Potter County, Pennsylvania, is hostile territory for Democrats. It’s rural, more than 97% white, and Donald Trump cashed in nearly 80% of the vote in 2020. If you need further proof, it can be found on the walls of the Democratic Party headquarters, where a banner reads “Vote Democratic, No One Has to Know.”
It’s a curious place for any Democrat to launch a Senate campaign, but that’s exactly where Conor Lamb, who currently represents a district in the Pittsburgh suburbs, chose to go last month, just days after announcing his bid for the Senate seat being vacated by Republican Pat Toomey. Lamb isn’t going to win too many votes in Potter County. He described an enthusiastic crowd at the event, but even in his telling, it numbered only 40 or 50, which to be fair likely represents a healthy share of active Democrats in the area. But his trip there was more than an exercise in voter recruitment. It signals a clear strategic belief for the 2022 midterms: that if Democrats want to prevail in a 50-50 state like Pennsylvania, they’ll have to do more than run up big leads in cities and suburbs, which have recently trended blue. They’ll also have to “lose better,” as one Democratic Party leader put it to me, in places like Potter County.
A key part of Lamb’s appeal, and the overall case moderates are making to primary voters, is that he’ll be able to deflect Republicans’ culture-war attacks—the idea that he’s a handmaiden to AOC and Nancy Pelosi and that he wants to defund the police, popularize critical race theory, and enforce COVID mask mandates. Lamb’s been there before. Sean Parnell, his 2020 congressional opponent who’s now running for the same Senate seat, has attacked Lamb for his relationship with the Bernie Sanders wing. One popular, slightly crazed ad showed Parnell walking a factory floor, holding a stuffed lamb and insulting framed photos of Sanders, Pelosi, and the “socialism squad.”
Parnell’s charges didn’t take root because Lamb has crafted an image that is moderate, bipartisan, and pro-working class. He’s noted that 80% of his House votes have been on bipartisan measures, and his efforts on veterans’ health care have formed the core of his congressional work. He quickly shifted our conversation to what he called the “economic part of our democracy,” i.e. workers’ rights to organize and earn a living wage. When I asked him about the hasty U.S. retreat from Afghanistan and mentioned the C-130 aircraft that had flown out more than 600 Afghan refugees, he jumped in to correct me, proudly noting that it was a C-17 aircraft—the type of plane flown by the air reserve base in his district. And, if we’re being comprehensive about it, it doesn’t hurt that Lamb looks the way many in Pennsylvania think a middle-of-the-road politician should: clean-cut, square-jawed, and white.
Lamb is one of a suite of candidates along the old Blue Wall that Democrats hope can help hold—and maybe expand—their slim Senate advantage. Ohio and Wisconsin also present appealing targets thanks to specific Republican vulnerabilities: longtime Ohio Senator Rob Portman, like Toomey, is retiring, and Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson has displayed a potentially fatal combination of dropping approval ratings and indecision. The Democratic front-runner in Ohio is Tim Ryan, who gained some notoriety by challenging Nancy Pelosi for the speakership in 2016, then running for president for a hot minute in 2020. Ryan is a likeable guy: He’s friendly, earnest, and one of the rare politicians who seems as interested in listening as talking. But it’s hard to shake the impression that he was brewed in a 1950s candidate-development lab. Born in a suburb of Youngstown, quarterback of the high school football team, married to a first-grade teacher, Ryan has been elected 10 times, albeit by declining margins, in his working-class district in eastern Ohio. He also happens to be ruthlessly focused on kitchen-table issues. In an interview, he rattled off jobs, retirement security, broadband, and infrastructure as priorities that have a “thousand percent” of his focus.
That focus comes through in Ryan’s legislative work too. His press releases come with hypnotic regularity: “Ryan introduces bipartisan bill to strengthen domestic battery manufacturing supply chain; Ryan applauds Biden administration for issuing Buy American rule; Ryan set to bring home nearly $18 million in funding for northeast Ohio.” For all I know, he may care deeply about things like racial equality and climate change. But his emphasis on economic issues helps him present to Ohio voters as a pragmatic centrist focused on solving their problems. In an interview, Ryan quoted—to be fair, slightly misquoted—the 1995 Bruce Springsteen song “Youngstown,” which Springsteen wrote as a ballad for the new American underclass: “Now, sir, you tell me the world’s changed / Once I made you rich enough, rich enough to forget my name.” It’s no throwaway tidbit. His entire persona is pitched around championing the forgotten, a demographic he thinks is big enough along the spine of the Appalachians, in mill towns like Youngstown, and in the poorer parts of Cleveland and Cincinnati, to carry him to victory, despite Ohio’s list to the right in recent elections.
In Wisconsin, Mandela Barnes, the sitting lieutenant governor, has an early lead in a crowded field. Barnes’s image as a moderate has been less clear in the past, but he’s been positioning himself, as Doug Thornell, a Washington-based Democratic consultant, put it, as “someone who is a bridge builder, someone who can be a uniter.” His first campaign video was practically a thesaurus of centrist politics, starting with the importance of faith, the value of hard work, and his commitment to job creation, education, and health care. And while he has spoken favorably of the Green New Deal, he’s done so in the context of creating employment opportunities and making sure “rich corporations and ultra-millionaires finally pay their fair share in taxes.” Solid stuff.
In theory, none of this should worry Republicans, who hold advantages in all three states. Ohio has abandoned its bellwether status in favor of Trumpism, and precedent suggests that Republicans have the enthusiasm advantage in these midterms—a theory reinforced by the Trump 2020 (and now Trump 2024) signs that still dot the countryside. But the Cook Political Report now counts Wisconsin and Pennsylvania as toss-ups. And that’s largely thanks to the political dumpster fire unfolding on the right.
The Trumpification of the party has driven out any number of candidates with broad appeal, leaving behind a mix of true believers and Trump Train newcomers hastily trying to atone for past mainstream sins. In Pennsylvania, the GOP field is headed by Parnell, a frequent Fox News contributor and friend of Don Jr., and Kathy Barnette, a conservative commentator. Both have lost House races, and neither has raised more than $600,000. In Ohio, the pack is led by Josh Mandel, a longtime fixture in state politics. His campaign website proclaims him to be pro-God, pro-gun, and pro-Trump, and he has seemingly tried to transform his technocratic image by festooning his social media with all-caps and exclamation points (sound familiar?). One of his rivals, J.D. Vance, has captivated national media with his own late-life conversion to Trumpism, but it’s not yet clear whether the base will buy it. In Wisconsin, the situation is a bit different: Ron Johnson, the incumbent, has arguably been too busy promoting quack COVID remedies to decide whether to run for reelection. This has effectively frozen the field and left potential candidates such as Mike Gallagher, a popular congressman from Green Bay, anxiously pacing the sidelines.
Ed Rendell, Pennsylvania’s former governor, dismissed the Republican field as a “very weak bunch” and noted the “Hobson’s choice” facing Republican candidates forced to go all in for Trumpism at the risk of alienating swing voters. His analysis applies to Ohio and Wisconsin too, where Trump-lite candidates may be burdened with the baggage of Trumpism without the same enthusiasm.
The emergence of Ryan, Lamb, and Barnes as early front-runners begs the question: Whither the progressives? So far, the left wing of the Democratic party seems to have struggled to put forward effective challengers. In Wisconsin, Barnes is only one of a number of top-tier candidates, all of whom might be described as moderate. In Ohio, Ryan’s early fundraising and endorsement success has arguably kept most other big-name Democrats on the sidelines, including Emilia Sykes, the up-and-coming leader in the state House. Only Morgan Harper is challenging the comparatively well-known and well-funded Ryan. In Pennsylvania, Lamb is part of a crowded field. John Fetterman, the incumbent lieutenant governor and a favorite of the MSNBC set, has gotten off to a strong fundraising start, but several insiders have questioned his staying power. One noted that the “fact that he pulled a shotgun on a Black guy [several] years ago is a real problem for him” and predicted that it will “ultimately be something that disqualifies him with a lot of voters.”
Still, there’s no consensus yet on whether the moderate strategy is the winning one. Earlier this year, Steve Phillips of the Center for American Progress argued that the goal should be to expand the coalition of white progressives and people of color, not to reclaim the working-class whites lost to Trump. This, he wrote, is how Democrats won in Georgia and Arizona and is also the way forward in the industrial Midwest. To some, the defeat of progressive icon Nina Turner in Ohio’s special election would seem to call his point into question. And the fact that Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin are overwhelmingly white, while Georgia and Arizona are more racially diverse states, means the demographic math looks markedly different along the Blue Wall.
So far the scenario is promising, but hardly airtight. A lot can happen between now and the primaries next year, especially in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where the fields are deep and diverse, and where progressives likely represent a high percentage of the primary turnout. And neither party should feel terribly comfortable, given the difficulty in predicting the state of the economy and the ongoing impact of COVID. Trump, who has defined the last three election cycles, remains the ultimate wild card, as he could be anything from a declared candidate for president to a defendant in a criminal prosecution (or both) come next November.
One thing is certain: For Democrats, November will be a tightrope walk, a balance between drawing out the old and attracting the new. In Pennsylvania, that means turning out the base in Philadelphia, but also doing well enough in Johnstown, about 50 miles east of Pittsburgh. Joe Biden scraped out a win in Pennsylvania in 2020, but as Lamb pointed out, Democrats still lost two key statewide offices and “most of the legislative races that we thought we had a chance to win.” It’s why Lamb is back in Johnstown, revving up more than 75 people packed into a bar for his event. He’s enthusiastic about the turnout, but when I ask him about campaigning in the time of COVID, he ruefully confesses that “even among Democrats…you do not see the most stringent adherence to or maybe the strictest interpretation of the CDC guidelines that you might expect.” It’s another not-so-subtle reminder of the challenge he faces, in places where Democrats may have less in common with the left than they do with the right.
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