Eight years ago I had a kind of front row seat to the spectacle that was the PA-7 Primary. This time, to the extent it matters, I was mostly watching from backstage. Even so, I can’t help but notice a lot of things that were the same then as now, and a few things that are not. Now the big question is if they’ll even matter.

So I had coffee on Friday with one of the candidates and I couldn’t help but eventually say to her that the irony was not lost on me that in another cycle the DCCC would probably have moved mountains to have a candidate like her, and this time they and really the entire establishment of the party really did their best to leave her behind. While the rejection of a woman by a party where the majority of our primary voters are women is noteworthy, it’s important to understand that this is actually more of a similarity than a difference- the party picked a person and then spent like crazy to get them. 2018 was the year of the woman, and outside groups came in and spent like drunks in the closing weeks of that primary to get Susan Wild across the line and *not* have John Morganelli get nominated. The DCCC and related Democratic groups have decided they want to run alleged blue collar “everyman” types in 2026, and they spent like crazy to make sure they got Bob Brooks. They spent so much for Bob that they spent DCCC dollars earmarked for the general election to push the guy across the line. This was a trend that played out to varying degrees in PA-1 and PA-10 as well, and PA-8 had no race. They are going to spend to any number they have to in order to get the narrative they want. You really can’t avoid it. And by the way, the NRCC does the same thing. Ryan Mackenzie was basically a welfare candidate in the 2024 primary, but outside PACs spent like crazy to get him across. It will be fascinating to see what happens over this next week in neighboring NJ-7, where backers of Tina Shah have come in and gone dead negative on Rebecca Bennett lately. We’ll find out if the DCCC really wants her or not.

Another thing that has become apparent- getting elected to some county office in Northampton County is not a route to the Congressional seat. Lamont McClure ran in second place in Northampton and Carbon Counties, respectable for a candidate that got outspent and really had to run against the popular Governor from his own party. He got dead last in Lehigh County, and by a lot. You know what that reminded me of? John Morganelli. Morganelli held on to win Northampton in 2018, but got absolutely left in the dust in Lehigh. Also, both hit a relatively low wall in fundraising pretty quickly and were majorly outspent. In both cases a person who was not an elected, in fact two other people, but was relatively involved in party politics, got major backing from outside of the district, and their fundraising (and outside spending) took off. Wild did not nearly have the thumb on the scale for her that Brooks needed, but her outside supporters spent everyone else into the ground in that race. The white elected guy from Northampton did not have a chance either time. There is an interesting dynamic here, between a major swing county that decides national elections and the national Democratic Party- the folks in DC do not want the candidates that win general elections here. Now this is not as cut and dry as that last sentence sounds, because there are other factors in this district (like turning out Lehigh County), wanting a candidate that is more flexible to running the kind of campaign they want to run, and the fact that many, many more people vote in a federal primary than a municipal one, but it still comes out to the same. If you zoom out to the national level, one could argue this is a national tension for the Democratic Party, as swing districts are much more rebellious against the messages our party wants to run on. One could also look at the numbers though and remark that Democrats actually have performed *better* in swing districts and swing states than they have in solidly Blue or Red areas in 2022 and 2024. Nevertheless, you can see the tensions.

Now this leads me to a couple of other observations that are fairly obvious coming out of this- playing the local politics game to run for Congress here is pointless. There’s not enough money here to “win” the in district political endorsements and turn that into a winning campaign. They can come in and swamp you. Also, and I don’t think you can call this an accident anymore, the national folks come in here and build large fields, often times large and divisive fields, in part because it’s much easier to shape the race to get the result you want in a field of four or more than it would be in a one on one primary. The DCCC met and talked to all four of the candidates before they entered the race, discouraged none of them, and yet ultimately leaned as heavily on the district as possible to get the candidate of their choice, both times. Neither Wild in 2018 or Brooks in 2026 were anywhere remotely near an actual 50%+1 majority in their victories, and they didn’t need to because they had enough other candidates in the field that would take a legitimate amount of votes to know that they probably could win if they got to 30%. It’s divide and conquer politics at it’s finest.

Now the obvious differences are really two things. First off, this time the party decided to embrace a Bernie Sanders backed populist, something they didn’t do in 2018. Boy, it does seem like they never pick the non-white candidates here, maybe I’m the only one seeing that. The national party has decided 2026 is the year they’re going to try Bernie’s way apparently, as we’re seeing in places like Maine as well, and I think it’ll burn them more than they think, but there’s still a chance that sticks for a while because I fully expect them to take the House. This is a wholesale directional change though, and I think a lot of Democrats who were good Obama-Clinton-Biden-Harris voters are going to need to come to grips with this- white populism is probably going to be the dominant ideology in our party too after the recent Supreme Court decision gutting the VRA and basically killing off “Majority-Minority” districts in our politics. Democrats are probably going to win the House with some folks we would not have liked in 2018 or 2022, and at the same time the CBC is going to take a dramatic hit in membership across the South. It’s a different party, and it’s probably going to get more different. I don’t think we’ve seen even the tip of the iceberg of the changes this is going to bring yet, and I’m just waiting for the Republicans to get our state legislative map into federal courts and find a friendly judge. I hope I’m wrong, but I fear I’m not.

And of course, the bigger, and somewhat related thing here- Bob Brooks is not Susan Wild. Wild came out of the 2018 primary with less help from major party figures (her big supporters were EMILY’s List, NextGen, and Planned Parenthood) and her perceived negative by some was that she would be too left for the district. That ended up not being true, at least until the new map gave her Carbon County and took away the good Democratic parts of Monroe. She had nothing personally offensive about her as a person, she was a candidate standing on the set of positions she ran on. Brooks is quite different than that. Yes, I think he will be attacked as a leftist, a “union thug,” and whatever other partisan arguments the NRCC will make, some of them at least partially true (he was backed by Sanders, Ro Khanna, Ruben Gallego, and other troublesome leftists), and some are just generic anti-Democratic talking points. He and Wild do have that stuff sort of in common. Wild didn’t have the personal baggage of Brooks though. Democratic primary voters at least partially (I mean, 59% voted against him) papered over his personal issues. His campaign is going to take the bet that they’ll downplay him stiffing his mother-in-law, and frustrations with Trump will win the day over Mackenzie. That’s a plausible theory that may happen, Trump is very unpopular right now. It also might not happen. These are not a partisan Democratic audience like the die-hards voting in our primaries. As things like this trickle out, it’s more likely general election voters will at least take a look at them. Bob’s strength, which is that he’s basically a generic 2026 Democratic nominee with no serious individualized policy positions, is also his negative- let’s face it, the party won him that primary, it was more of a victory for Josh Shapiro than Bob individually. There’s no reservoir of love for him personally, as is true of the overwhelming majority of candidates in 2026. These voters aren’t going to believe him because he’s on their team. They’ll either decide stopping Trump is their first priority, or they’ll decide Bob is too much of a scumbag to stomach. I can honestly say both things are true, so we’ll see which plays out.

Now with the benefit of hindsight I think you can look back and see the obvious trend lines here. Sometimes history repeats itself. Other times you nominate someone who blows up in your face. I know which deserves to happen here, but it’s harder to say which will. I guess we’ll know six months from now.