The NPR Politics Podcast - Democrats Hoping For Upset In Pennsylvania Special Election

Episode Date: March 12, 2018

A special election in Pennsylvania on Tuesday is garnering an unusual amount of national attention. It's for a House seat in PA-18, a deeply Republican district that Trump won by 20 points in 2016. Polls show an incredibly tight race between Republican Rick Saccone and Democrat Conor Lamb. Democrats are hoping for an upset, while Republicans are fighting hard to hold the seat. This episode: host/White House correspondent Tamara Keith, political editor Domenico Montanaro, and congressional correspondent Scott Detrow in Pittsburgh. 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 Curtis and Valerie, and we are calling from PA District 18, where we are on our way to cast our votes in one very special election. This podcast was recorded at 1.36 p.m. on Monday, the 12th of March. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage on NPR.org or the NPR One app and on your local public radio station. All right, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR politics podcast. There is a special election in Pennsylvania tomorrow to fill a House seat vacated last fall by a longtime Republican congressman. It's a deeply Republican district where President Trump won by 20 points in 2016. But the polls show an incredibly tight race.

I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House for NPR. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. So, Scott, last time we talked to you, you were in California. Now you are in Pittsburgh. I've traded sunny San Diego for hilly Pittsburgh. And, you know, happy to be here, too. And you are camping out there until the votes are counted.

There are a few things that are special about tomorrow's special election in southwestern Pennsylvania. For one, this is a district, as you said, just outside of Pittsburgh that should be a safe Republican seat. And yet it does not look at this moment like an extremely safe Republican seat. And two, this district will not even exist by the end of this year because of redistricting in Pennsylvania. And yet both Republicans and Democrats are spending so much money to win this seat. So, Scott, why? Yeah. So let's start with the fact that this should not be this close. This district opened up back in the fall when Republican Tim Murphy had to resign because of a scandal. Murphy, a longtime anti-abortion advocate, text messages emerged where he was encouraging someone he was having an affair with to go get an abortion.

Very quickly resigned in the wake of those texts becoming public. And I remember writing in the story about his resignation, don't expect this seat to have a competitive special election. Not only did President Trump win it by 20 points, Democrats didn't even field a challenger against Murphy the last few elections. And here we are today. Things changed on that front. Hashtag 2018. Yeah. So Conor Lamb is the Democrat running against Rick Saccone, who's a Republican. Lamb is a younger guy. He's 33 years old. He's got a really good resume. He's a Marine and he worked as a federal prosecutor. And that is the stuff that a good campaign ad is made of. He's running against Rick Saccone, who's a longtime state representative,

who Republicans have been pretty grumpy about the way he's campaigned this race. They feel like he's really let lamb into the race. And like you said, it's really close in a district that Republicans are freaking out about because it is so close. So is this the traditional like, oh, a candidate's not doing well, so let's blame the candidate kind of thing? Or is Saccone, from what you've seen, and you've covered a lot of campaigns and candidates, is he really that lackluster on the trail compared to Lamb? A little bit of both. A little bit of both. I think what has really scrambled this race is that the backgrounds of the two particular candidates are allowing the Democrats to run a working class populist campaign and

energize the types of people who turned out for Donald Trump in this district against the Republican. And that's for a couple of different reasons. One, Conor Lamb is pretty conservative. He notably put in his first campaign ad in this race, him shooting an AR-15, not the type of thing a Democrat usually puts in a campaign ad. And Rick Saccone, on the other hand, has a pretty long track record of voting against union issues, particularly this issue of, you know, it's called card check shorthand, the idea of whether or not you have to be forced to join a union or whether you have the option to opt out of the union. So the labor unions have gone all in

on this race and are aggressively campaigning for Lamb, making phone calls for Lamb, running ads for Lamb, doing everything they can to get him to win, and in the process picking up a lot of votes from people who voted for Donald Trump last time around. This also seems like a race like a lot of these other special elections that we've had this year where it becomes sort of a proxy war. And I know that Democrats are doing their very best to not make this a national race. But it seems like it sort of has become at least like President Trump showed up. Oh, yeah. Right near the district on Saturday night.

You know, one of my favorite town names in Pennsylvania, Moon Township. He was in Moon Township campaigning with Saccone, big airplane hangar rally. And you're right. And President Trump made that argument when he was speaking, saying, look, Lamb is talking about how conservative he is, but the bottom line is you need to vote for Republicans because Republicans are the people who back me in Washington. Somebody like Lamb, he's never going to vote for us. He's now saying, and I appreciate his nice words about me. This is Trump country, right? So he has to say nice. Okay, he's smart. So he's saying nice things. Here's the problem. As soon as he gets in, he's not going to vote for us. He's going to vote the party line. He has to. And if he doesn't,

he's never going to a chairman of a committee. You know, it's a whole crazy system. But he's going to vote the party line. He doesn't care about us. So, Scott, Republicans nationally have been, you know, despite Lamb's kind of conservative record that he's been trying to play up, have been trying the same old kind of playbook, trying to tie Conor Lamb to Nancy Pelosi. Right. So how much of this is is working one and two? You know, is like is that the way to go to kind of cookie cutter in someone like Conor Lamb because he's a Democrat, that he's just make him make him Nancy Pelosi because they don't have confidence in Rick Saccone? Well, I mean, I think they're trying to make every Democrat Nancy Pelosi. Right. It's been pretty effective in the past. They feel like that's one reason why they were

able to hang on to the Georgia special election, because they just blasted John Ossoff last year with Nancy Pelosi linking because Conor Lamb's last name is Lamb. That has provided the opportunity for a lot of puns in these advertisements that he's part of Nancy Pelosi's flock. Yeah. And it's like every time you get to the district to cover a race, it always startles me, even though you know it's going to happen when there's so much money being spent. Every time I've walked by a TV, every time I've turned on a TV, it's two or three ads in a row. And they all feature Conor Lamb because they're either pro-Lamb ads that Lamb is running or ads that these outside Republican groups are running

that are blasting him and trying to say he's just a puppet of Nancy Pelosi. How do we know Conor Lamb is a Pelosi liberal? Lamb joined Pelosi to oppose your tax cut and to defend Obamacare. Conor Lamb has a weak record. As a prosecutor, Conor Lamb's efforts ended in plea deals, which allowed a teacher who lied about his sexual misconduct to keep his taxpayer-funded retirement benefits,

allowed a drug kingpin who flooded our streets with cocaine and heroin to receive a lighter sentence. He grew up here, went to Central Catholic, then college and law school, served four years in the Marines, still loves to shoot, became a federal prosecutor.

Now, Conor Lamb is running for Congress to fight for jobs, health care and Social Security. I find it fascinating that, Scott, you're saying that there that Republicans are essentially trying to make this race a referendum on Lamb in many ways. And the race may be becoming one because, you know, Lamb is the one who's gotten so much attention given his ads and given the Republican ads. Lamb is the one who's been in the focus of everything. But, you know, what's fascinating to me is in just talking to some Democrats who've worked on these kinds of house races over the last couple of days, they're starting to try to talk about the tax bill and how if Lamb were to win, that it proves that the tax bill is actually not a message that Republicans are easily running on, which is fascinating because a moderate Democrat that I talked to earlier in the week said that he thought that Democrats themselves were doing a pretty bad job messaging the tax plan. Yeah. Is anybody there, Scott, talking about it? Not that many actual voters I've talked to, but I think that is a good argument because I was talking about all of these ads being run linking Lamb to Pelosi and National Democrats. A lot of that has been focused on the tax bill and saying that Nancy Pelosi said that this tax bill did nothing but give people crumbs.

Yet Nancy Pelosi and Conor Lamb are still opposing your tax cut. Lamb called it a complete betrayal. And Pelosi said this is Armageddon. Middle class tax cuts, bonuses, pay raises. Crumbs is so pathetic. Pelosi and Lamb, too out of touch, too many taxes. Crumbs is the phrase that Republicans are going to be talking about the rest of the year. So that has been the advertising. But if you look at the polls, they've not really dragged Lamb's numbers down. He's ahead in some polls and it's very close no matter what you look at. So I think the thinking is, well, if they hit him with this so much and it didn't work, what does that say about this argument? Yeah, that makes sense. And I've seen a lot of Democrats

start to talk about that. One said that the Republicans have run the lion's share of their ad campaign dollars on the tax plan and they're willing to use this the next day, even if Lamb were to lose by a couple points because it's such a it's such a Trump district. So as I'm thinking about this race and why why it might matter outside of Pennsylvania 18 when even though it is a special election. I mean, I guess in some ways it's a trial run for messaging for the fall. It is and it isn't right, because certainly the outside group ads are being run that way. But I think on the Democratic side, they are trying so hard to make it be anything but that. Look, we can overread a lot of these special elections. OK, and we love to do that. You know, I think that we need to step back for a second and think about where this fits in. It's sort of like reading one poll or reading another poll. What we have seen is this trend line over

the past year of Democrats overperforming, Republicans underperforming in districts where President Trump has done well. On average, in the five special elections so far that Republicans of Democrats overperforming, Republicans underperforming in districts where President Trump has done well. On average, in the five special elections so far that Republicans have all won, and we should say that Democrats have done better than expected. Republicans have underperformed President Trump by an average of eight points overall. So the real question here for me when I look at tomorrow night is, does the Trump coalition transfer in the way that the Obama coalition never seemed to transfer during those Obama years? President Obama won a lot of seats in the House and Senate for his party when he was on the ballot. When he wasn't on the ballot, Democrats lost a lot of seats.

There are two areas of the district that I'm going to be paying close attention to as results come in tomorrow. So the district, it's a semi-circle underneath Pittsburgh and then stretches down. So right underneath Pittsburgh, there are high-income, high-education suburbs. And these are the places that Democrats really view as ground zero of their attempt to flip the House. But then in the southern part of this district, it's a totally different part of the world. Washington County, Greene County, this is the western Pennsylvania Trump country that you've heard so much about.

This is a big coal mine area. This is an area where natural gas drilling, the fracking boom is really centered. And it's pretty culturally conservative. So I went down to a rally that Conor Lamb had with United Mine Workers of America yesterday in Greene County in Waynesburg. And this is not a part of the world that is friendly to Hillary Clinton, to Barack Obama. And I was just struck at this rally with mine workers because President Trump talks about the coal mine so much, right?

That's like shorthand for his populist appeal. Oh, yeah. And yet you have the president of the mine workers union, a guy named Cecil Roberts, who is one of the more unique speakers I have ever seen campaign. He basically turned this rally into an old school tent revival. Let me say this to you. If you want somebody who will stand up in Congress and fight for your job and fight. He's thumping the podium. He's pacing. He's pointing this part of the world. Then you should vote for Conor. If you want more jobs, protect your job, you should vote for Conor. If you want to protect Social Security, you should vote for Conor. If you want to protect Medicare, vote for Conor. If you want to protect your right to a free election when you want to join a union. Vote for Conor. It's a rare message for Democrats, and it's a rare message delivered in that way.

You know, there were a lot of those kinds of union rallies, you know, 40 years ago, but they've faded quite a bit. And I think that that's a big piece of the working class part of the Democratic Party that's been hollowed out. And now you wind up with a party that's not exactly a big tent party anymore. It's more cosmopolitan, it's more idealistic, and it's not one that has been talking about, you know, and being rooted in the kinds of places that the Democratic Party was rooted in before Reagan. When unions were the thing that were seen as maintaining the economic well-being of a certain class, then they had a lot of political strength. When that strength started to decline, then the cultural issues started to take over.

OK, let's go fast forward Wednesday morning. If Saccone wins by two or three points, then is the story. President Trump has his mojo, Republicans win, or is it, wow, that was a 17 point drop from what Trump had in that district, you know, less than a year and a half ago? I think it's both, right? I mean, it would be that Republicans win six in a row, that they keep winning these House specials, and the Democrats can't quite get over the hump. Yes, they won a slew of down-ballot races, legislative races in Virginia. Yes, they were able to win in Alabama. The Senate race. He said this himself. And, you know, that was a line.

That kind of thing was something that went too far for Republican voters in the state. And he wasn't able to get the kind of support that a regular Republican might have gotten. But when it comes to the narrative the day after, you know, if it's a close race, you know, it will be that Republicans still won. Democrats haven't quite gotten over the hump, but that they had more enthusiasm. And there's still questions about the strength of that Trump coalition. And if Lamb wins? I think it'd be a huge upset. But I think I'm going to argue what Domenico said as well, that if it's close, either way, I think that Democrats have to feel confident going into November,

because if Rick Saccone narrowly wins this race, if it's within a couple of points either way, especially with the new maps in Pennsylvania, there's like a half dozen seats that are more Democratic friendly than this district that are currently held by Republicans that I think Democrats will suddenly feel like, wow, we can really flip these seats and do pretty well in Pennsylvania and in other districts like this all across the country. But I think the moral victories are getting pretty stale for Democrats, right? I mean, how many times in a row can you get excited about losing by a narrow margin? And I think Democrats are very hungry for a win here. Right. That's true. If Lamb wins, though,

it's a huge blow to Trump. Democrats would finally have gotten over that hump and it would just add fuel to this notion that Democrats have a potential wave coming in the fall. And Trump's put this on himself by going to Pennsylvania, not just neighboring, but then tweeting about Saccone, by talking about Saccone. He's taken it on himself. And if S were and if, you know, if Saccone were to lose, it would be a big blow to the president. So we will be back on Wednesday with the full results out of Pennsylvania. And until then, keep up with our coverage on NPR.org, NPR Politics on Facebook, and of course, on your local public radio station. You can also always catch one of us on Up First every weekday morning. And if you like the show, we would love it if you would subscribe and also rate us in Apple Podcasts. It really helps other people find us. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House for NPR. I'm Scott Detrow in Pittsburgh this week.

And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. 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 load one trained up. I'm so excited. I'm Hannah Rosen. Join us. Every 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.

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