Month: July 2025

Carpetbagging Republican Crosswell’s Out of Town Donors Try to Buy the Lehigh Valley

/ Rich Wilkins / 12 Comments

You can’t make this up if you try. No, really. Crosswell’s first finance report is out. It’s incredibly bad. Don’t take my word for it. From Lehigh Valley News:

Crosswell, the latest candidate to enter the race, raised more than $320,929 in just three weeks, records show. 

That amount, which came entirely from individual donors, led the field of Democrats. After expenditures, he had $254,003 on hand as of the end of June, according to the reports.

Crosswell resigned from the U.S. Justice Department in protest after the Trump administration opted to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams for political reasons. 

His campaign, which has focused on upholding the rule of law, appears to have attracted significant support from the legal community. Dozens of attorneys from across the country have donated to his campaign, records show.

However, it appears almost none of the money he’s raised came from within the district. 

LehighValleyNews.com identified only a single donation from within the Lehigh Valley or Carbon County on the 200-page report — a $500 contribution from an Allentown woman.

The dearth of local donations could feed more political attacks that cast him as a carpetbagger. Crosswell, a former Marine, moved to the district earlier this year and switched his party affiliation from Republican to Democratic in December. The Pottsville native had no prior ties to the district other than athletic competitions in high school. His three opponents have accused him of district shopping — a claim Crosswell denies.

For a moment I’ll leave aside the false narrative that the Adams decision pushed him to run and let the rest speak for itself. Croswell got exactly one person to donate to his campaign from the district. One. This guy isn’t even pretending to represent the Lehigh Valley, he’s trying to buy his way into our seat with a bunch of lawyers from North Carolina, DC, California, and God knows where else paying his tab. I’m sure if we looked over their voter registrations, plenty of them are his buddies from his union busting days in the Republican Party, but it really doesn’t matter if they aren’t. They aren’t from the Lehigh Valley. That’s fine with Crosswell though, because neither is he.

I’ll just point out though something that is just as bad, especially if you’re a solid Democrat who believes in the policies and values of the Democratic Party. While raising $321k, he couldn’t find one Democratic group to back him. Not a single PAC gave him money. Not one union. No pro-choice organization. No environmental group. Nobody. This is because he has long held the values of the Republican Party when he went to work and vote. One has to worry now that if he does find a group to give him money, it will be because he basically sells himself. He came into this with none of our values. This whole campaign is being astroturfed by union busters and Beltway elites.

The other two Democratic candidates have not matched Crosswell so far, which can be expected based on past Lehigh Valley congressional primaries. This isn’t a wealthy district, and this happens to be where they made their actual lives and careers. They’re from here, and they’re Democrats. I certainly have my preference, but I could probably deal with either one being our nominee. Being honest about who you are is the first and most important step to asking for someone’s vote.

The Moderate Myth

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment
Bill Clinton speaking in front of an American flag at the Hotel Bethlehem during the 2008 Presidential Primary season.

“Why do all of these rich tech bros think Donald Trump is a moderate? They spend all this money. pushing a right-wing agenda and then people actually believe it’s moderate.”

This was the prompt of a recent conversation I had, and well, it’s a fascinating one. Donald Trump did have a lot of rich “moderates” behind him, didn’t he? Hillary Clinton was simultaneously beat on by alt-left dead-enders for basically being Dick Cheney, and also viewed as too left by a lot of voters. Kamala Harris is about as “normie Democrat” as you can be on policy at this point, but she was viewed as the extremist by a lot of voters, not Trump. Why did this happen?

I tend to not really want “big change” policy moves, and so I have a tendency to like and support actual moderate policy. I think it’s highly important that we don’t mistake actual fairly moderate policy for being a political moderate though. There is no real pocket of voters out there giving you credit for say, taking a moderate position on abortion rights, for example (codification of Roe in it’s original, two-trimester form that allows some regulations of procedures and when you can access care). Not many voters gave Senators any credit for moderate positions on immigration or gun control in the past 15 years. Taking actual moderate policy positions often times leaves you in the bullseye of your own party’s activists and gets you no credit from the opposition.

One of the key reasons both parties (and not at all the only reason) could not properly handle Donald Trump is that both are fairly ideologically homogeneous. Democrats fight over how to get people health insurance, they don’t fight over whether or not to do it. Voters don’t really view you as more moderate for preferring the Affordable Care Act over government Bernie-care for All (it’s not Medicare, really). Same on the Republican side, they have some disagreements over how far to go on deporting illegal aliens and whether or not they’ll allow bare minimum background checks for all gun sales. No one is literally arguing for a path to amnesty or for blocking some gun sales in the GOP. Both parties have their positions, and there are degrees of separation in them, but even a moderate is still basically a member of one or the other. Voters don’t really see moderates as different.

Most of the reason is that lower information voters and honestly voters in general are far less ideological than voters who are activists, staffers, or candidates. They personally hold views that are not always consistent. For instance I know friends that vote regularly and are pro-gay marriage (and lgbtq rights in general) and pro-life. Anti-war and love going to the shooting range. Anti-immigrant and pro-marijuana. Many non-politically active voters actually very commonly hold views that are ideologically contradictory. When they think of a moderate, they think of someone who breaks out from party orthodoxy, like they do. And there’s a lot of them- a third of Americans identify as moderate and 43% consider themselves an independent.

When faced with Trump’s sometimes bizarre campaign positions- being for mass deportation, but against any foreign military action, or being pro-life while also being for ending taxes on tips and social security- a lot of these voters feel more comfortable with that. Very disciplined candidates like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris actually pay a price for not saying anything all that shocking. Voters who want “moderate” are often times just telling you they want something different, and an ideologically consistent candidate isn’t it.

Obviously identity plays into how a candidate is perceived, and some portion of the public understands the “left-right continuum” in a traditional way. Part of this is just a basic disconnect though. Political people are thinking about moderates as actually being moderate. Normal voters are thinking of moderates as more free wheeling and less careful. That fits Trump perfectly. It’s also now his biggest vulnerability, as he governs. How long until the public realizes he’s the definition of a conservative?

I Wonder How Much Union Buster Money is in Crosswell’s $320K?

/ Rich Wilkins / 8 Comments

In an earlier post, I told you how Ryan Crosswell is a Republican carpetbagger, running a fraudulent campaign for the Democratic nomination in PA-7. Ryan didn’t grow up in this district, or ever live in it until earlier this year. He registered to vote as a Republican in North Carolina, Louisiana, and Washington, DC (That we know of), and voted in the Republican Presidential primary in every one of Donald Trump’s races for President, so far. He claims he had some epiphany to become a Democrat when Trump’s DOJ decided to drop the charges against Eric Adams, but he purchased his campaign websites long, long before that. He just thinks Democratic voters are dumb enough to be bought off by a Republican from the Beltway.

Despite that, VoteVets and other DC groups are astroturfing together a well-funded campaign for the carpetbagger. He announced that he raised $320,000 in the first three weeks in the race. That’s an impressive amount of money, for regular candidates. This guy is going to need every penny of it though to distract voters from the fact he’s got no connection to this district, and that he’s not a Democrat. Turns out though, he’s got lots of help with that. He doesn’t just have VoteVets helping him, or the mega law firm that he works for in San Diego currently (yes, that’s in California). In fact, the guy is likely being funded by actual Republicans.

Back before Crosswell was working for the Trump Administration he worked for a firm called Littler Mendelson in Charlotte, NC. As they would tell you it, they’re the best of the best in employment law, from the perspective of the employer. Ask literally any labor union in the United States and they’ll tell you they are a notorious anti-labor firm. In regular people speak, Littler Mendelson is a union busting law firm. According to Crosswell’s LinkedIn (above), he specialized in the kind of “non-compete” agreements that the Biden Administration was trying to weaken or end in some cases.

Basically, in addition to not being from here and being a Republican, Crosswell is asking a district that literally was the birthplace of the working class (Bethlehem Steel and Mack Trucks) to elect a union buster. I would laugh at this, if he didn’t have so much money.

Of course Crosswell would raise a bunch of money to try and buy a district he has no relationship to. One has to just ask though- how much union buster money is in that $320,000? Given that nothing in his record suggests that he changed his mind from his previous Republican positions on any other issue, one has to wonder how working on the Eric Adams case changed Crosswell’s career long beliefs in anti-union practices?