Pennsylvania's 18th CD Special Election Results: The Blue Dog Can Still Hunt

Democrats are declaring victory in last night's special election in Pennsylvania's 18th congressional district though there are still absentee and provisional ballots to count. Democrat Conor Lamb leads Republican Rick Saccone by 641 votes.

FiveThirtyEight's Nathaniel Rakich in "The Pennsylvania 18th Result Tells Us What Everything Else Has Been Telling Us For A While: We get it! Republicans are in deep trouble.," explains why Lamb's lead will hold:

The exact margin will likely change, but it’s going to be very difficult for Saccone to make up that deficit. The only votes left to be counted are around 200 absentee ballots in Greene County (expected to be announced on Wednesday) as well as a handful of provisional and overseas ballots, which may take days to finalize. There may not even be 641 ballots left to count.

Nor is a recount likely to change the final result. Although it would be pretty easy for Republicans to request a recount should they want one, recounts typically don’t shift election margins by that much. That’s especially true in Pennsylvania, where most voting is done on electronic touchscreens; a recount would only reveal errors in the small population of paper ballots.

But as we’ve told you from the beginning, for those of us who don’t live in the Pennsylvania 18th, it doesn’t really matter who wins if what you’re mainly interested in is the 2018 midterms. The takeaway for November’s elections will be the same no matter whether Lamb wins by a fraction of a percentage point or Saccone wins by a fraction of a percentage point: Tuesday represented yet another huge Democratic overperformance in a Trump-era special election.

Even if the GOP were somehow to produce a missing box of a thousand provisional ballots all marked for Saccone it wouldn't change the fact that there was a 20-point swing for the Democrats in a district that was safely Republican and that was Trump terra firma. It's huge and very dire for the GOP.  As Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns summarize in "Pennsylvania House Race, in a District Trump Won by 20 Points, Is Too Close to Call":

Republicans concede that they will be unable to keep the 2018 battlefield limited to a few dozen districts, mainly in coastal suburbs where Mr. Trump is intensely unpopular. With a deepening mood of pessimism and fear in Washington, they may be hard-pressed to tackle additional contentious legislation this year.

Even before the returns were counted, Republican officials began criticizing Mr. Saccone’s candidacy in a district where the anti-abortion Republican previously holding the seat, Tim Murphy, was forced to resign after a woman with whom he was having an affair said he pressed her to have an abortion.

But three months after suffering an embarrassing defeat in the special Alabama Senate election, Mr. Trump and his administration once more put their prestige on the line on friendly terrain. By continuing to aggressively compete even as Mr. Lamb was surging, Republicans tested the potency of two of their most fearsome political weapons for the midterm campaigns: their fund-raising advantage and the deep unpopularity of Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader.

Outside organizations sought to derail Mr. Lamb with attacks on his record as a federal prosecutor and claims that he would, as one ad put it, merely be a sheep for Ms. Pelosi.

But the spending did not put the race away, in part because Mr. Lamb pre-emptively inoculated himself against the Pelosi offensive by stating early in the campaign that he would not support her for leader.

Along with his military service and support for gun rights, Mr. Lamb’s opposition to Ms. Pelosi, which he highlighted in a TV ad, helped him win over some of the voters who were raised Democrats but have drifted to the Republican Party in this heavily unionized district.

His approach may signal to other Democrats that they can pursue more moderate swing voters without sacrificing the support of the party’s liberal base, at least in districts that will tolerate deviations from party orthodoxy.

I have to apologize because nearly everything I said about this race on Monday turned out to be wrong. I said that there weren't enough white-collar liberals in Allegheny County to overcome Trump's advantage in rural precincts. A passage from Rakich's article reveals how wrong I got this:

Lamb outperformed Hillary Clinton’s margins by a nearly identical 19 points in white-collar Allegheny County and in Trump-loving, blue-collar Washington and Westmoreland counties. However, Lamb outperformed then-President Obama’s 2012 margin by 23 points in Allegheny while doing so by only 9–12 points in the district’s other three counties. Perhaps because Lamb assumed some socially conservative positions and cozied up to blue-collar workers, the Pennsylvania 18th is often portrayed as just another Midwestern working-class district. In fact, though, it is both wealthier and better-educated than the nation as a whole. As the numbers show, Lamb won this election not in “Trump country,” but in the Allegheny County suburbs.

My analysis hinged on the rationality of an average liberal voter. Why would you go to the polls on a cold late-winter day to vote for a gun-toting, anti-$15-Now blue dog? Many would stay home I thought, muttering "A pox on both your houses," and turnout in Allegheny would not be enough to counteract the droves of MAGA voters in Westmoreland, Washington and Greene counties. That was wrong. The liberal is superficial and doesn't bother with contradictions. The liberal is energized by a profound disgust for Trump.

The takeaways: The Blue Wave might yet appear (2006 redux); Biden will probably run for the Democratic nomination; and the blue dog can still hunt.