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It didn’t take long Tuesday night — less than an hour and a half after polls closed — for Summer Lee to be declared the Democratic nominee in her bid for a second term in Congress. And the scope of the progressive movement’s victory was clear from the moment you walked into her election night primary party at the Renaissance Pittsburgh Hotel Downtown.
Whether Democrats have as much fun in November remains to be seen — though there are reasons for optimism there as well.
Compared to primary night in 2022, when Lee just barely won the nomination to replace Mike Doyle, the venue Tuesday was more upscale, the mood more upbeat. Outside the window, you could even see the Pirates not losing to the Brewers. Those celebrating inside included Lee’s two most powerful local allies: Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato and Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey. And among the multigenerational, multicultural crowd of supporters were a handful of top officials of the local Democratic Party — new leaders of an institution that once opposed Lee and fellow progressives.
Leeann Younger, who chairs the city’s Democratic committee, was among them. Asked what the evening said about the transformation of local politics, she said, "I think what we take away from tonight is the idea that courage and standing up for everyone is always right. We are reaping some of the benefits of that tonight, but we were always winning."
That was certainly true of Lee’s race. Her rival Bhavini Patel focused heavily on Lee’s longstanding criticisms of Israel — an issue that rose to the fore after the Oct. 7 terror attacks by Hamas. But while that message resonated strongly among Jewish voters, its salience may have waned for other Democrats after months of Israeli reprisals in Gaza — and such concerns weren’t top of mind in many communities anyway.
If there was a dark lining for this silver cloud, it lay in a race well down-ballot, where Wilkinsburg school board member and progressive activist Ashley Comans failed to topple 34th House District member Abigail Salisbury — despite having the endorsement not just of Lee but of Gainey and Innamorato, too.
Salisbury’s nearly two-to-one win despite Comans’ high-octane support prompted some chortling from Democrats who look sourly upon the progressive movement. Don’t be surprised if there are more public statements of schadenfreude in the days ahead. But Innamorato and Gainey’s predecessors, Rich Fitzgerald and Bill Peduto, also struggled to sway voters, even at — maybe especially at — the peak of their powers. (Ask them how races for council and controller in 2015 went. And then duck.)
Salisbury won the seat in a special election a little more than a year ago. But no one made much of a case for why she should be fired. And even when voters give a mayor or county executive the reins, they still expect to choose the horses themselves. The 34th District race offers more evidence that it doesn’t take long to gain the advantage of incumbency … and that it doesn’t take much for other elected officials to risk overplaying that advantage.
In fact, as eyes turn toward November and the presidency, there are signs that both parties need to be careful about taking their voters for granted.
The danger is perhaps most obvious for Republicans. One in six GOP voters spurned Donald Trump to cast their ballots for the zombie campaign of Nikki Haley, who ended her bid in March. Perhaps not surprisingly, Haley drew a disproportionate amount of support from constituencies less enamored of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement: She did well with those who have embraced voting by mail or live in more moderate areas around Philadelphia.
Still, Biden may have some enthusiasm problems of his own. Nearly 7% of Democrats cast votes for the moribund campaign of Dean Phillips. And there was a surge in write-in votes as well. More than 13,000 voters in Allegheny County alone cast such ballots — twice the number that did so in 2020.
We may never know all of the names Pennsylvania voters jotted down statewide, but it’s reasonable to assume many were prompted by an effort to have voters write “uncommitted” as a means of signaling dissatisfaction with Biden’s support for Israel.
When I asked Nikki Lu, who is managing the Biden campaign in Pennsylvania, about the message the campaign had for those voters, I got the kind of clipped response that reporters get when they ask an obvious question that a campaign obviously hates to answer.
“The president believes that everybody should be able to participate in our democracy,” she said, “and he is taking steps to see that there is lasting peace in the region.”
It’s worth noting that Biden had fewer defectors within the ranks than Trump did on Tuesday — and that the “uncommitted” effort had some organization behind it, while votes for Haley were cast without any encouragement from anyone at all.
After her win Tuesday, Lee warned that Trump’s success rested on his ability to rally his base. To compete this fall, she said, “We can’t afford to lose a single piece of our coalition … The administration and the party are going to have to respect that base.”
Lee herself talked a lot about Israel on Tuesday night. But she also stressed economic justice and environmental concerns closer to home, and she denounced those “who wanted to make this a referendum on just one issue.”
But there may be a lesson in there for some in the Democratic base as well. Because maybe the most powerful block of “uncommitted” voters were those in both parties who didn’t commit to voting at all. Statewide, more than two-thirds of voters just didn’t show up Tuesday.
And if focusing on a divisive foreign policy issue was a good strategy, Bhavini Patel would have had the livelier party Tuesday. How much Democrats have to celebrate this fall could depend at least in part on whether “uncommitted” voters make the same choice.
