The NPR Politics Podcast - Democrat Apparent Winner In Pennsylvania Special Election

Episode Date: March 14, 2018

Tuesday night was a big one for Democrats. In a southwestern Pennsylvania district that Trump won by 20 points in 2016, voters appear to have elected Democrat Conor Lamb to fill a vacant House seat �� a huge upset for President Trump and the Republican party. The race has still not been officially called, but barring a recount, Lamb has a small but insurmountable lead over Republican Rick Saccone. This episode: host/White House correspondent Tamara Keith, political editor Domenico Montanaro, and congressional correspondent Scott Detrow in Pennsylvania. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Alexandria Hammons calling from Mission Beach in San Diego, California, my favorite place to watch the sunset with my boyfriend, Tyler. This podcast was recorded at 1.04 p.m. on Wednesday, the 14th of March. While political news may have changed since the time you hear this, my love for you, Tyler, is forever. Will you marry me? Wait, what? Keep up with all the political coverage on NPR.org, your NPR One app, or your local public radio station.

Enjoy the show. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Does he have to hear the podcast first? Well, what is the answer, Tyler? Oh, my God, Tyler. Do say yes. This is amazing. Tyler, let us know. Yeah, do let us know, please.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. Again, last night was a big one for Democrats. In a southwestern Pennsylvania district that President Trump won by 20 points in 2016, voters appear to have elected a Democrat to fill a vacant House seat. And I say appear because as of this taping, the race is still too close to call. But Democrat Conor Lamb is up by fewer than a thousand votes. And last night, or actually very early this morning, he declared victory. It took a little longer than we thought, but we did it. And it looks likely that he'll hold on to that lead. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House for NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.

I'm somewhere in between Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And Scott, would you like to put some specificity on your location? Well, I think you know where I am if you had to guess where I was pulled over to tape this podcast. Not a wah-wah, Domenico. Your Pennsylvania geography is wrong. I am in Sheets country. I knew exactly what Pennsylvania geography is wrong. I am in Sheetz country.

I knew exactly what you were going to say. Deep in Sheetz country. That's called trolling. A little bit of a troll there. I am, of course, in Sheetz in Somerset, Pennsylvania, where, fun fact, Rick Santorum kicked off his 2012 presidential campaign. Well, there you go.

Now you know. So you got about three hours of sleep last night, and that's because it was a night of great suspense. Polls had showed that this was going to be a very close race between Conor Lamb, the Democrat, and Rick Saccone, the Republican. But, whoa, it was wild. Lamb watch party and I've never been with a campaign in such a close race. You know, Democrats had no business winning this race. And we talked about that on Monday. But Democrats really felt going into the polls closing like they had pulled this off. They were going to win. And Lamb jumped out to a big early lead.

He had a 6,000 vote lead for a while. Everybody was partying and the lead got smaller and smaller and smaller and got down to 95 votes at one point. And then everyone got pretty nervous in the room. But you have to give CNN some credit here. They decided to put a reporter and a camera in the room in Allegheny County, that's the county with the Pittsburgh suburbs, where they were counting the absentee ballots. So around 1130 or so, the absentee ballots are finished counting. The election official is on the air with CNN and announces that Lamb had carried them by a lot and suddenly had an 800 vote lead. And the room went nuts. Of course, Saccone, as you mentioned, hasn't conceded yet,

but Lamb has declared victory. And Domenico, it looks like it's pretty hard for Saccone to narrow this gap at this point, huh? It is. Yeah, I talked to an official at the Pennsylvania Secretary of State's office this afternoon, and she said that there are only about 200 absentee ballots out in Greene County, which is what they're waiting for. They're not completely sure about everything out of Washington County, although it appears that the AP has gotten all that data in and that there are an additional 188 overseas and military ballots. So, look, Lamb is up 641 votes. You've got 200 absentee ballots out, another 188 overseas ballots. That doesn't add up to 641. Even if they were all for Saccone, which presumably they are not. Probably. But, you know, so but the thing is, there can be there's a mechanism for

for protesting votes. If three people per precinct speak up and with evidence of voter fraud, they can take that to court sometime within the next week. So there are probably going to be some efforts in that direction. And we're probably not going to get a real certification for a few days. But that is a high bar. That is not an automatic recount. That is something. In fact, there's no provision in state law for an automatic recount when it comes to congressional races. And it would take a lot of time and money and a tight timeline. And given that Republicans have basically been really embarrassed in this race and also given that this district will cease to exist later this year, I am wondering whether they will put the full effort into a recount here. And it really tells you something that Republicans spent as much money as they did.

Ten million dollars for what's essentially, you know, a test tube election, because this is like it's it's it's in's in a beaker essentially because it's not going to exist. And they just – they know what the narrative would be if the Republican were to lose in a district that went by 20 points for President Trump. Why that's important is there are 118 other districts that President Trump won by less in the 2016 election than this district. So when Democrats need just 24 seats to flip the House, now suddenly that looks like a real path. Not that you are saying, I don't think, that all 100 and some of those seats are really truly in play. No, of course not. But, you know, it comes down to like having the right candidate, whether or not you invest the kind of money necessary. But this was a an example for Democrats to be able to say what's possible and a warning sign for Republicans about that as well. And you know that there's going to be or should be a wake-up call among Republicans this morning. Some strategists are calling for that to say, don't look at this as just, you know, Rick Saccone not being a great

candidate. He was kind of a generic Republican candidate. A generic Republican candidate should have won by a lot in this district. So they want to tell those candidates, don't be complacent. You got to knock on every door. You got to raise every dollar that you can and work hard because there's a potential wave coming. Scott, you have been in that district for days now and you had gone up there before that and you know the area. What is your takeaway from all this? So there were some unique factors at play in this race, and we talked about them a lot on Monday. The fact that Lamb was running as a pretty conservative Democrat, that he had tight union ties. And because of Rick Saccone's voting record in the statehouse, organized labor was really energized to elect Lamb. And Lamb was able to win a lot of the union vote, the white

working class vote that otherwise would have probably gone to a Republican or certainly went to Donald Trump. So that was a unique situation. But I think the thing that's really sticking with me that really does play a big role or is another key indicator for what we could expect in the fall is that yet again, high income, high education suburbs that have gone Republican for a long time have broken sharply for a Democratic candidate. We saw that in Alabama. We saw that in Virginia. It just keeps happening. It's the revenge of the suburbs.

Yeah. And I want to just read one quote from a Pittsburgh strategist who's been paying close attention to this. He ran both of Pat Toomey's statewide campaigns. And Pat Toomey is the senator, the Republican senator from Pennsylvania. Yeah. And both of his elections were pretty tight. This guy's name is Mark Harris. So he knows where to find Republican votes in Pennsylvania. He writes last night, once this is all clear, what has happened? The Allegheny County numbers are apocalyptic. Any statewide Republican losing the southern part of the county by as much as a cone did would lose statewide by 20 plus points. Total suburban wipeout. We as Republicans have to win those suburbs to have a prayer statewide. And this guy is in Pennsylvania, but presumably there are strategists and consultants and and candidates all over this country and a lot of other states looking at suburbs.

Absolutely. Look, the road to a majority for either party runs through places where there are bonefish grills and outback steakhouses. Okay. Like it's going to run through this. What are you saying about my neighborhood? Exactly. So that's key. But there's another thing here to look at that's really, really interesting. I found that he was also able to do fairly well in rural areas. He didn't win a whole lot of those precincts in rural areas, but he was able to improve upon what Hillary Clinton's performance was, for example, in 2016 and, you know, move dozens and dozens of precincts in his favor. Well, and what Donald Trump, now President Trump, did so incredibly well in 2016 is he just dominated those white working class counties. I mean, Hillary Clinton just couldn't gain any ground there. Right. And that's a lesson for Democrats, because the fact is, when Democrats have, you know, migrated towards cities and have

seemingly given up in many respects on rural areas, cutting the margins is important. When every vote counts, like in a race like this, it can make all the difference. After an election like this, there is always a lot of analysis and spin that comes from the political parties trying to say what it means and trying to take the lessons that they want to take that make them look the best. So what is the lesson that Republicans are taking from this, Domenico? I mean, for instance, Paul Ryan. What House Speaker Paul Ryan decided to say today is that this doesn't really mean a whole lot because a candidate like Conor

Lamb is a bit of a unicorn for Democrats. I think the candidate that's going to win this race is the candidate that ran as a pro-life, pro-gun, anti-Nancy Pelosi conservative. That's the candidate that's going to win this race. So this is something that you're not going to see repeated because they didn't have a primary. They were able to pick a candidate who could run as a conservative, who ran against the minority leader, who ran on a conservative agenda. You will have primaries in all these other races and the primaries bring them to the left. So I just don't think that this is something they're going to be able to see a repeat of. There aren't a lot of Democrats like him is what he's arguing, and that a lot of Democrats are going to get primaried and pulled to the left.

Now, frankly, that sounds like some wishful thinking, because there are a lot of Conor Lambs out there who, when they target these kinds of districts, are looking to try to run those kinds of candidates. there is the potential to be primaried in more liberal districts or even suburban districts like we've been talking about, where Democrats have to be careful about being pulled too far to the left. And Scott, Democrats have actually been working to find and field candidates in districts where they haven't necessarily even run people in the past, but trying to find people with military backgrounds, with law enforcement backgrounds. Conor Lamb was both a military veteran and a former prosecutor. He seems to fit a mold of the type of candidate that it seems like Democrats have been on the lookout for. Yeah. And here's the Democratic spin that came in yesterday and this morning. It was interesting. Up until the last week or so,

National Democrats were not being too involved in this race. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had briefly aired ads out here and then stopped paying for television ads. Then all of a sudden, yesterday afternoon, the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee were saying, hey, by the way,

if you want to know how much we worked on this race, the answer is a lot. We were just super secret about it. We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on digital advertising, on get out the vote, on fundraising. I think there's a lot of grain of salt you need to take that spin with because they're hopping on the bandwagon. But I think there was also a strategic move there in that, just like Alabama, they realized if there were proactive national Democrats swooping in to try and help with this race, it would only hurt Conor Lamb, who was trying to distance himself from Nancy Pelosi and say, hey, I'm just talking about the district. Don't lump me in with national Democrats. You may not like vote for me because I'm conservative and I'm from here, etc.

So that was the spin from Democrats. But also the fact that, like Domenico said, there's more than 100 districts that are more Democratic than this one that are currently represented by Republicans, and Democrats are rearing up to compete in them. And this does fit in line with something that Tom Perez and other Democratic leaders have been saying for more than a year now of they need to just show up. You saw it in Virginia in the statehouse races that shifted so much there. And you saw it here when you run a candidate. It is much better than not running a candidate, which is some pretty base level analysis.

Right. But it's true. Democrats just didn't run a candidate in this race a couple of elections in a row. Now they do. Now they compete. And suddenly they've picked up a seat that nobody expected them to win. So Paul Ryan is saying Conor Lamb was a pro-life, pro-gun, anti-Nancy Pelosi conservative. Hold on a second. He's not pro-life. He's not at all. Exactly. He isn't actually pro-life. He supports abortion rights. He just personally, like a lot of we've talked about this before, like a lot of Democrats doesn't personally support abortion. But what the Democratic spin on him is that he supports Obamacare, that he opposed the Republican tax cut and that he was running to save Social Security and Medicare. Yeah. And not only that would stand up for union rights. There were a lot of typical Democratic platform things that they emphasized in a way to try and appeal to people who voted

for President Trump. Look, Democrats, what this kind of win does for a party is it's like, you know, adding a match to an already roaring fire. It just helps them with recruiting. And we're seeing the numbers of candidates explode in this cycle from Democrats, especially women who are running in huge numbers in all kinds of districts and solid Republican districts. You're seeing a lot of women run, for example. So, you know, that is what these kinds of things can do. You have to kind of keep momentum going. Remember in the primary race in the 2016 election, Bernie Sanders needed a win or two. He won in New Hampshire, came really close in Iowa, was able to raise a lot of money to kind of continue his streak into those other races down the line. It's very similar to this now because they have to keep some momentum, get a narrative going. And that's why Republicans spent so much money to try to stop that from happening. One last little question here, which is there was a third party candidate on the ballot, a libertarian candidate. And, you know, he got fourteen

hundred ish votes. That was more than the margin apparent margin of victory for Conor Lamb. Yeah. And it struck me that this just keeps happening in high profile races, which I think maybe is an indication of just how closely divided we are on so many things. In this race, the third party vote gets more votes than the difference between the two candidates. In the Alabama special Senate, the write in votes were more than the margin between Doug Jones and Roy Moore. And of course, in several of the key states in the 2016 presidential election, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein earned more votes than the difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. So it's remarkable to me that this just keeps happening. Or maybe there are just 1,400 libertarian voters in this district. Yeah, I was going to say, you know, could see that there might

be 1,400 libertarians hanging around. This is the home of the Whiskey Rebellion, after all. Okay, you are now officially bringing in some history that I don't know. A key libertarian moment in American history. Where they drank lots of whiskey in rebellion. They rebelled against a whiskey tax and George Washington came out and knocked him around. It's too bad Ron Elving is not here. It really is too bad that Ron Elving is not here. All right.

And with that, we are done for today. We will be back in your feed tomorrow with our weekly roundup. Keep up with our coverage on NPR.org, NPR Politics on Facebook, and of course, on your local public radio station. You can always catch one of us on Up First every weekday morning. And if you like the show, we would love if you would subscribe and also rate us in Apple podcasts. It really helps others find us. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House for NPR. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress and I'm finally returning to Washington.

Welcome back, Scott. I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. Ever get to Friday, look back on the week and say to yourself, what just happened? I'm Sam Sanders. Check out my podcast, It's Been a Minute, where every Friday we catch up on the news and the culture of the week and try to make sense of it all. Listen on the NPR One app or wherever you get your podcasts. This week on Invisibilia, we ask, what's the best way to lose? We look for clues in beekeeping, grammar, and in my 74-year-old mom's desire

to jump out of an airplane. All right, guys, I'm going to start getting low-wound straight up. I'm so excited. I'm Hannah Rosen. Join us.