the lessons it could hold for the Democratic playbook than it is for the immediate makeup of Congress. For Republicans, it represents the first electoral opportunity to gauge whether their tax cuts are enough to defend against a rising blue wave.
But as the oft-quoted saying goes, all politics is local. A Republican campaign aide involved in this race acknowledged as much about the 18th District, where Saccone is contending with a positive image Lamb has built up in the community. Lamb comes from a political family—his grandfather was majority leader of the Pennsylvania state senate in the 1970s. He attended a Catholic high school in Pittsburgh and went on to study at the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated with his political science degree in 2006, followed by a law degree in 2009. After serving in the Marine Corps, Lamb came back to the area to work as a prosecutor.
Saccone, 60, also has an impressive résumé: He served as a counterintelligence special agent in the Air Force for over a decade before becoming a television news anchor in South Korea. After that, he helped negotiate the terms of nuclear power plant construction in North Korea as the only American living in the totalitarian country at the time, according to his website. He returned to the United States and got his Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh before serving as a senior counterintelligence agent during the Iraq war, in which he was tasked with “identifying, capturing and interrogating insurgents.” He has visited 75 countries and has written nine books.
His legislative career as a state representative has been lackluster by comparison. He is best known for introducing a bill in 2013 to require public schools to post the words “In God We Trust” inside their buildings. That bill failed. During his campaign, Saccone has embraced Trump enthusiastically, going so far as to describe himself as “Trump before Trump was Trump.” He has split with his Republican predecessors by unapologetically alienating labor unions, claiming he will receive support from their members regardless. Lamb has relentlessly sought union support.
“We will fight back, and I actually think it’s time for us to pick a few fights of our own,” Lamb said at a downtown Pittsburgh rally in support of unions on February 26, the day the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Janus v. AFSCME, a case that could cost public sector unions millions if nonmembers can no longer be required to pay them fees. “I have been happy and thankful to have your support throughout this campaign. If you send me to Congress, we will start picking those fights right away,” Lamb pledged.
Lamb is walking a tightrope. He religiously avoids attacking the president, and he has taken meticulous steps to distance himself from the national Democratic party. He refuses outside Democratic help and is turning down donations from super-PACs. He’s hoping his comparatively conservative stances on issues like gun rights (he doesn’t support gun control proposals such as raising the minimum age to purchase rifles from 18 to 21) and abortion (he tells me he’s personally opposed to abortion as a religious principle, but says he would make no effort to legislate his views) will be enough for Republican voters to overlook the D next to his name on the ballot. Although there are about 70,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in the 18th District, voters here consistently side with Republican candidates.
Before Trump won the district overwhelmingly in 2016, Mitt Romney carried it by 17 points in 2012. Former GOP congressman Tim Murphy easily won here in 2002, breezing through seven subsequent races with at least 58 percent of the vote each time until he resigned in October after the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported he had an extramarital affair in which he encouraged the woman—who thought she was pregnant with his child—to have an abortion. (Shannon Edwards, the woman from the affair, is now challenging longtime congressman Mike Doyle to represent the Pittsburgh area’s 14th Congressional District.)
Saccone does have some firm support among staunch Republicans in the area. John Sarkis, a vocalist who sings with a Pittsburgh-based national act called The Skyliners, tells me after meeting Saccone at the fish fry that he will vote for him. “The people who are really in touch with what’s happening are easily with Rick,” he claims. But this race is closer than usual, compelling Republicans to pull out all the stops to keep the seat. Trump is expected to hold a rally to shore up support for Saccone before Election Day, and GOP money is flowing into the race.
“We’re going to spend what we think we need to spend,” one Republican campaign aide tells me. The Washington Post estimated GOP groups such as the National Republican Congressional Committee and several super-PACs had already spent $4.7 million on airtime by early February. (Democratic outside groups, for their part, had only spent around $300,000.) The NRCC alone has spent “upwards of $2.5 million to $3 million” in advertisements, according to another GOP campaign aide. Republicans have tried to energize the GOP base by invoking consistently unpopular House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, warning that a victory for Lamb would be one step closer to the return of Speaker Pelosi.
Lamb has countered the attack by saying he does not support Pelosi’s continuing in a leadership role for House Democrats. “My opponent wants you to believe that the biggest issue in this campaign is Nancy Pelosi. It’s all a big lie,” Lamb said in a campaign ad released two weeks before the election. “I’ve already said on the front page of the newspaper that I don’t support Nancy Pelosi.”
Asked about the effectiveness of their Pelosi talking points, a GOP campaign aide argued, “You don’t go out defending yourself on TV if it’s not working.”
But for Jeri, a lifelong resident of the district I met at the Friday night fish fry, the Pelosi line of attack is unconvincing. Jeri is in her sixties, and she joined the American Legion “for the bingo” a few years back. She voted for Trump in 2016, and she supported Republican Tim Murphy when he represented the area. I ask her who she’ll be voting for on March 13, and she tells me she was initially leaning towards Saccone, but she is “dead set against him” now. She blames his “mudslinging” campaign in part for her decision.
“When they do those ads, the one that they’re running now has Lamb, and when they talk about Nancy Pelosi and she goes, ‘crumbs.’ What was the rest of that?” Jeri asks. She’s talking about a GOP advertisement that attacks Pelosi for comparing the raises and bonuses middle-class workers were given by their employers after the passage of the GOP tax bill to crumbs in light of the billions of dollars that corporations received. Lamb has made similar comments. “Was she thinking maybe we need something better for the little people? I don’t know. That’s the way I see it. You never get to see the rest of the ad,” Jeri laments, shaking her head. Asked how she feels about Pelosi, Jeri says she doesn’t know much about the California Democrat. “I know she doesn’t get talked about very good,” she says. “I just don’t believe that’s what she said.”
Jeri tells me she is altogether frustrated with government, and it is clear she is inherently suspicious of Saccone on account of his seven years spent in the Pennsylvania statehouse.
“The other one, he’s never been in office, has he?” she asks, referring to Lamb. “Let’s see what he can do. Because we can always get rid of him later.”
Haley Byrd is a reporter at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
