HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania — Eugene DePasquale and Sean Parnell couldn’t be more different politically. DePasquale is a seasoned statewide-elected official and Democrat from York County, Pennsylvania, while Parnell is a western Pennsylvania Republican newcomer who has never run for office in his life. Yet they share one very important thing in common this year: Both are challenging incumbent members of Congress in Trump-won districts in Pennsylvania.
Both of their races tell the story of not just how truly uncertain the Keystone State is politically but also how completely divided it is.
It also shows us how hard it is to predict results in this state, both for the presidential election and for which party might eventually hold the majority in the Pennsylvania congressional delegation — or whether it remains split, with some of the partisan office-holders rearranging seats.
“Interestingly, Pennsylvania is the only state that currently has an exactly split [U.S.] House delegation by party,” noted Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
“The split is a good illustration of how divided Pennsylvania is,” he said of the nine-nine partisan split. The state has swung wildly since 2006 in terms of who holds the State House and congressional majorities, with the trends often serving as a harbinger for the entire country.
In 2006, moderate House Democrats swept out entrenched Republican members in Pennsylvania. Republicans swung the state delegation majority back in their party’s direction in 2010 and helped the national GOP gain the majority in the process.
The delegation became more Republican in 2012. Six years later, that 13-5 majority became a 9-9 split.
While Parnell is effectively running as an outsider, DePasquale is taking the opposite tactic in his race.
“I just think my approach as auditor general is something that can really be helpful in Washington and show voters that I am someone who knows how to hold people accountable, know how to hold agencies accountable, know how to make things work better,” said DePasquale of why voters will be attracted to his candidacy. The area now composing the 10th Congressional District voted for Mitt Romney by 7 percentage points in 2012 and in 2016 favored President Trump by 9 percentage points.
DePasquale, first elected as the state’s auditor general in 2012, said that when he ran for reelection in 2016, he ran with Trump at the top of the ticket for Republicans. “Trump won the district, as did I,” he deadpanned. “While we all know there’s some people that are always voting Republican. Some people always vote Democrat. There was a pretty big chunk of people here that voted for both of us.”
DePasquale is challenging Rep. Scott Perry, a Cumberland County Republican and decorated military veteran who served in the Pennsylvania National Guard and who barely held his seat in the 2018 midterms after the Democrat-led Pennsylvania State Supreme Court decided in February of that year to redraw the districts of the entire state — turning his into a district much less Republican than his former seat.
Parnell is a decorated Army veteran who earned a Bronze Star for valor. He is challenging Rep. Conor Lamb, a current Marine reservist, former federal prosecutor, and Allegheny County Democrat who became the darling of Democrats in the 2018 midterms first by scoring a squeaker in a nationally covered spring special election victory in the then-18th Congressional District, a district that voted overwhelmingly for Trump. Lamb won again that November with a sizable victory in a new district that voted for Trump by 2.5 percentage points in 2016.
Since then, Lamb, like all of the newly elected Democrats who won in swing districts, has had to face the realities that every member faces once they hit Washington no matter which party they are attached to: bloodsport politics that often force votes on volatile issues that they never ran on, like impeachment.
In both races in 2018, Lamb ran as a traditional western Pennsylvania Democrat who told the Atlantic that voters wanted “someone down there who’s actually gonna attack the problem, not attack the other side.”
Parnell has come out of the gates since his announcement at the end of October with an impressive $265,000 plus in fundraising, raising that amount in the eight weeks left in the fourth quarter of 2019. Lamb, though, raised a whopping $580,000 in the full fourth quarter.
Neither DePasquale nor Perry has released his fourth-quarter numbers yet.
All four men are navigating a shifting electorate whose voters are questioning whether they belong in their ancestral parties with culture, rootedness, institutions, and newly formed community-centric tribalism playing an outsized role in their decision-making.
Kondik sees the Lamb-Parnell race, like the 7th and the 1st Congressional District races, as competitive races where Republican challengers might upset Democratic incumbents. “Arguably, at least a third of the state’s districts are competitive to some degree. Democrats likely will go hard after Perry’s district and the 1st Congressional District,” he said of the seat held by Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, who also held onto his Bucks County district by the seat of his pants.
Kondik said the best Republican target is probably the 8th Congressional District, which is held by Democrat Rep. Matthew Cartwright, “But PA-7 and the Lamb seat are also reasonable targets,” he said of the Lehigh Valley-centric district held by Democrat Rep. Susan Wild.
“In a bad Democratic year, PA-6 could also be competitive, but in a presidential year like this, I doubt Republicans can actually put it in play,” he said of Democrat Rep. Chrissy Houlahan’s seat in the former Chester County Republican bastion.
One thing is certain in the districts Kondik outlined to watch: All of them have the potential to become much more competitive for their incumbents than perhaps originally expected. Pennsylvania, as always, will be in the center of which way the winds might blow nationwide.
Disclosure: Zito co-authored a book with Brad Todd, a strategist for Sean Parnell.
