It appears Democrat Conor Lamb has eked out a by-a-nose photo finish win in the Pennsylvania district 18 special election. There may still be absentee ballots to count, this remains unclear as I write.
Lamb is a former Marine gun-supporter who says he won’t vote for Pelosi as Party leader in the House. What may have won it for him was being anti-right-to-work (his opponent was pro) in a heavily unionized district in the state’s southwest corner. The people who voted for him are exactly the people Obama said cling to guns and God, and Hillary called “deplorables.”
There is no way to spin this positively for Republicans. In 2016 Trump won the district by 20 points and he recently went to the district to ask their support for Lamb’s Republican opponent Rick Saccone, who ran as a Trump loyalist.
There is a pattern of a President’s party losing House seats in the midterm election following his election. If it happens again in 2018 no one will be much surprised.
