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Why Democrats Should Worry About Conor Lamb's Victory
Why Democrats Should Worry About Conor Lamb's Victory
The Worst Government Possible, on Purpose
The Worst Government Possible, on Purpose
Why Democrats Should Worry About Conor Lamb's Victory
Dems pick up a House seat in Pennsylvania – but is Lamb the start of a
winning strategy or the establishment sidelining the Trump Resistance?
Is this the face of the future for the Democratic Party? Drew Angerer/Getty
By Bob Moser
20 hours ago
Republicans are fucked. There is no other possible way to interpret
Democrat Conor Lamb's ridiculously implausible victory on Tuesday in a
special congressional election in Pennsylvania. The 33-year-old
ex-Marine, former prosecutor, and certified hottie edged out a veteran
Republican lawmaker in a steel-country district that Donald Trump
carried by nearly 20 points just 16 months ago. A district where
Democrats didn't even bother to run a candidate in the previous two
elections. A district that's practically as white as Utah. A district
that's exactly the kind of place where Trumpism is supposed to be
bulletproof. "We should be able to elect a box of hammers in this
district," moaned GOP consultant Mike Murphy. "If we're losing here, you
can bet there is a Democratic wave coming."
RELATED
Democrat Declares Victory in Pennsylvania – Here's What You Need to Know
A tight House race on GOP turf suggests Donald Trump has become a
liability for his party – and there's a field of opportunity for
Democrats in 2018
After Tuesday, it looks like a huge wave forming. In a whopping 110
Republican-held House districts across the country, Trump won in 2016 by
less than he did in Pennsylvania's 18th. Democrats only need to win 24
of them to take back a House majority in November. Even with their
preternatural knack for turning sure wins into losses (see, for example,
Clinton vs. Trump), the consultants who run the party in Washington
would really have to pull out all the stops to prevent The Resistance
from lifting the Democrats back to power.
Don't worry, though – the Democrats will try to screw it up. It's a
time-honored party tradition. On Tuesday, of course, the blue side was
mostly stamping and cheering in unison for Lamb, lefties along with
centrists. What was not to love about Trump Republicans losing in a
district that's often referred to as "Northern West Virginia"?
Especially after the GOP poured more than $10 million into trying to
save the seat. Making the schadenfreude even more delicious, Trump threw
himself into the campaign full-bore in its final stages. Last week, he
announced a steep tariff on steel and aluminum – the one issue, more
than any other, that might sway this labor-heavy district into the GOP
column. ("Do you think it could possibly have all been for western
Pennsylvania?" Gail Collins asked rhetorically in The New York Times.
"Duh.")
View image on Twitter
View image on Twitter
Andrew Rush
@andrewrush
This is the danger of campaigning at a candy factory. #PA18
3:10 PM - Mar 12, 2018 · Sarris Ice Cream Parlor
23.2K
7,203 people are talking about this
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All the most Trumpy of surrogates were parachuted in: Ivanka, Kellyanne,
VP Pence. On Election Eve, Donald Trump Jr. toured a candy factory with
the doomed Republican candidate, Rick Saccone, resulting in indelible
images of the "first son" wearing a hairnet over his helmet of
painted-on black hair and being interviewed by a chocolate bunny. Over
the weekend, Trump pere held his second rally for Saccone, holding forth
for 75 minutes of vintage bombast. The president gifted the Democratic
candidate with a nickname, "Lamb the Sham," and explained the sobriquet:
"He's trying to act like a Republican. But he won't give me one vote"
once he gets to Congress, he warned his raucous fans.
But the voters in the district knew that wasn't true: If Lamb made
anything clear in his campaign, it's that he most certainly will vote
with Trump on occasion. On guns, for one thing: Lamb opposes a ban on
assault weapons, such as the AR-15 he was shown firing in one of his
campaign ads. He supports the president's trade policies, too including
the new tariffs. He pooh-poohs single-payer healthcare. He's as
"pro-military" as a person could be. (He is also "personally opposed" to
abortion, though he says it should be legal.)
Lamb, for all his fresh-faced charm, ran and won as a Trump Democrat – a
flashback to the "Republican Lite" candidacies the Democrats specialized
in during the Clinton '90s and '00s. He was so reluctant to criticize
the president that NBC reporter Kacie Hunt made it her mission on
Tuesday to ask him about Trump and try to extract something. Lamb
wouldn't rise to the bait:
Kasie Hunt
✔
@kasie
Conor Lamb has no comment on whether President Trump is a stable
commander in chief based on today’s events.
11:54 AM - Mar 13, 2018
377
163 people are talking about this
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"Just try getting this guy to say anything critical of Trump," Hunt
marveled on MSNBC. An equally mystified Guardian reporter noted,
accurately, that "Lamb has been almost painfully non-controversial." In
a rally over the weekend in a rural corner of the district, the
president of the United Mine Workers, Cecil Roberts, summed up the
reasons why white people were about to vote for a Democrat here, hailing
Lamb as "a God-fearing, union-supporting, gun-owning, job-protecting,
pension-defending, Social Security-believing,
sending-drug-dealers-to-jail Democrat."
In his victory speech Tuesday night, Lamb unintentionally pointed up the
vacuousness of the platform he ran on: "Our issue in this campaign was
common ground," he said. Which is not an "issue," of course; it's a
particularly lame Hallmark sentiment.
The first ad Lamb ran in the campaign – his "bio" spot – set the tone.
Watching it, you wouldn't suspect that the candidate was anything but a
good old Republican. The first image you see is a little-boy Lamb,
posing in a football uniform. "He grew up here," it starts, "went to
Central Catholic, then college and law school. Served four years in the
Marines. Still loves to shoot." (This is where the AR-15 makes its star
turn.) The word "Democrat" comes up twice – once, when the voiceover
says Lamb is "the only candidate calling for Democrats and Republicans
to have new leadership," and again, when the final message appears on
screen as the ad fades out, promising he'll "work with Democrats and
Republicans." (In a subsequent ad, Lamb claimed he could heal the
partisan divide because he was a Marine.)
The real message of Lamb's campaign basically boiled down to this: "Look
at what a fine young normal white fellow I am!" But, hey: It worked –
partly because Lamb does come across as a kind of professional Eagle
Scout. Only a hopeless left-wing purist could argue that Lamb's approach
was the wrong one for the 18th district in Pennsylvania. No gun-banning
feminist with ardent backing from Our Revolution could have won this
race. And on balance, it's certainly better to have one more
insufficiently liberal Democrat in Congress than one more GOP lap-dog
for Trump. Lamb's campaign, for all its glossy emptiness, certainly
offers some helpful hints for Democrats running in overwhelmingly
Republican districts like his.
Lamb greets his supporters after giving his victory speech on March
14th. Salwan Georges/The Washington Post/Getty
But the Democratic establishment doesn't just see Lamb as a model for
running in deep-red districts that are overwhelmingly white. They want
him to be a model for Democrats running everywhere – to see Lamb's
victory, in Jonathan Chait's words at New York, as "proof of concept for
a strategy that could replicate itself across the country." And so, of
course, do the conservative Blue Dogs. Tim Ryan, the anti-Bernie Bro
from Ohio who challenged Pelosi for speaker last year, says that Lamb
"embodies to me what the next iteration of the Democratic Party is going
to look like. Veterans, working class, really representing people who
are underemployed, who were maybe making some decent money 10-15 years
ago but aren't now."
This isn't just a few scattered moderates talking: The Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee is pursuing a centrist strategy for
winning in the fall, working in close coordination with the Blue Dog
Coalition. The DCCC chair, Ben Ray Lujan, started the cycle last year by
announcing there would be no "litmus test for Democratic candidates,"
signaling that the Democrats would support "candidates that fit the
district." Which is code for: You can hate abortion and Obamacare and
love guns and run like a Republican, and we'll still support you if we
think you can win. In places where Democrats have both progressive and
moderate candidates running in primaries, the party has tried to
persuade left-wingers (including some notable candidates of color) to
step out of the race—in some cases, sharing "opposition research" they
expect Republicans would use against the leftie in a general election.
In Texas, before a congressional primary in Houston, the Democrats went
public with their opposition research against the most liberal candidate
in the field. (It backfired pretty spectacularly.)
This clamor for centrism in a time of Resistance would be profoundly
baffling, if it wasn't the Democratic establishment we were talking
about here. The DCCC's strategy risks deflating the Resistance, turning
off non-white voters, and dampening the turnout that Democrats should be
able to expect in November, given the level of Trump animus across the
country. Even if the DCCC does its worst, though, Democrats will still
almost certainly take back the House in November. The question is
whether they'll win it back in a way that points the party forward. The
America of the future looks absolutely nothing like the 18th District in
Pennsylvania. And the future of the Democratic Party looks nothing like
Conor Lamb.
full:
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-democrats-should-worry-about-conor-lambs-victory-w517866
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