I’m pretty sure that if I told you Bob Brooks was entering the race for Congress on say, tomorrow, he’d push back his announcement. I guess it’s something I said. While he reportedly has lined up SEIU, his own union, and the DCCC, he’s now delayed for over a month and a half since initially telling people he would enter. Coincidentally, not much that was initially promised has happened either. The Governor called no one to ask them to drop out, and sources around the Governor claim that never happened. Not coincidentally, they have not pushed anyone out. Two sources within Shapiro land adamantly claim he will not endorse in the Democratic Primary. Even so, Brooks-watch has outlasted several Trump scandals now.
It is clear that Brooks hired a paid media team, and now two separate sources relay that he has hired staff. He has hired a manager who managed a Congressman that recently flipped a long time red seat in a neighboring state. He has also apparently hired a finance director who will also serve as Deputy Manager. He is taking on some significant payroll with his hires before he even enters and raises any money. Everyone better hope that Brooks raises money the way some folks initially were told he would, and not at the “$175-200k” level that they’re now downplaying expectations to for him. Maybe they’re worried that Democrats won’t like him?
I can’t see how this works out. I can’t imagine how anyone else thinks so either. The more I think about this, the more I think this is about taking votes from other “local” candidates and helping the union-busting, carpetbagger Republican win the primary, and making a few folks some money along the way. While the “local” candidates fight each other for scrap money, he keeps raising money from his fat cats everywhere else. Then when the primary actually comes, he out spends everyone. Brooks cuts into McClure’s Northampton vote by just enough. Boom, the DCCC gets the candidate they actually wanted, one who can raise his own money. They’ve decided that’s the most important thing a nominee can have here. Listen, I’m not going to sit here and say money isn’t very, very important. I’m just saying I’m amazed now that we have a gun nut entering the race with supposed Beltway approval, and we already literally have a Republican running in the Democratic Primary. Even a decade ago this wouldn’t fly. Here we are though.
So this was sent along to me from a woman via e-mail Wednesday. I’m not friends with Bob Brooks on Facebook, but nothing looks inauthentic about it. I also got the sense from the proton mail email address that this person is in opposition research. The woman who sent it to me noted that the folks who posted this are 3%’ers, far right nuts. Sheriff Bieber is definitely a pro-Trump character. I see that last night it got out, so I might as well comment on this.
I’d be fine with prayer in schools if these nut bags didn’t mean their kinda prayers, but our founding fathers were very clear about opposing the establishment of a state religion. I don’t know what Bob Brooks thinks this meme meant about guns, but it meant “no gun control at all.” Zero. If he wants to run as the NRA’s candidate for Congress, I guess he’s welcome to do that. I guess a Ten Commandments in every public building and an AR-15 in every home is the path forward.
I’m sure his handlers will fill him up with the right things to say, that’s their job, but all of this suggests a very “Make America Great Again” world view. As if there was some past time where prayer in schools and a good whooping at home made sure kids grew up right, to be decent Americans. This suggests that our changing society is to blame for our ailments. I guess we could go back to pre-2008, 1972, 1863, 1960, 1954, 1919, or whatever year he’d like. Look, I think the Democratic Party has gone absolutely batshit on plenty of social issues, but I’m really not longing for the backlash of conservatives who long for “yesterday.” All this shows is that the non-candidate Brooks was wildly out of step with Democratic Primary Voters, and this run for Congress is a bait-and-switch.
This is what happens when the DCCC just keeps recruiting more primary candidates, not vetting them, and then wondering why they have massive flaws. They’re already lowering expectations on him, from initially promising the Governor would ask everyone to drop out of the race, endorse him, and raise him money, to he will raise like “$175-200k” in this quarter, and then miraculously every outside group will run here to fund him. By next week they’ll be like Jeb Bush asking you to clap. This is such a bad idea.
I used to live in Vegas. The only betting I did was on sports (If only Pete Rose had said this from the start…). If you ever played the table games in a casino though, you understand the idea of going “all in.” Yesterday, Lamont McClure did that in the PA-7 race. He has a good poll and a lot of advantages in this race, but his fundraising numbers finished third last quarter. So, he loaned himself $200,000 for the campaign. This isn’t money carried over from his County Executive races or anything like that. It’s personal money.
Let’s start with the obvious here- I don’t think $200k assures victory, or anything like that. The reality is that while many of the candidates in this race are struggling to raise cash, someone will spend a lot more than $200k, possibly in this quarter alone. Rumors are that Ryan Crosswell will raise another $350k, almost entirely from outside of Pennsylvania, let alone the district. The truth is that with every additional candidate the DCCC recruits into this race, it’s more and more likely that Crosswell’s out of town Republican donors buy this primary. They don’t care, they’re fine running a Republican as a Democrat, I guess. In fact, they’re claiming their new guy will raise $175-200k, and that will bring in some outside fantasy money. The truth is they’ve not delivered a single promise to this date associated with this candidate, so why should we believe it?
Here’s what $200k does do though. $200k will pay for roughly six pieces of district-wide mail. When you’re the candidate in the lead, and you have the most name recognition, that eases any fall from grace caused by other candidates out spending you. If you’re polling 40% in Northampton County now, it means you probably hold most of that- and that’s about 18% of the total vote. What this means, in moron proof terms, is that there is no physical path to victory for a second Northampton County, labor backed candidate who currently basically polls at zero. You can scream and yell about all the fictional general election polls, all the fictional endorsements from statewide figures, and how your personal negatives actually won’t hurt you- none of that matters. If the existing front-runner spends $200k on paid communications, that’s probably not going to win the race- but I guarantee you, the other person trying to run on the same lane on the track will lose. This isn’t opinion. It’s math. I’m not sure what personal gain some people have with pushing this charade, but they’re not giving honest, decent, good advice.
If you were hired to run a college sports team tomorrow, one of your most important jobs would be to recruit the players that are going to be on your team. You would identify the ideal players that you could realistically recruit to join you, try to get the best player on your list, and then you would put your resources into helping them win. Sure, you realistically don’t mind some competition for spots on your team, but the idea isn’t to have lots of intersquad battles for spots. The idea is to get the best players and put them in the best position to win.
In an ideal world, party politics is a team sport. Staff at the DSCC, DCCC, PA HDCC, PA SDCC, and any other campaign committee, should be trying to build the strongest slate of general election candidates that they can to win the next election. I have to give the DSCC fairly high marks on that front so far this cycle. It appears that they have found the targets that they wanted in North Carolina and Ohio, and may not be far off in Maine. Only Texas looks messy so far. They’re largely avoiding stupid primaries. That’s a good thing, because primaries cost money, and campaign money is precious.
Things don’t operate quite the same at the DCCC. In PA-10, the committee got their candidate in Janelle Stelson, a candidate who finally made the district as close as it should be based on the political dynamics there. Meanwhile in PA-8, there is no major candidate yet, and according to the streets, several candidates who have track records of winning elections passed on running. The candidate that is reportedly the preferred candidate in PA-8 just had to go through a primary battle to keep her job as Mayor, and now she faces a general election with both Republican and Independent Democratic challengers, making it likely she won’t be getting into the race very soon. Meanwhile across the river in NJ-7 there are three serious candidates that are raising hundreds of thousands of dollars per quarter right now, and reportedly a fourth is about to enter, meaning whoever gets to face Tom Kean Jr. will be starting from scratch after winning a brutal primary. That probably sounds familiar to folks here in PA-7, where we’re about to get our fifth candidate in the primary to face Ryan Mackenzie. All of this while there’s a candidate clearing the field and raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in PA-1 (Bucks County), a district that Democrats have literally have no chance of winning unless Brian Fitzpatrick loses a primary (Fitzpatrick voted against Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” and has been winning by double digits for several election cycles now). If this sounds bad, don’t take it as isolated to this region- these problems are persisting in other parts of the country too.
Here in PA-7 is a case study in chaotic recruitment. There are four candidates currently in the race. After a false start or cold feet, the fifth is going to enter on Friday, according to the street word. At least three of the existing candidates met with the DCCC before entering, and received help hiring staff and building their paid media consulting team. After getting them all into the same primary, the committee is shocked to see that two of them aren’t raising a half a million dollars every three months. The third candidate they recruited has become problematic to them, because nobody bothered to vet him ahead of time to figure out he had no ties to the district and was a lifelong Republican and union buster. So since they didn’t like the candidates they had, now they’re telling everyone they have the silver bullet candidate. He doesn’t poll well, even after his bio, he’s never run for office before or raised any money, and has no obvious path to the nomination, but reality be damned. They claim the Governor wants him, and will campaign for him and raise him his money. Of course, they claimed the Governor was going to call and ask everyone to drop out a few weeks ago, but now that the call never came, that isn’t important. They’re bad mouthing the existing candidates, claiming their teams are quitting on them and they won’t show any money raised this quarter. There was a supporter of the new guy in Lehigh County claiming the existing candidates lose a non-existent general election poll to Mackenzie, and badly at that. There’s even a public-sector union member that claims they need to get the existing candidates out of the way because I was mean to somebody on this blog. The list of excuses is almost as long as the list of candidates at this point. There’s no reason to believe we won’t be doing this same thing again with a new candidate come October or November either. This is silly and pointless, and really doesn’t produce winning nominees.
Say what you want about the Republican Party, but last cycle when they decided they wanted Ryan Mackenzie to be their candidate in PA-7, they didn’t put him through a ringer to be nominated. Their leadership bought him the primary over the preferred candidate of the conservative grassroots. The God’s honest truth in PA-7, PA-8, and NJ-7 is that the DCCC could (and probably should have from a pure path of least resistance) have simply went to the most recent Democratic Congresspeople in those districts and guaranteed them support if they had run again. If they had begged hard enough, they might have ran. If they said no, fine, then you go recruit the top prospective candidate in the districts, preferably someone with a strong pathway to winning. What we have here is a mess.
The model of just recruiting a bunch of candidates, teaming them up with all-star DC consultant teams, then making them compete for fundraising dollars with each other until they all fail and you have to go find a new candidate makes absolutely no sense. Pick a candidate, skip the competition. Or if you really think they need to compete with each other, maybe don’t make the field so crowded that no one can get any oxygen. There is no silver bullet, no savior coming to save us all from that.
People get caught up in “horserace coverage” during elections, but the reality is that nothing actually happens until money is being spent and votes are being cast. With that said, I told you about a poll a couple of days ago that was out in the field for the PA-7 Democratic Primary. I didn’t know who had actually done it then though. It turns out the poll was done by PPP (Public Policy Polling). For who? I don’t know. I managed to get the results though. McClure holds a 16% lead in the initial ballot, with Pinsley and Obando-Derstine tied for second. Brooks and Crosswell are within the margin of error of zero initially. After bios McClure and Obando-Derstine are the only serious candidates, with McClure’s lead only mildly changed. Crosswell gets out of being within the margin of error of zero, but only up to 7%. Even after bio, Brooks is only at 5%. The concept of a candidate like Brooks does better with the public than the actual candidate does. Pinsley actually goes down after people heard his bio. When informed that Crosswell is a lifelong Republican, with a union buster past, and no ties to the community, 88% of Democratic voters said they had very serious or somewhat serious concerns.
Only the Pinsley part of this shocks me. Lamont McClure has a base of support that he built up winning races over the past 15+ years, there’s probably no way to really drive him down in Northampton County. While Carol Obando-Derstine is a relative unknown, Democratic voters like voting for an educated woman who is an immigrant to this country. There’s a rationalization for these candidates running. I would think the same for Pinsley, as he’s occupying the political “left lane” in this race, but the polling didn’t bare that out. Crosswell is the creation of some Beltway consultants who want to just pour money into creating a fictional story that didn’t really happen. As for Brooks, while people say they want to vote for a blue-collar bio, fire fighter, and little league coach, that’s not what they end up selecting when push comes to shove.
Again, this isn’t votes being cast. Polling assumes everyone can get their message out at equal levels, which they can’t. On top of this, almost 40% are undecided at the end of the poll, which I’m sure some Carvillian Geniuses in DC and the Valley will say shows this race is going to change. This race is starting to shows shades of the 2018 primary though, in which Susan Wild won by 2.4% with 33.5%. There are five candidates this time instead of six, but were Roger Ruggles or David Clark running to actually win in that race? Carol, by way of bio, is probably going to grow into a candidate who gets close to 30% simply by staying viable. I don’t see how or why she would do better than Congresswoman Wild did in that race though, seeing as how the district is more conservative than it was then. McClure’s positives are very high, like Morganelli in that race, but he isn’t out of step with the party on Trump, immigration, or abortion, like Morganelli was. In this race it will be Crosswell answering for negatives. Brooks kind of looks like the Ruggles in this race. Pinsley wants to be the Edwards. At least right now, this race looks like maybe it’s a two dog hunt. Maybe.
About a half hour ago my mother received a text poll on the Democratic Primary in PA-7. The poll asked her about Ryan Crosswell, Lamont McClure, Bob Brooks, Carol Obando-Derstine, and Mark Pinsley. It gave some biographical information on each. My mother thought they were “impressive.” No idea who did it, but I’d be interested to hear the results. She didn’t mention any negatives, but I didn’t see it for myself.
Carol Obando-Derstine is running for Congress in PA-7. I don’t think we’ve ever met, but we have some common friends. She describes herself as “An engineer, advocate, educator, bilingual leader, Mom, and Democrat running for Congress in #PA07 to continue serving her community.” She’s worked for PP&L and Senator Bob Casey. She’s an immigrant to us in the Lehigh Valley, but her roots here include years and years of work time, at least one degree from Lehigh University, and time serving the public in this area. She’s a Democrat, and she is not a carpetbagger. I have many of the same doubts others express in private about her electability, particularly as a first time candidate. With that said, she has picked up major endorsements from our last Congresswoman, EMILY’s List, and BOLD PAC. She is not embarrassing herself in this race whatsoever. Her fundraising so far isn’t super impressive, but it is competitive.
Word on the street though is that the powers that be in the Democratic Party, in both Harrisburg and Washington, are going to ask Carol, Northampton County Executive Lamont McClure, Ex-Republican Ryan Crosswell, and a yet unannounced local office holder who is getting ready to enter the race to all stand aside for a white male, who is also a first time candidate like Carol, and who seems to who have stiffed an old lady out of $55,000. These powers that be are claiming the Governor himself is going to ask all of the candidates to drop out, ask all of the unions who have endorsed to switch their endorsements, and everyone to genuflect to a complete neophyte candidate. They’re going to ask the only woman, and the only person of color in the race to stand down for a white guy who has even less experience than she does running for office, and who has yet to prove he can raise money or do any of the other things a Congressional candidate needs to do. Apparently it’s a much bigger problem that Carol is new to this and hasn’t raised a million dollars yet than it is that this white guy is inexperienced and has no money at the end of July. Do I believe the Governor is actually in on this? No. I can’t believe he’d even entertain such a stupid idea.
I’m going to give Carol some completely unsolicited advice- if someone actually calls her and asks her to get out of the race, be with the Governor or some staff person in DC, she should politely decline. Why would she, as the only woman in a field of four or probably five candidates, drop out? Especially with the support of major political organizations inside the Democratic Party who are going to stick with her as long as she’s in the race? Frankly if they spend on her behalf, in a field that is so male heavy, she’s probably going to win. Again, I have my concerns about her, but a woman held this seat literally until the third day of this year, it’s kind of insulting to think she’s D.O.A. and this yet unnamed new candidate (at least here) is some sort of savior that is going to beat a sitting Congressman. I see no reason Crosswell would or should drop out of this now, almost all of his money is out of state and won’t care what in state powers want. The chances McClure is going to drop out after not running for re-election as Executive are absolutely flat zero. Why would Carol drop out? There’s really no reason she should. I see no way this guy can win the primary with multiple other guys, one from the same geographic space, and at least one other in a similar ideological space. He starts with zero name recognition, less time to raise money, and opposition in his way. There’s no reason Carol should capitulate to his quixotic dreams.
This Goof Represents The Most Swing District in America.
There’s not many scenarios where Democrats win the House in 2026 and don’t win PA-7. Joe Biden won it in 2020, Donald Trump did so in 2024, and both times the margins look similar to the state margin, and Pennsylvania basically is the tipping point state right now. One of the reasons I never registered to vote anywhere else while out on the road (besides the fact I was coming back) was that I really do live in the most swing spot in the country.
So it seems that the DCCC may not have been as thrilled with how the race was shaping up. Fundraising amongst the candidates in the field wasn’t matching up with the more metropolis swing districts in New York and California. That sort of makes sense though. There’s not a lot of big donor money in this district. The big donors in Philadelphia and New York are hesitant to put money into a competitive primary. So two of the three candidates are finding it a little harder to raise cash than expected. The other, we’ll just say he’s problematic. Problematic in big ways. Problematic in many ways.
I can’t blame the DCCC for going looking for more candidates. Why not? The more seats you can put on the board, the better. If you don’t feel absolutely great about the candidates you have, keep finding more. Competition should be fierce for an important job. Right? Unfortunately, maybe the DCCC is not looking in the right direction. The candidate they are supposedly recruiting now has some, let’s just say, issues.
Out of respect for the man, I won’t name this first time candidate, yet. He has never held public office, but he has spent his career working for the public. He’s got no experience being a candidate though, and running for Congress is not the place to learn. Digging in a little deeper, things get a little difficult for him though. A friend whom I will not name dropped me a note on the guy today, and he’s got some problems that will dog him in his race. He’s been in foreclosure twice, in 2012 and 2016. One could write that off, all of us normal people have financial problems at some point. He also had a $5,000 legal judgment rendered against him to Midland Bank, which sounds like a credit card or some small loan that he failed to pay. Again, no judgment here. This part of what they told me stuck out though. It goes well beyond just some hard economic times:
He borrowed $55,000.00 from his mother-in-law. Signed a promissory note. Refused to pay. Got sued. Had a trial. Lost. Appealed. Lost. There is currently a unsatisfied $55,000.00 judgment hanging over his head.
Ok, look, there’s being a working class guy that is behind on some bills, which I think we all can sympathize with. Congress could use more guys that understand that feeling. Then there’s stiffing your mother-in-law for $55k and not paying it back even after you lose in court twice. This friend goes on to note that there’s also a divorce with the potential candidate’s first wife out there, which they don’t know what is in there. I don’t know if this was mother-in-law one or mother-in-law two, but I’m guessing this judgment was from the first one. If that’s the case, I’m sure that divorce is messy and I’ll probably get something sent my way on that later.
Stiffing old ladies isn’t a good look. Especially when it fits with a pattern of being bad with money. Stiffing a family member makes it look like maybe the money problems aren’t just a case of tough times, but maybe something worse. It’s hard to tell, but I will bet bourbons to beers that Ryan Mackenzie and the Republican Party will take information like this and absolutely slime this guy if he’s nominated. By the end he’ll be the symbol of elder abuse and financial misconduct in America, not the next Congressman.
This new candidate has went around the district telling people he will enter with the public support of the DCCC, the Governor of Pennsylvania, and the Democratic Leader in the House. I find it hard to believe any of them would be so stupid as to promise all of that to a candidate without doing a little more research than this friend of mine did before sending this info to me. In fact, I first met the Governor like twenty years ago when he was a State House member, the guy is way too smart to put himself into a nasty, competitive primary like this right before re-election (and maybe a run for President?). I definitely don’t see that happening, once they do their research.
Campaigns are hard. This guy has had an honorable career serving the public. This may be biting off a bit more than could be chewed.
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.
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?
Apocalypse Vibes 