At around 1 A.M. on Wednesday, Conor Lamb, the Democratic candidate for Pennsylvania’s Eighteenth Congressional District, appeared onstage at the Hilton Garden Inn in Washington County. “It took a little longer than we thought, but we did it,” Lamb said, beaming. The audience erupted into cheers, then filed out into the frigid parking lot.
At the time, it wasn’t totally clear what Lamb had done, other than provide an extremely close race in an area that Donald Trump had won by nineteen points. The results were so close that, after eleven o’clock last night, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer prodded Larry Spahr, the director of elections in Washington County, to stay up through the night to count more than a thousand absentee ballots. Speaking to Spahr by phone on national TV, Blitzer asked, “Have you ever seen anything like this in your county?”
“Absolutely,” Spahr replied, refusing to play the part of country fellow overawed by either the election or the sudden national interest in Washington County. In previous days, reporters had swarmed the area, tweeting quaint-sounding street names, like Apple Pie Ridge Road and Horse Emporium Lane.
For all the outside attention, the concerns that dictated the campaigns of Lamb and the Republican candidate, Rick Saccone, in PA-18 remained intensely local. This morning, I spoke by phone to Mykie Reidy, one of Lamb’s most committed progressive organizers. She’d gone to bed at 2 A.M. and risen at 6 A.M., too excited to sleep. While campaigning for Lamb, Reidy, who lives in one of PA-18’s wealthy northern suburbs, learned about the priorities of rural citizens in her district, first among them health care. In doing so, she had put aside her more progressive views to join with other Democrats who were more conservative. “I’m not worried about feeding my family,” she said. “I have room in my life to be concerned with social-justice policy positions.” There is, she said, great value in puncturing what she calls the “blue bubble,” especially in support of Lamb, who focusses on issues that most people agree with, including support for workers’ rights and Medicare. “He’s a great communicator, embodies a sense of service, and is likable,” she said. “That might seem like a shallow thing to hang your support on, but, in the end, I saw that the genuine concern for the people he was representing was a more important quality than a particular stance on a particular issue.”
New Yorker writers on the 2018 midterm elections.
In discussions about Lamb’s victory, the issue of character comes up repeatedly. Tom Northrop is the publisher of the newspaper of record in Washington County, the Observer-Reporter, which has been in his family since 1902, and which made the controversial decision to endorse the charismatic Democrat, despite the paper’s largely conservative readership. (“We believe one of the two candidates would be better positioned to be the kind of moderate, conciliatory figure that is needed in this tempestuous moment in our political life, and that is Conor Lamb,” the endorsement read.) The people of PA-18 are sick of polarized politics, which distract from the pressing economic issues that his readers face daily, Northrop has told me in the past; Saccone’s messages, supported by tens of millions of dollars from outside Republican concerns, might have done him harm. “The brutality of the attack ads really turned people off,” Northrop said by phone this morning. But it was the support of unions and Lamb’s ability to keep the race’s focus away from Trump that won him his narrow victory. “Lamb was brilliant,” Northrop said.
Others I spoke to were more resigned. Jason Clark, the president of the Washington County Pork Association, didn’t stay up to watch the returns. He didn’t vote for Lamb but assumed that he would triumph. “As soon as he got the endorsement from the unions, I said it’s over,” Clark told me on the phone this morning, from his job selling auto parts. (No small-scale farmer could possibly support himself solely by farming, he noted.) Of Lamb, Clark said, “There’s things I don’t like about the man, but he’s got some ideas. He’s got youthfulness.” And to Clark, for whom military issues are important, Lamb’s service mattered. “The guy signed up as a marine,” he said. Most of all, Clark wanted his fellow-Republicans to “concede gracefully”—with the kind of attitude that he wanted to see return to politics, both local and national. “Congratulations,” he said.
