House Republicans got a stern warning Wednesday morning to take the results of a Pennsylvania congressional race as “a wake-up call” ahead of November’s midterm elections.
House Speaker Paul Ryan and top campaign lieutenants said at a closed-door GOP meeting that the down-to-the-wire outcome in what had been a reliably red district shows that Democratic enthusiasm is real and all incumbents need to be prepared for competitive races.
“This is a wake-up call,” Rep. Steve Stivers of Ohio, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, told GOP lawmakers gathered for the private caucus meeting. “If you’re getting outraised, this is a wake-up call. Prepare to bear down.”
Holding onto a narrow lead, Democrat Conor Lamb declared victory in the wee Wednesday morning hours as his special election match-up against Republican Rick Saccone in Pennsylvania’s 18th District went down to the wire and the final absentee and provisional ballots were being counted.
For Republicans, that the race was close at all is alarming: President Donald Trump won the district by 20 percentage points in 2016, and the GOP had pulled out all the stops to prevent an embarrassing loss, including dispatching Trump to campaign there twice and spending heavily on the race.
Stivers told Republicans that “our voters turned out, but you can’t get outspent five to one.”
It was a jab at Saccone’s paltry fundraising: He took in just $615,000, while Lamb raised $3 million.
But outside Republican groups pumped another $10.7 million into the race — including about $3.5 million each from the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Ryan. And the GOP still fell short in what had for years been seen as a safe district.
Ryan on Wednesday morning was re-emphasizing a message he’s delivered GOP lawmakers for months: The tax bill, passed in December, needs to be sold aggressively — particularly as a boost for working-class families.
Lamb said on the campaign trail that he’d oppose House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, for speaker. But that didn’t seem to diminish Pelosi’s happiness over the outcome in a district where Democrats have been blown out in recent elections.
“It’s exciting. It’s very exciting,” Pelosi said as she walked into a Democratic caucus meeting Wednesday morning. “This goes to show you this election is about the people of western Pennsylvania. But it’s very exciting.”
Pelosi added that the results showed “the enthusiasm for our candidates.”