READING, Pennsylvania — When former Chester County Chamber of Commerce President Guy Ciarrocchi (R) announced he was going to challenge Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D) in her 6th Congressional District seat, many people, including some of the top insiders in the GOP establishment, thought he was chasing windmills.
Houlahan, who has represented a district that includes all of Chester County and some of Berks County, including this city, for the past four years, is a former Air Force officer, engineer, and nonprofit executive. He is competing for what, in a normal year, would be a relatively safe Democratic seat. The Cook Political Report rates it a D+5 seat that Joe Biden won handily over Donald Trump in 2020, 57% to 42%.
The leafy suburbs of upper middle Chester, once reliably Republican, have become reliably Democratic in the Trump era. But Ciarrocchi has lifelong roots in the county, has coached softball in these suburbs forever, and is not seen by many voters as intrinsically tied to Trump in either his demeanor or his positions.
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The wild card in this district, however, is the large Hispanic population that is open to a Republican like Ciarrocchi.
The Reading Railroad, made famous by the classic version of the Monopoly board game, played a critical role in transporting Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal to the major cities along the Atlantic coastline. The city has gone through major ups and downs over the years. In 2011, Reading was declared the poorest small city in the nation, while in 2020, it was on the upswing. Then it stalled like everywhere else in the country, thanks to the pandemic.
The biggest change, however, has been the demographics with the vibrant Hispanic community in this city. Hispanics now comprise the majority of the population, and many of the voters here are considering voting Republican in next week’s midterm elections. The shift might just make Ciarrocchi’s windmill chase a bit less quixotic.
Recent polling shows that most Hispanic voters will back Democratic candidates in next Tuesday’s election, but that majority is much smaller than the one that showed up for Democrats in 2018. According to the most recent Washington Post-Ipsos survey, Democrats have only a 27-point lead with voters who identify as Hispanic — down significantly from the 40-point they enjoyed four years ago.
What happened? Well, according to the Rev. Nicolas Camacho, Democrats don’t help themselves by calling Hispanics “Latinx” — a moniker that perplexes him. The truth is most Hispanic voters prefer to call themselves something else.
“I am an American voter,” said the retired United Methodist pastor and U.S. Army chaplain, who also serves as the chaplain coordinator for the Reading Police Department from his office here in the Delaware Valley.
Camacho came to Reading from Puerto Rico in the 1980s when his church was looking for a Spanish-speaking pastor to serve the growing Hispanic population. He never left.
He said Hispanic voters don’t see themselves as a Balkanized voting bloc. “We vote not on where we came from but as a member of the community who owns a small business in your neighborhood, coaches your kids little league, or serves as a firefighter or civic leader, and we vote on what impacts our lives, not on ethnicity,” he said.
He sees Hispanic voters as no different from the Italian immigrants who settled here in the last century.
Camacho said the immigration of Hispanics to Reading began in the 1950s, mostly from Puerto Rico. That evolved in the next generation. “The Mexican community started growing specifically in the north side of the city around the ’90s,” he said. “In fact, the Mexican community is the highest growing population group in the city among the minorities.”
“We’ve also seen a migration of people coming from Colombia and El Salvador,” he added. “It is a hardworking community that is no different from the other waves of immigrants that have come to this country and is contributing to making the community better.”
Camacho said Ciarrocchi came to him to discuss considering a vote for him. Camacho usually votes Republican already, he said, but after meeting with Ciarrocchi, he felt confident he could support him. More importantly, he said he is encouraging others to vote for him as well.
“Sadly, I have to admit that many Latinos, unfortunately, are not really looking at the way that I look, and that’s their own decision,” he said. “However, the ones that I have been talking to, they have been able to look at Guy with clear eyes and know he hears what their problems are on inflation and crime and education, and they agree he is the right choice.”
There are three other House seats in Pennsylvania that are closer than the Houlahan seat to flipping from Democrat to Republican. Those are Rep. Matt Cartwright’s 8th District in Scranton, Rep. Susan Wild’s 7th District in the Lehigh Valley, and the open 17th District currently held by Rep. Conor Lamb. These have all been placed on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee‘s “Red Alert” status, indicating that the Democratic candidates need “immediate resources,” according to a memo sent out Tuesday.
Ciarrocchi is being outspent by $1.9 million to $130,000 at this point in the game. At the same time, internal polls conducted by the National Republican Congressional Committee show the race narrowing such that Houlahan holds a mere 4-point lead — within the margin of error.
Both RealClearPolitics and Sabato’s Crystal Ball have moved the race from likely Democrat to lean; if there is a surprise Wednesday morning in this race, it would be important for analysts to drive to Reading and spend a few days to figure out how well Ciarrocchi did with voters like Camacho and his parishioners.
