YORK, Pennsylvania — The call came around 8 p.m. Wednesday evening. Eugene DePasquale, the sitting Pennsylvania state auditor general and Democratic candidate for the 10th Congressional District, had conceded the race to incumbent Republican Rep. Scott Perry.
Very few people would have imagined this call would have come a year ago when DePasquale announced that he was going to challenge the incumbent Republican; DePasquale is a nice, easygoing, centrist Democrat who won two terms statewide handily and along the way earned respect on both sides of the aisle because of his Eagle Scout comportment and pragmatism.
He was a doer, and they liked him.
A drive through here less than a week ago showed that something had changed.
You see, it all started to change early last summer after he won the primary race to earn his party’s nomination; it began with campaign emails that read like he was running for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s seat in New York instead of the sprawling 10th District seat filled with rolling farms, picturesque towns, and three midsized cities here in central Pennsylvania.
Then, his Twitter feed began to replicate the tone of his campaign emails; he began running on national things that only satisfy the lust of Twitter banter and lost his touch on things that matter to people who live and work and pray in his district.
What he, Democrats, journalists, and the institutional elite misunderstood was that they thought it was Perry who was out of touch with his constituents — when, in fact, it was DePasquale, pressured, tugged, and pulled by the Left who lost his way.
A bright shining star for the Democratic Party had fallen, and the race that was called the microcosm of the presidential race in Pennsylvania turned out to be a lesson in remaining true to yourself and, more importantly, staying true to your locality.
In short, Democrats misread what this election was about, focusing too much on the pressure of the Left, hiring young staffers that have never lived in the candidate’s district to craft tweets that often reflected their point of view instead of the district’s, and believing their own narrative rather than focusing on what a district wants.
Former Pennsylvania Democratic Party Chairman T.J. Rooney said that this insatiable need for candidates to run their race or their mouth on Twitter often finds that Twitter earns them no votes.
Rooney also says that it frequently leads them to be out of touch with their voters: “I am oftentimes struck about things that candidates talk about who may be seeking election to the State House that have nothing to do with the State House.”
Rooney says it is an ongoing problem in the party, and it does a lot of things to a competitive race. “No. 1, it clogs up your time and your message, and it’s providing voters with useless information. Most voters generally care about what you intend to do in the job you’re seeking election to. They don’t care what your position on the United Nations is if you’re running for state rep in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania,” he said.
He also said people in this state got swept up in what they believe. “In this case, they believed, understandably, I believed it too, that there would be a blue wave, and it just turned into a prizefight. And when it turns into a prizefight, which not every election is, but when they turn into that, you need to be able to appeal to more voters, voters who may be inclined to support you based upon what they think you could do in the job you’re seeking election to,” he said.
“When they find out that you have a strongly held position on what’s going on in Portland, and that just blows it all up because No. 1, you’re not running for city council in Portland — you’re running for state rep in Nesquehoning,” he said.
Harrisburg Republican strategist Charlie Gerow said early on that DePasquale was a formidable foe, then he stopped saying it beginning last June when the centrist Democrat sent out an email that said: “Nancy Pelosi emailed you — did you see? Flipping PA-10 blue in November is critical to expanding the Democratic House Majority!”
It was the first of hundreds of emails and tweets and Facebook posts that poured from his campaign — rarely if ever focusing on the concerns of the districts and everything about expanding a political party.
Voters don’t vote on expanding power, said Gerow, but they vote on their localities, something he said Perry focused on. “These congressional races are all about localism,” he said flatly.
“Eugene lost because he allowed the national Democrats to push him to the Left, and that was not a winning formula. He should have come out right away and said I won’t vote for Nancy Pelosi Democrat. And if he had, it might’ve been much closer than it was. In fact, he may have won,” he said.
“This cycle was a prizefight, but it was also an inside, outside cycle,” said Rooney. “Everyone on my side listened to the pollsters, the experts, the elites, and the pundits, and in doing that, they were listening to the insiders — the people who don’t know anyone from Cumberland County. If we listen to the voters rather than the experts, we would have known that voters did not feel connected to their worldview at all.”
He continued, “The thing that blows my mind for me is when candidates don’t understand the cycle that they’re running in.” He is also frustrated when he sees freshman Democrats spending too much time on Facebook.
His advice to candidates and incumbent Democrats in an upcoming midterm cycle in this state: “Lay off commenting on Facebook and just focus on your district needs. You might have constituents who voted for the other party for other races and voted for you.”
Rooney said this next cycle is one that Democrats absolutely need to take heed: “Because we know what happens to every president, not Joe Biden, but every president in the off year, it’s usually a very, very tough leg. And we’ve got a governor’s election in Pennsylvania, and we have the United States Senate election in Pennsylvania and a whole lot of stuff. And we’re going to be playing defense. And that’s a different game, and that requires playing by a more circumspect set of rules.”
