In the race’s final days, much of the GOP’s messaging appears focused not so much on the Trump/GOP tax cuts, or even on Trump’s tariffs, but rather on immigration, crime and Nancy Pelosi. An outside group allied with the House GOP recently launched spots slamming Democrat Conor Lamb as a “Pelosi liberal” and for allegedly supporting “sanctuary cities and amnesty for illegals.” The National Republican Congressional Committee has recently released ads that slam Lamb, a former prosecutor, as soft on gun traffickers. A super PAC allied with Trump has an ad that mentions the tax cuts but talks more about “Pelosi liberals.”
A Democratic strategist working with the Lamb campaign who tracks ad buy information tells me that these ads represent the main spending on the GOP side in the closing days. Indeed, last week, Dave Weigel and Josh Kraushaar both reported Republicans had previously aired ads touting the tax cuts but cycled them out of the messaging, because, as Kraushaar put it, they were “barely moving the needle in the district’s working-class confines.”
The reason the downplaying of Trump’s tax plan — and the emphasis instead on hot-button issues such as immigration — matter can be found in the makeup of this district. This is a place where Trump’s claim that his tax cuts are good for working people should carry weight. Trump won it by 20 points, and it has many of the sort of working-class white voters who apparently looked to Trump as an economic savior. But it turns out that this fact may explain why the tax cuts are not sufficiently resonating.
This is what we saw in Virginia when Ralph Northam won last November. The initial GOP messaging of "Trump taking credit for the Obama economy failed, so they went to the foghorn racism that worked for Trump in 2016. It failed miserably and the Democrats came within a whisker of winning back the state assembly.
“This is more of a populist district than it is a conservative district,” Mike Mikus, a Democratic strategist from southwestern Pennsylvania who ran a previous race in that district, told me today, referring to the leanings of voters in steel and coal country in places such as Washington, Westmoreland and Greene counties, which Trump carried in 2016 by 61-36, 64-33 and 70-28, respectively. Those are huge margins, a reminder that this district is mostly deep, deep, deep Trump country.
Still, Mikus argued to me that the district is more “economically diverse” than is commonly understood, with a large chunk of the more educated voters coming from the suburbs of Pittsburgh in Allegheny County. But this, too, highlights something important. Republicans hope that the tax plan will also stanch losses among college-educated and suburban white voters who might stomach Trump’s excesses and vote their bottom lines instead. Yet it seems clear that Lamb will do well in those areas, perhaps mirroring places such as Virginia, where Trump’s sexist, racist and xenophobic provocations are shifting white suburban voters toward Democrats and supercharging turnout among them to boot.
And if anything, Trump and Republicans are doubling down on those cultural provocations. In addition to the ads referenced above, Trump’s rally in Moon Township over the weekend featured full-blown race-baiting and authoritarian appeals, with brutal attacks on the media and on a prominent African American congresswoman as “a very low IQ individual.” This, apparently, is what is necessary to excite Trump country and get those Trump and GOP voters out — even amid this awesome Trump economy.
To be clear, Saccone could still win. But if Lamb keeps it close, it will still show that the Trump/GOP tax cuts aren’t enough to get educated suburban white voters to put aside their distaste with Trump in the numbers Republicans need. What’s more, this race is shaping up as a referendum on whether Republicans can hold Trump’s blue-collar white base, including the disaffected union Democrats who defected in 2016, in Trump-like numbers. But Mikus suggested to me that Lamb, who has campaigned on a pro-labor message, may be showing how Democrats can begin to reverse that trend, because even in Trump country, he’s “bringing some of those voters home.”
If so, this will show that candidates matter, to be sure. But it will also show that Trump’s agenda — which is basically Orthodox Ryanism overlaid with reckless protectionism in the form of the tariffs, plus a lot of bombast — isn’t enough to prevent good Democratic candidates from bringing back some of those voters. And that could have an impact on Democratic chances of winning the House this fall, since that turns in part on whether they can put some of these more working-class districts in play.
I still remained convinced that for the Dems to put more districts like PA-18 in play, Democrats need to try to get back 2012 Obama voters that dropped out in 2016, not the ones who voted for Trump. But keep in mind if a district that Trump won by 20 points is competitive now, then there is no truly safe district for the GOP in November.
Not a one.
And they know it.
Oh, and one last thing: Monmouth University has Lamb up by six in their final poll in the race today.
Here's hoping that holds up for tomorrow.
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