Photo: Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris takes a selfie with Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) and his wife Gisele Barreto Fetterman after greeting supporters at John Murtha Johnstown-Cambria Airport on September 13, 2024 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
September 13, 2024 – WILKES-BARRE — Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, has spent most of the last two weeks in Pennsylvania starting with a Labor Day rally in Pittsburgh, where she returned a few days later to hunker down for debate prep. She debated former President Donald Trump, the GOP nominee for president, in Philadelphia on Tuesday, and on Friday she campaigned in Johnstown and Wilkes-Barre, two areas that have swung Republican in recent elections.
“I will be continuing to travel around the state to make sure that I’m listening as much as we are talking,” Harris said during the Johnstown visit, according to pool reports. “And ultimately I feel very strongly that you’ve got to earn every vote, and that means spending time with folks in the communities where they live. And so that’s why I’m here and we’re going to be spending a lot more time in Pennsylvania.”
Luzerne County, where Wilkes-Barre is located. was once a Democratic stronghold, and is near President Joe Biden’s childhood hometown of Scranton. But Hillary Clinton lost the county by nearly 20 points in 2016, and Trump beat Biden but nearly 15 points in 2020.
Harris touched on familiar themes in her address to the audience at the McHale Athletic Center at Wilkes University, praising small business owners as the “backbone of America’s economy,” pledging to protect reproductive rights, and reiterating that her campaign for president was informed by her middle-class background.
“People sometimes just need the opportunity, because we as Americans do not lack for ambition, for aspiration, for dreams, for the preparedness to do hard work,” Harris said. She said if elected, her economic plan calls for building 3 million new homes by the end of her first term, and said she would take on corporate price-gouging, and expand the child tax credit.
Harris also said she would “get rid of unnecessary degree requirements for federal jobs to increase jobs for folks without a four year degree” and would “challenge the private sector to do the same.”
Sept. 7, 2024 – After spending several days in Pittsburgh this week, Vice President Kamala Harris ventured out Saturday afternoon for a quick campaign stop in the Strip District. She was greeted by emotional supporters.
Harris departed the Omni William Penn Hotel in Downtown around 1 p.m. Security was high around and inside the historic hotel. Secret Service closed off a block of William Penn Place to traffic in front of the Omni, and guests had to pass through a metal detector in the lobby.
The vice president traveled just up the road into the city’s Strip District, making a stop at Penzeys Spices on Penn Avenue.
Upon entering, a woman became overwhelmed when looking at Harris and started to cry. The woman told the vice president, “I appreciate you, just so you should know.”
Harris embraced her.
Vice President Kamala Harris shares a hug with a woman overcome with emotion during a campaign stop Saturday at Penzeys Spices on Penn Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Strip District.
“We are gonna be fine, we are gonna be fine,” Harris told her. “We are all in this together.”
Harris then greeted other customers in the spice shop and posed for pictures.
One girl Harris spoke to, named Charlotte, said she is from Freeport and attends school in the Freeport Area School District. The girl asked for a hug. Harris posed for photos with the girl and her entire family — including her father, a seventh grade geography teacher.
Harris thanked him for being a teacher.
“We are counting on your leadership, OK?” Harris told Charlotte, who nodded in approval. “Really I am serious, I am really counting on you.
“Go Yellowjackets,” Harris said, referencing Freeport’s mascot, as she high-fived Charlotte.
Harris then met with some other customers briefly and discussed cooking with a Penzeys staffer and picked out a few spices.
Sept 3, 2024 – Pennsylvania drivers might begin seeing more billboards featuring ordinary people, like a white-haired, red-shirt wearing man named “Mike,” and a simple message: “I’m a former Trump voter. I’m a patriot. I’m voting for Harris.”
The billboards are paid for by a group called Republican Voters Against Trump, a project of the Republican Accountability PAC, that is hoping the voices of ordinary voters will sway conservatives and independents to support Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, in November.
On Tuesday, the group announced a new $11.5 million campaign that will feature voters like Mike on billboards, online ads and tv and radio commercials in Pennsylvania and other swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona.
But the bulk of the spending, $4.5 million, will target Pennsylvania, which could end up being the decisive state in the 2024 election.
John Conway, the D.C.-based director of strategy for Republican Voters Against Trump, is leading the campaign (He claims no relation to perhaps the most famous never-Trumper, George Conway).
“Our campaign is built on the idea that you need to establish permission structures in order to get voters who have historically identified as Republican to vote against their party’s nominee,” Conway said. “The ads themselves are coming right from the same people we’re targeting with these campaigns: center-right former Trump voters who don’t want to vote for him again.”
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
Conway says the group has collected the testimonies of roughly 300 voters who previously cast ballots for former President Donald Trump, but who no longer support him. They constitute the heart of the new advertisements.
Kamala Harris will make her second visit to western Pennsylvania in less than a week on Thursday, as the Democratic candidate focuses her presidential campaign on voters at both ends of the battleground state.
Harris appeared at a union hall in Pittsburgh on Monday alongside US President Joe Biden, but will be back in the city on Thursday, days before she heads to a debate with Donald Trump in Philadelphia. Campaign officials say she will remain in the state throughout the weekend as she prepares for the debate.
Harris’s trip comes at a pivotal point, with polls putting her and Trump neck and neck in the race to secure Pennsylvania’s 19 Electoral College votes — more than in any other swing state.
“The state is in play, and the path to 270 for either candidate can run through Pennsylvania,” said Kristen Coopie, a political-science professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, referring to the number of Electoral College votes needed to win the White House in November.
“[The campaigns] know the state is important. They know there is a wide representation of citizens just within one state . . . it is pretty representative of the country at large.”
Harris also arrives amid an escalating political fight over the ownership of US Steel, an iconic American manufacturer and major employer in Pittsburgh, whose future has become an electoral issue. Harris and Trump have both come out against a proposed $15bn takeover of US Steel by Japan’s Nippon Steel — a protectionist stance designed to court blue-collar votes in the state. On Wednesday, the Financial Times reported that Biden was preparing to block the deal on national security grounds.
US Steel has said that if the merger fails it could close plants, raising the stakes ahead of Harris’s Pennsylvania trip, her 10th visit to the state this year.
Trump — who narrowly survived an assassination attempt in July in Butler county, just north of Pittsburgh — has also made the state a focus of his campaign.
On Wednesday night, the former president, was interviewed by Fox News host Sean Hannity in front of a live audience in Harrisburg, the state capital. After vowing to “heal our world”, invoking the praise he had received from Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, Trump expressed confidence in his chances to win the election and touted his “love” for Pennsylvania. “We’re going to be very well set up to do a great job,” he said.
Both campaigns have spent more on advertising in Pennsylvania than in any other state, according to FT analysis of AdImpact data, with the Harris campaign and allied groups spending nearly $146mn to date and the Trump team almost $132mn.
The winner of Pennsylvania — whose population spans diverse, urban areas such as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, highly educated affluent suburbs and poorer rural areas — has won the White House in 10 of the past 12 presidential elections.
Margins of victory in Pennsylvania have been small. In 2020, Biden defeated Trump by about 80,000 votes. Four years earlier, Trump beat Hillary Clinton by about 44,000 votes, or less than a percentage point.
Patrick Murphy, a former Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, said the state remained a “toss-up” with just two months to go in the race, but insisted it was an “absolutely, positively, must win” for Harris.
A CNN poll from Pennsylvania published on Wednesday found the two candidates tied, each with support from 47 per cent of likely voters. An FT average of statewide polls in Pennsylvania also shows Harris and Trump in a statistical tie, with Harris enjoying an edge of just 0.4 points.
Charlie Dent, a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania and Trump critic, said that given the former president’s tendency to over-perform polling in past elections, he may already have an advantage over Harris.
But he added Harris was still better positioned than Biden had been to defeat Trump this time.
U.S. Rep. Summer Lee (D-12th District) speaks to the Pennsylvania delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago Aug. 22, 2024 (Capital-Star photo by Kim Lyons)
Delegates and candidates turn to the work of keeping the battleground state blue
By: Kim Lyons
Penn-Capital Star
August 25, 2024 – CHICAGO — Pennsylvania was the most popular kid in the class at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, and the battleground state and its 19 electoral votes were well represented in Chicago and on the convention’s nightly broadcasts. Each night featured a speaker from the Keystone State, with Lt. Gov. Austin Davis on Monday; state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta on Tuesday; Gov. Josh Shapiro on Wednesday and U.S. Sen. Bob Casey on Thursday.
Shapiro was unquestionably the biggest Pennsylvania presence at the DNC, due in part to his status as a runner-up to be presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate. He was constantly booked during the week, speaking at numerous state delegations’ breakfasts, attracting the ire of GOP nominee former President Donald Trump, and appearing regularly on cable news channels.
Project 2025 played a key role at the convention, as Democrats continued to try to link the conservative policy plan to reshape the federal government and increase presidential authority with Trump.
Kenyatta, a candidate for state Auditor General held the giant Project 2025 book on stage Tuesday night,, and told the audience it was a “radical plan to drag us backwards, bankrupt the middle class and raise prices on working families like yours and mine.”
Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025 but several members of his administration were involved with helping to craft it.
“It’s a big, heavy book full of bad ideas, and it was one of these moments where we’re able to really get people to understand with the visual how serious Trump and this administration are about doubling down on his flawed theory of the case,” Kenyatta told the Capital-Star on the final day of the convention.
Our vote is the highest demonstration of the collective power we have… The purpose of this moment is to use our collective power to elect somebody who gives a damn about us, and then to work side by side with her to help implement the things that she’s talking about.
He added Project 2025 should serve as a warning to Democrats about what they believe a second Trump term would look like.
“When Trump burst onto the political scene, he did so with the thesis that ‘America sucks,’ and that it sucks in large part because our neighbors, the people in our community, people we don’t know — they’re somehow a part of bringing America down,” Kenyatta said, “and the only way we fix it is if we give him all the power.”
While Trump’s first term saw the former president “flailing around,” Kenyatta said, the architects of Project 2025 mapped out a plan for how to reach some of the goals of the far-right wing of the party, such as a national abortion ban and abolishing the U.S. Department of Education.
Kenyatta added he doesn’t believe in the political concept of giving all the power to one person to fix everything.
“Our vote is the highest demonstration of the collective power we have,” he said. “If we elect Kamala Harris in November and then say, ‘OK, we’ll see you in four years at the next convention. Hope you fix all the problems!’ then we’ve missed the thread. The purpose of this moment is to use our collective power to elect somebody who gives a damn about us, and then to work side by side with her to help implement the things that she’s talking about.”
At the final Pennsylvania delegates’ breakfast on Thursday, U.S. Rep. Summer Lee (D-12th District) urged the battleground state delegates to keep up the convention’s momentum.
“We’re here honing our tools so that we can go out and do the very hard work, not for Kamala Harris. We’re not doing hard work for Summer Lee or any of my colleagues,” Lee said, but rather for marginalized and vulnerable people. “Think about that person whose name is in that book over the hundreds and hundreds of pages of Project 2025, who do we see there that we need to make sure is not touched by the evil and the horrors that they have lined up and ready for them.”
Davis, Pennsylvania’s youngest and first-ever Black lieutenant governor, addressed the convention on Monday night and spoke about the importance of building bridges. He appeared on stage with Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Sarah Rodriguez, Harris County, Texas Executive Lena Hidalgo, and California Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, all of whom shared stories about how Harris had made an impact on their communities.
“I grew up with working class parents in a small steel town in southwestern Pennsylvania, and to have the opportunity to speak on a national stage like that was incredibly humbling,” Davis told the Capital-Star. “It was just an example of how someone can live the American dream, so I hope folks who saw me saw that America should be a place where every person has that same opportunity.”
Davis said the question he heard most often over the course of the convention was whether Democrats can win Pennsylvania. “And I tell them, absolutely, we just have to keep showing up everywhere, competing in places that sometimes it’s not easy to be a Democrat,” he said.
Asked if there were “red” areas of the state he saw as possible to flip blue, he pointed to central Pennsylvania as having the most potential, particularly the race in the 10th Congressional District between former WGAL anchor Janelle Stelson and Republican U.S. Rep. Scott Perry.
“I think we have a great candidate in Janelle Stelson,” he said. “I think there’s a lot of energy also with [state Rep.] Patty Kim running for state Senate. So I think Dauphin, Lancaster, Cumberland — an area Governor Shapiro won when we were running on the ballot.”
Davis said not everyone was completely impressed with his star turn on television, however. His daughter Harper, whose 1st birthday is next month, was asleep by the time he appeared Monday night. “We’re going to replay it for her but she doesn’t care,” he said. “She only cares when I FaceTime her and she’s like, ‘Daddy, when are you coming home?’”
Photo: Walz and Harris talking with Aliquppa’s football team, as part of several stops in Western PA three days ago.
However Democrats Must Communicate Their Positions on Medicare and Social Security with this Critical Voting Bloc
From Retired Americans PAC
Aug 20, 2024
Chicago – A new survey of likely voters ages 65 and up in six key swing states shows Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are in an extremely close race to win the pivotal senior vote in the most contested battleground states. Harris holds 47% of the total senior vote in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, while Donald Trump is supported by 49%. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has just 3 percent of the senior vote in those states.
Four years ago, national exit polls found that voters over 65 voted for Trump over Biden by 5%. In each of these states, voters over the age of 65 comprise at least 23% of the electorate.
When asked which party would be best at handling key issues, the poll found that Democrats held a slim 2% advantage on Social Security and Medicare, issues Democrats have led on. On prescription drug costs, Democrats held an 8% advantage over Republicans. However, Republicans held an advantage over Democrats on the issues of inflation, at 9%, and immigration, 18%.
“Harris’ strong showing in the survey with a group that went for Trump four years ago is encouraging,” said Richard Fiesta, an expert on retirement security issues and Treasurer of Retired Americans PAC. “However candidates who want to win must engage older voters directly on the issues that matter most to them now.
“There are stark differences between the two parties on the future of Social Security, Medicare, and prescription drugs – it’s incumbent on Democrats to communicate that they will strengthen and protect these programs, not privatize or cut them,” Fiesta continued.
The poll of 1,200 likely voters ages 65 and up in the November general election was conducted by GBAO between July 23-30, 2024, in AZ, GA, MI, NV, PA and WI on behalf of Retired Americans PAC.*
Harris led Trump among seniors by 3 percentage points in Arizona (49%-46%) and Michigan (50%-47%) and by 4 in Wisconsin (49%-45%). Trump led by 3 in Nevada (48%-45%), by 6 in Pennsylvania (51%-45%) and by 12 in Georgia (55%-43%).
*Two hundred respondents were reached in each state and the results were weighted proportionally. Respondents were reached by live dialers and through text-to-web interviews and the results carry a margin of error of +/- 2.8 percentage points at a 95 percent confidence interval.
In 2000, Hispanics — a term used for Spanish-speakers, while “Latino” includes those with a heritage in all Latin American countries — accounted for less than a quarter of Allentown’s population. Now the city is majority Hispanic, chiefly Puerto Rican and Dominican. With similar alacrity, the nearby city of Reading turned 70 per cent Hispanic.
On a walk through a heavily Puerto Rican neighbourhood, Matt Tuerk, Allentown’s mayor, was greeted every few yards by residents lounging on the stoops of neighbourhood bodegas. Tuerk, a bicycling mayor who speaks fluent Spanish, is trying to set up a direct flight between San Juan, Puerto Rico’s capital, and Allentown. He and Susan Wild, the Democratic congresswoman for the area, recently slept on the floor of San Juan’s airport.
“Hispanics won’t automatically vote for either party — and many won’t vote at all,” Tuerk said. “But you won’t get anywhere unless you meet them halfway.” The Harris campaign has 15 campaign offices across the state. Trump has just one, in northern Philadelphia. “Trump doesn’t seem to be making a serious effort,” said Charlie Dent, a former Republican congressman who until 2018 represented the district that includes Allentown. “The focus is still all about Maga [Make America Great Again]. But I’m sceptical that the Maga base will be large enough to win.”
Dent adds that Trump is on his own version of “a Grateful Dead tour” — replaying his big hits from the glory years. Trump may also be drawing confidence from his victory in Pennsylvania in 2016 after a campaign in which he routinely denigrated Hispanic people. He defeated Hillary Clinton in the state by 45,000 votes — a margin of just 0.72 per cent. The eight years since then have seen rapid population change. Large numbers of Hispanics have arrived to work in the booming logistics hub of the Lehigh Valley, which is close enough to East Coast metropolises like New York and Philadelphia to put 100mn Amazon and Walmart customers one truck shift away.
Many affluent New Yorkers, who tend to be Democrats, also relocated to the area during the pandemic. With its German and Czech-Moravian settler roots, the Lehigh Valley county of Northampton was once described by an eminent historian as the most conservative region in America. Now it is a mosaic. Trump was the first Republican to win Pennsylvania since George HW Bush in 1988. In historic terms, his win may have been a fluke.
Could Trump pull off another shock? Only in spite of himself, said Christopher Borick, a pollster at Allentown’s Muhlenberg College. Borick concedes that polling has not fully caught up with anecdotal evidence of Harris’s lightning switch in momentum. A month ago, polls showed Biden also losing Wisconsin and Michigan, the other two must-win swing states.
The surge in enthusiasm for Harris has brought new states, including North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia back into play. Recommended US presidential election 2024 Trump or Harris: Who’s ahead in the polls? A registered independent, Borick lives in Nazareth, a few miles from Allentown, and one of the most hotly contested townships in America. A reminder of the region’s bible-suffused early days, Nazareth is 10 miles down the road from Bethlehem, a former steel hub. In 2020, Biden won Borick’s ward, with its population of 1,000, by just three votes. This time he and his neighbours have been bombarded by Democratic door-knocking and campaign mail.
“The Trump campaign is so far missing in action,” said Borick. By the conventional calendar, Trump has 80 days to make up for lost ground in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. But in practice, early voting starts in mid-September. Roughly a third of Pennsylvanians are expected to vote by mail. If the 2022 midterm elections are any guide, these will veer strongly Democratic.
Here again, Trump is trampling on his campaign’s priorities. Republicans are trying to educate their voters about the benefits of the mail-in ballot. On the stump, however, Trump often repeats his claim that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election via mail-in fraud. In the next 30 days Republicans must somehow enthuse their foot soldiers to vote early without contradicting their leader’s stolen election theory — and his warning that 2024 will also be rigged. For true believers, this requires semantic acrobatics. Traditional Republicans can put it more bluntly. “That’s malarkey,” Montero, the lawyer based in Allentown, tells conservative voters when they express suspicion of postal votes. “We can only win by voting.”
The bill was the first sponsored by Lee to pass the full House
Photo: Cliff Simmons, an oil and gas inspector supervisor for the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection, points a methane sensor at an abandoned well on the Murrysville property of Pamela and Ivan Schrank on Thursday, March 28, 2024. Simmons visited the well site with other DEP officials, journalists and Rep. Summer Lee (PA-12). (Steve Mellon/Pittsburgh Union Progress)
By Kim Lyons
Penn-Capitol Star
APRIL 30, 2024 – Cliff Simmons, an oil and gas inspector supervisor for the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection, points a methane sensor at an abandoned well on the Murrysville property of Pamela and Ivan Schrank on Thursday, March 28, 2024. Simmons visited the well site with other DEP officials, journalists and Rep. Summer Lee (PA-12). (Steve Mellon/Pittsburgh Union Progress)
The U.S. House on Tuesday passed a bipartisan bill aimed at finding the thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells across the country, and studying how to better limit their environmental impact.
The legislation would authorize the U.S. Department of Energy to establish a five-year program to improve the location data it has on abandoned wells — some 350,000 of which are believed to be unaccounted for in Pennsylvania alone.
The bill — the Abandoned Wells, Remediation, Research, and Development Act — was the first piece of legislation sponsored by Pennsylvania Democrat Summer Lee to pass the full House. It passed by a vote of 333-75.
“We cannot and should not accept the fact that leaky oil and gas wells from the 1800s are poisoning our communities,” Lee said on the House floor Tuesday. “We must invest significant resources to research and develop solutions to this crisis — because it is still nearly impossible to track every abandoned well, and it is still too expensive to plug leaking wells.
Pennsylvania has the second-largest number of abandoned oil and gas wells; only Texas has more.
Lee visited the Murrysville home of Pamela and Ivan Schrank last month, after the couple discovered a leaky abandoned well on their property. During that visit, Pamela Schrank told Lee how she discovered the well, when she became dizzy while gardening in their backyard. The Schranks reached out to the state Department of Environmental Protection to have the well plugged before further damage occurred.
Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor has earned a reputation for being sure-footed in a crisis.
Photo: Josh Shapiro speaks during campaign event in Scranton, Pa., April 16. PHOTO: MATT ROURKE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
By Salena Zito
Wall Street Journal
April 29, 2024 – Lyndora, PA – Gov. Josh Shapiro walks down the labyrinth of narrow concrete stairs and hallways through Cleveland-Cliffs’ Butler Works steel mill in Western Pennsylvania. Reaching the podium, he raises his arm in victory when Jamie Sychak, president of United Auto Workers Local 3303, notes that a feared shutdown of the plant has been averted.
“It shows what is possible when we come together—Democrats and Republicans, union leaders, and CEOs—and go in the same direction,” Mr. Shapiro says. He praises the work the union’s members do at the only domestic mill that produces the grain-oriented electrical steel used to produce distribution transformers. The mill was set for extinction because of a proposed federal rule mandating that manufacturers use amorphous steel instead.
The union and Cleveland-Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves lobbied local, state and federal elected officials, but only after Mr. Shapiro appealed to the White House did the rule change. “They heard us, loud and clear, and they worked with us to revise this final rule,” Mr. Shapiro tells the crowd. Having the president’s ear is a big advantage for a swing-state governor.
Joe Biden carried the Keystone state by 1.1 points in 2020. Four years earlier, Donald Trump won by less than a point. When Mr. Shapiro won the governor’s office in 2022, his margin was nearly 15 points. That was in part because his opponent, state Sen. Doug Mastriano was a weak candidate. But it didn’t hurt that Mr. Shapiro is “so damn talented,” as GOP strategist David Urban puts it. The latest polling by Quinnipiac University shows Mr. Shapiro has a 59% approval rating. Mr. Biden’s figure in Pennsylvania is 39%.
Mr. Shapiro has developed a reputation for being competent, pragmatic and sure-footed in a crisis. “My job is to keep people safe, and my job every day is to get s— done,” he says in an interview. “Particularly in a time of emergency, you need to take control of the scene, you need to assess the damage and what is needed to be done, and then put your team in place to go and do it.”
After the February 2023 Norfolk Southern train derailment across the state line in East Palestine, Ohio, spilled a cocktail of hazardous chemicals, the Pennsylvania governor was on the ground in Beaver and Lawrence counties, as well as in Ohio at Gov. Mike DeWine’s invitation, to see firsthand what had happened.
“I’ll never forget,” he says. “I knocked on the door of a home in Darlington Township and the woman in the home invited me in. And obviously they were scared, they were worried about their livestock, and she had also shared with me—and this has stuck with me—she had to leave her home for about two days and in the time she left, she lost a batch of eggs.”
U.S. Rep Summer Lee participates in a Democratic candidates’ forum in Pittsburgh, Jan. 28, 2024
The three wasted no time describing their differences and why their opponents were wrong for the job.
By Kim Lyons
Penncapital-Star
JAN 28, 2024 - PITTSBURGH— The three candidates seeking the Democratic nomination for Pennsylvania’s 12th Congressional District came out swinging during a forum at Carnegie Mellon University on Sunday, not only demonstrating their differences but their willingness to criticize their fellow Democrats in areas of disagreement. And there were plenty of areas of disagreement.
U.S. Rep. Summer Lee (D-12th District), Edgewood Borough Councilmember Bhavini Patel and Laurie MacDonald, president and CEO of the Pittsburgh-based nonprofit Center for Victims, took the stage at the forum moderated by journalist Chris Potter of WESA-FM, Avalon Sueiro, president of the CMU College Democrats, and Heidi Norman, who works for the City of Pittsburgh and is a Democratic committeewoman in the city’s 14th Ward.
The first questioner asked the candidates to offer their thoughts on the role of a Congressional representative in navigating the complex situation in the Middle East. Lee has received criticism for her position supporting a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.
MacDonald said her father was an immigrant from the Middle East, who wanted to “assimilate” and to have people judge him on who he was. She said she was passionate about putting together a coalition of peacemakers in the region, although recognized it would not be easy. “I think if we work together and continue with the Abraham Accords, and get that process going that we can find room for everybody in this world.”
Patel criticized Lee for not attending local rallies with the Jewish community in the days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, and for tweeting out information about a hospital bombing in Gaza that was later found to be erroneous. “To me that’s stoking hatred, that’s stoking antisemitism and it puts people in our communities in a tragic, dangerous position,” Patel said. “That is unacceptable.”
Bhavini Patel participates in a Democratic candidates’ forum in Pittsburgh Sunday Jan. 28, 2024 (screen capture) Lee replied that it was a subject that elicits pain in multiple communities. “The reality is, is that peace— a just and lasting peace— has to start with centering all of the folks who are impacted, and we have to be incredibly clear that there is no pathway to peace if we can only talk about security for one community, or as we continue to pit communities against each other,” she said. “Peace and justice and liberation and accountability for Israelis is not counter to peace and justice for Palestinians or Muslims or for Arabs.”
She added that “anybody who would use this issue as a political wedge is not serious and does not understand the gravity of the situation.”
The two sparred again on a question about the role and responsibility of the United States in geopolitical conflicts around the world.
Patel said as someone with a degree in international relations she has spent time “navigating these issues and getting a sense of what’s going on.” She noted that Lee had tweeted information that the president doesn’t have the authority to authorize airstrikes in the Red Sea against the Houthi rebels, who have attacked ships in the area and disrupted global commerce.
“When we’re unable to actually take these foreign policy concerns in a serious way, and engage with them in an intellectual way, and we’re just focused on posting, rather than understanding the challenges, I think that it sets us up for challenges,” Patel said. “I think it puts us in a precarious position as a country.”
Lee countered that her preference was to center American diplomacy in global conflicts. “The reality is that while an international studies degree is important, I have a law degree,” she said. “And no, the president does not have the authority to declare war or offensive strikes without the prior authorization of Congress.” Patel attempted to interrupt but Potter admonished her to respect the other candidates’ time.
Despite the best efforts by moderators to prevent delays and interruptions, the audience was fairly vocal throughout the event, alternately applauding or heckling the candidates based on their answers. At one point during a response to a question about the role of Congress in supporting gender-affirming care, MacDonald reacted directly to the audience booing her.
“My opponent — the people who live in her district have no families, they live in squalor, they don’t have…” MacDonald began, before audience members shouted back. “You think you know, right, well guess what, I worked there. I have helped those communities.”
When the heckling had died down, MacDonald added, “I don’t need to take that. My record speaks for itself. I’ve walked the walk, I’ve talked the talk, I help families. I help everybody. I don’t have a prejudiced, white, black, purple, pink bone in my body. I love everybody. And I love all of you too, even if we disagree.”
Laurie MacDonald participates in a Democratic candidates’ forum in Pittsburgh Sunday Jan. 28, 2024 (screen capture) The candidates were asked how they would engage younger voters, and in her response, Patel continued a line of criticism she has levied at Lee before: that she thinks the progressive Democrat does not fully support President Joe Biden’s agenda.
“With the Supreme Court overturning affirmative action, Roe v Wade, it really does come down to unequivocally standing with our president,” Patel said. “We really have zero room for error, and heading into the 2024 general election when we think about the future of this country, when we think about the future of our democracy, it really is all hands on deck, and it’s going to come from Western Pennsylvania. It’s going to be Pennsylvania that drives that conversation and drives that turnout and we need to start taking that seriously.”
Lee said the Democratic coalition of 2024 would include Black and brown voters, young voters and progressive voters, “precisely what Western Pennsylvania looks like,” noting that progressives had won decisive victories in recent elections in that end of the state.
“We actually need people who are going to be bold and push the president— just a little bit— so that we can get to [student] debt cancellation,” Lee said. “We need young people who are going to push the administration on climate change, because we have to meet the scope and the scale of the urgency of the moment. That energy is led by young people.”
Beaver County Blue: Voice of the 17th CD of Progressive Democrats of America 