Conor Lamb: A Vital Precedent in a Changing Time

Meet Democrat Conor Lamb. A former Marine and federal prosecutor, he won the special election for the House seat in Pennsylvania after the resignation of sitting Republican Tim Murphy. His victory was especially shocking because President Donald Trump had carried that district by an overwhelming 20 points in 2016.

This stunning upset wasn’t very meaningful at face value, considering the Supreme Court had declared the district in which Lamb beat Saccone to be gerrymandered unconstitutionally, meaning that it will be dissolved come November. However, the implications of his win far outstrip the immediate consequences.

Back in 2016, the 18th Congressional District overwhelmingly voted for Trump. What’s more surprising was that the Republican nominee, Rick Saccone, ran a very “Trumpian” campaign on a platform of poorly-explained policy promises to create new jobs and “intensely vet” immigrants, even allowing Trump to endorse him against “Lamb the Sham.” To identify why Saccone lost an election he was poised to win, let’s look at Trump’s appeal in 2016. Back then, Trump was the change candidate, the one who would “shake up Washington,” the outsider. Now, however, he is the head of the ruling party and thus represents the establishment, and Lamb is the harbinger of change.

Lamb’s platform reflected this to a T. On his campaign website, as well as on the campaign trail, Lamb condemned Washington’s lack of action on several critical issues, while making sure not to offend his majority conservative constituents by backing away from Democratic leadership and supporting the Second Amendment. He recognized that the opioid epidemic needed immediate action to prevent the further loss of life and demanded that pharmaceutical companies be held accountable for their actions in that regard. He called Paul Ryan’s push for entitlement reform “Washington talk for taking the money you paid your whole working life and using it to cover the trillion dollars [he] just added to the debt,” which, in a way, accurately described the reform.

Furthermore, he bemoaned “big tax cuts for the rich written by and for corporate lobbyists,” evoking the common man’s growing sense of powerlessness against colossal corporate interests with a disproportionate impact on policy making. B y rallying the anger of the people burned by the current government’s inaction and bad policy, Lamb, knowingly or not, used the same tactics that Trump used just a year and a half ago.

We’ll just have to wait and see if the “bias for action,” or desire to act in a swift and meaningful manner he espouses as one of the core tenets of his Marine training, can live up to the hype like Trump’s promises didn’t.

More than anything, this election proves that disenfranchised and disaffected Americans, “the forgotten men and women of America,” will often vote for an opposition party, irrespective of whether that candidate is a Democrat or a Republican. This represents a move away from the cult of Trump that dominated the swing states in 2016, one that the Democrats shouldn’t shy away from capitalizing.

For the Democratic Party, refusing to mount grievance-driven campaigns against the current administration that have time and time again been proven effective would be irresponsible and wrong; just because Donald Trump did the same thing to get elected doesn’t make it immoral. B y aggressively pointing out the flaws in the status quo, Democrats can be the proactive party and push for beneficial reform, potentially retaking the House and contesting Republican influence for the next two years.