During a visit to Western Pennsylvania on Friday, Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson called the amount of money Democrats are spending on House races this year “irrational” — even though both Democrats and Republicans are on track to spend less money in the area than they did two years ago.
“Democrats, I think irrationally, have raised a lot of money this cycle,” Johnson said during a stop at an Aliquippa trucking company. “They've raised more in a lot of the key races around the country. But ultimately, at the end of the day, it's not about the quantity of the cash. It's about the quality of the candidate.”
Johnson was stumping for Republican Congressional candidate Rob Mercuri, who is looking to unseat the Democratic incumbent Chris Deluzio in the 17th Congressional District — and whose own candidacy has been outgunned so far.
The Democrat-aligned House Majority PAC has reserved $1.9 million for ads on the race, while the Republican equivalent, the National Republican Congressional Committee, has reserved only around $700,000, according to AdImpact, which tracks campaign ad spending.
Although Johnson called the amount of Democratic spending “irrational,” outside funders in both parties had each spent more than four times as much on ads — around $8 million — by the end of the 17th District race in 2022.
Mercuri is also being outspent when comparing each campaign head-to-head, without factoring in allied groups. Deluzio’s campaign is spending $1.7 million on ads, according to AdImpact, compared to just $400,000 for Mercuri. Deluzio spent a similar amount of money on ads in 2022, though resources in that race were more evenly matched: Republican candidate Jeremy Shaeffer spent four times as much money on ads in the district in 2022 as Mercuri’s campaign has so far.
Johnson said that Mercuri could make up the difference with help from outside groups.
“The campaign finance laws prevent me from coordinating with our super PACs and the conservative groups that are out there,” Johnson said. “But I know there's a lot of buzz about Rob's race. They're watching it very closely. And my expectation is in the coming days, he'll have a lot more air cover coming in here at the end, and that's when it really counts.”
That money has already started to flow in recent weeks. A Super PAC called the Eighteen Fifty-Four Fund has reserved around $1.8 million worth of ads in the final weeks of the campaign starting on October 15. Five family members of Betsy DeVos, the education secretary under former president Donald Trump, are listed as the committee members for the organization in a tax filing. No outside group has spent $3,000 or more on ads for Deluzio.
The 17th Congressional District is expected to be the closest Congressional race in Western Pennsylvania. The Cook Political Report says the voter distribution in the district is about evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, but has listed the race as “lean Democrat.”
