PA-18: Blue Dog

Not to put too fine a point on it but this Lamb fellow won a deep red Trump district becuase he presented as an eminently reasonable, moderate democrat. Marine combat veteran, pro-gun, hates Nancy Pelosi.

What's not to like?

Back in 2006 Chicago Mob boss and future Obama consiglieri Rahm Emanuel ran the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee. Under his leadership the DCCC recruited dozens of candidates just like Lamb, usually called Blue Dogs. One such example was former Redskins QB Heath Shuler, who got elected in South Carolina. An athlete, a businessman, and a practicing Christian, Shuler had nothing in common with Poxi Pelosi. He was eventually gerrymandered out. The rest of the Blue Dogs died on the alter of Obamacare. Basically Emanuel and Pelosi forced them to vote for the deeply unpopular bill, which led to the epic shellacking the party took in 2010. This was the plan all along.

But for a brief two congressional sessions these Blue Dogs secured a blue congressional majority.

They even wrote a book about it.

PA-18: This Time its Personal

Ok, don't believe me. I'm just the guy who three weeks before the presidential election was saying, 'You folks know Trump's gonna win, right?'

[Yeah you also thought the GOP would win PA-18-Ed]

True enough.

The Dems won becuase they had a good candidate and the GOP had a bad candidate. Quote  the Daily Caller:

Conor Lamb finally gave Democrats their blueprint to win back the House in November: support the second amendment, support trump’s tariffs, support fracking, call for Medicaid cuts, replace identity politics with patriotism, serve honorably in the U.S. Marines, dog whistle as often as possible that you are a Democrat in name only, and throw Nancy Pelosi so far under the bus they’ll need a backhoe to excavate her.

Oh, and the Lambs are a locally known political family.

Now let's ask ourselves, how many of these guys do the Dems got? How many pro-gun Dems are going to make it through their primary process? Yeah, that's what I thought.

We'll go more into this next week, but this race was won locally  and has no relevance in the fall. 

Always trust content from Will Stroock.

Update: as I was saying.

Has PA-18 Gone Mad?

Yes, yes it has. One can tell becuase the same people who assured us of a Hillary! landslide now assure us that PA-18 is a harbinger of GOP electoral Armageddon in November and the only thing that can stop it is Bruce Willis and his rag tag team of oil rig misfits.

Our friend Bill Katz at Urgent Agenda writes the following:

The "journalists" of CNN are having a field day. John King, who normally sounds marginally sober, was already speaking of a "blue wave," and actually used the Senate race in Alabama as an example. In that case, the Republicans, in a Republican state, worked hard to lose an election by putting up Judge Roy Moore, a toxic candidate with a questionable background. The Democrats put up a candidate who ran far to the right and sounded like a typical Republican.

There may well be a blue wave in November, but it didn't begin last night in Pennsylvania, and it certainly didn't begin in the oddball Senate race in Alabama.

Bill Katz is our house pessimist. The man gets paid to worry. He's not worried. You know its BS when the media are trying to lump in Alabama in this whole blue wave thing. 

One other item. Last year there were four special house elections and the GOP won all of them.

PA-18 was lost becuase of local issues on the ground. The question for the GOP is not will there be a blue wave, the question is what went wrong in PA-18? Mostly we think the Dems had an ex-marine, pro-gun candidate who doesn't sound like pox-ridden Nancy Pelosi and the GOP had a lackluster snoozer who sounds like your uncle at Thanksgiving. That is the Dems had a good candidate, the GOP had a bad candidate.

Circumstances, Ideas, Candidates. Remember the mantra people.

PA is Special

Well as of this morning PA-18s special congressional race is too close to call.

It doesn't really matter at this point. The Dems got a massive turnout in an unimportant house race in a deep red part of PA and fought the GOP to a standstill.

The Dems had a good candidate, the GOP had a lackluster candidate.

I saw a blurb from CNN saying the GOP is in real trouble this fall, therefore we may rest easy that the GOP is not in real trouble this fall.

Still the Dems can turnout their vote, that's for sure.

The GOP better have good candidates.