Yesterday, Democrat Conor Lamb defeated his Republican opponent Rick Saccone in a Pennsylvania special election to fill the vacancy left when Republican congressman Tim Murphy resigned. Candidate Donald Trump had won the district, Pennsylvania Congressional District 18, by 20 points in 2016. The district is so reliably Republican that the Democrats did not even bother to field a candidate against Murphy in 2014 and 2016. Conor won the razor thin victory by running as a defiantly moderate Democrat, someone whose views were not at all in line with his party's liberalism, but whose views better match the conservative leaning voters of District 18. Although President Donald Trump came to the district the weekend before the election to fire up the Republican base, his efforts, as they did in
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Alabama, failed to inspire the GOP faithful. They weren't buying what Trump was selling.
I can hear the excuses now. Lamb ran as a Republican-lite. Saccone was a horrible candidate. Yeah, so what? The fact is District 18 is a heavy, heavy Republican district. When the numbers are that stacked in the GOP's favor, the Democrats cannot win a district simply by running a candidate who talks like a Republican even if the GOP fields a candidate who can't walk and chew gum at the same time.
Make no mistake about it...
what gave Conor Lamb a shot at victory is the unpopularity of Donald Trump. Trump's presidency has been an unmitigated failure. For 14 months, the Trump administration has teetered from one crisis to another, with the President taking pains to alienate every demographic group with the exception of under-educated white men. While Republicans still back Trump by 80% plus, the fact is independents, those people who voted for Trump because they couldn't stand Hillary, have long ago left and they show no sign of coming back. Trumpers don't get that. They think Donald Trump won some sweeping victory on November 8, 2016, when in fact Trump only won a narrow victory in the Electoral College because he faced the most spectacularly unpopular candidate the Democrats could find.
For Trumpers, the approaching blue wave due to hit the shores on November 6th (which even they must by now admit is coming) surely must be someone else's fault. How about George Soros? Nancy Pelosi? Chuck Schumer? Bob Mueller? Paul Ryan? Mitch McConnell? Lord knows the Kool-Aid drinking Trumpers will never actually hold the President responsible for anything. The ethos of "personal responsibility" does not apply when the leader of your cult is named Donald J. Trump.
But it should. Trump and his embarrassingly incompetent and scandal-riddled tenure is destroying the party I have believed in and supported since my 18th birthday. It will take a generation to rebuild the Republican party post-Trump. The sooner that process begins the better.