Congressional candidate Summer Lee declared victory over Steve Irwin in the bitterly contested 12th Congressional District last night. But Lee acknowledged that there are still votes to be counted in the razor-thin race — votes that county officials said would take days to be recorded — and Irwin did not concede.
In a speech around 12:30 a.m. Wednesday, Lee said that the victory of her campaign represented the culmination of a five-year-old movement “that centers each and every one of us, that we could get rid of the politics of old that says that Black people and brown people and women and progressives and young people and workers and unions don’t belong here."
And while Lee conceded that “we’ve still got some precincts left” to count, she told an ecstatic crowd in a Downtown shared work space, “This is the mightiest movement in the land!”
Shortly before, Irwin had made a brief appearance of his own at his campaign’s headquarters in East Liberty.
“We can’t break out the accordion yet,” the amateur musician and full-time lawyer joked to cheering supporters.
Irwin, too, noted there are still votes to be counted and said he is confident he would be able to declare victory once they were tallied.
While not conceding, he did strike a conciliatory note while briefly speaking to reporters and addressing the narrow margin separating the candidates.
“This was a very hard-fought race … We’re all going to come together, that’s what this is all about, when this is over,” he said, before a staff member cut off questions.
As of 12:14 a.m. Wednesday, Lee led Irwin by 4,142 votes in Allegheny County, while Irwin led Lee by 3,696 votes in the portions of Westmoreland County that also make up the 12th District. That gave Lee an edge of less than 500 votes. But Allegheny County officials said 31 precincts did not return memory sticks that contain their vote tallies. Those will have to be retrieved from machines manually — a process that requires unsealing the machine and careful attention to chain-of-custody procedures to assure the integrity of the count. It may be days before that process is completed.
Still, Lee and her supporters would not be denied. The campaign says that the outstanding precincts are areas that Lee expects to win, and independent political observers generally agree that the landscape tilts her way.
“We know we have won,” Mayor Ed Gainey told Lee’s supporters. “Tonight is her victory, but tonight is our celebration.
“We believe that every vote counts,” he added. “But we know that the votes [that are left] are ours.”
The counting delay is the latest twist in a bruising campaign that may help to define the direction of the Democratic Party — a campaign that has been defined in large part by huge sums of outside money. But Lee now seems poised to replace U.S. Rep. Mike Doyle, who decided to retire last year after more than a quarter-century in the House. Also finishing out of the running were University of Pittsburgh law professor Jerry Dickinson and two other lesser-known candidates, Will Parker and Jeff Woodard.
The 12th District includes the city of Pittsburgh and a broad swath of suburban communities to the south and east of the city, extending into Westmoreland County. (Adjustments to its boundaries earlier this year left Lee just outside the district: That meant she couldn’t vote for herself in the race, though she is still eligible to run for and represent it.)
Irwin and Lee likely would have voted similarly on a number of key issues in Congress, though Lee’s support for environmental justice made her far more critical of heavy industry and fracking for natural gas. But their approaches to governance, and their rise to the top of the Democratic field, were markedly different.
Ever since toppling state Rep. Paul Costa in 2018, Lee has been a standard-bearer of a movement to take the local Democratic Party in a more progressive direction. The Swissvale resident was a guiding spirit of UNITE PAC, a local political committee that helped steer resources to like-minded candidates and which last year played a role in helping to elect a slate of county judges sympathetic to criminal justice reform efforts. And her 2018 win was a harbinger of other progressive wins, by candidates such as state Rep. Jessica Benham and Gainey himself.
If Lee’s reputation centers on a movement that began outside the halls of government, Irwin branded himself as the person to wield power effectively inside it. The Squirrel Hill lawyer with a background in securities and labor law offered himself up as a pragmatist in the mode of Doyle himself — capable of building consensus and securing federal dollars for infrastructure back home. His background included work as an aide to U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, a Republican, as well as for local infrastructure agencies. Doyle and officials including Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald warned that the district could pay the price for Lee’s sometimes blistering criticism of party leaders and the political system generally.
But to a large extent, the race’s final weeks were defined by massive outside spending, led by a new so-called “super PAC” tied to AIPAC, a hawkish pro-Israel group. The new entity, United Democracy Project, reported spending more than $2.5 million on TV ads, mailers and get-out-the-vote efforts to help Irwin and hurt Lee. Local voters sometimes reported multiple mailings in their door slots in a single day. The message had nothing to do with Israel but challenged Lee’s credentials as a Democrat in good standing, based on criticisms she has previously leveled against Joe Biden and the local party.
Lee had notable allies in her corner as well: Her campaign got a late boost from a visit by progressive hero Sen. Bernie Sanders, and a progressive political outside-spending group called Justice Democrats reported spending nearly $950,000 to support her bid. And she sought to use the money spent against her to her own advantage, arguing on Tuesday that a victory for her “would send a message: that this is not the type of politics that we accept.”
