by Sandy » Wed Mar 14, 2018 12:32 pm
Not asleep, just a little busy and pre-occupied at the moment. At any rate, this is becoming so routine, I wasn't sure there'd be much discussion. Though I don't live in that particular district, it is in the Pittsburgh television market so I've been bombarded by endless ads.
In spite of all kinds of spin on the analysis, this is what it looks like. A moderate Democrat won a congressional district that was one of the deepest, reddest in the state, and one of the most gerrymandered. Trump won it by 20 in 2016, Romney by 17 in 2012. The former congressman in that district, Tim Murphy, was a conservative, vocally pro-life Republican who had to step down because he asked his mistress to have an abortion after he got her pregnant. He ran unopposed last time around.
It is what everything else has been in special elections across the country, a prime example of a major shift away from Trump that is most likely a national phenomenon. Starting with Ossoff gaining 18 percentage points and almost taking a gerrymandered deep red district in Georgia, the Democrats have picked up congressional, senate and state house seats in a wide variety of places, mostly "Trump country," or at least, red states. There seems to be hesitation on the part of the media sources considered on the "left," to call this what it is. It's still early but it is a trend, and if you count the number of congressional districts across the country where a Republican holds a seat with a smaller Republican base than this one, it comes out to something like 110.
Notwithstanding the fact that Trump and Pence came twice, and Don Jr. on the Monday before the election, even if the remaining few absentee ballots (fewer than 1,000 by last count) overcome Lamb's 625 vote margin, this was a crushing, devastating, destructive defeat. The GOP sank more than $10 million of its precious reserve of congressional election fund into this race, to win a symbolic victory in a district that will be drastically redrawn for the 2016 election. Lamb lives in the re-drawn district, which will include a much larger chunk of heavily Democratic Allegheny County, and which will lose all of heavily Republican Westmoreland County. Saccone lives in Washington County, which became much more Democratic in this cycle. Since Trump came twice to help Saccone, and so did Pence, and Donald Jr. was here on Monday, I think you can call this a referendum on Trump, and you can say it was a devastating, disastrous one. You could have said that if the outcome had been this close the other way. The exit polling is pretty clear. There's no real excitement about the alleged tax cut bill. People don't believe the economy is better than it was under Obama. The steel industry benefits, but a lot of other related industries are worried about the prices and the effect of loss of trade resulting from it. And all those coal miners in Washington county are still waiting for Trump to deliver on promises, so they shifted their votes, doubling the county's democratic turnout.