I saw Dent at a Philadelphia forum last spring, on his final weekday as a member of Congress (he quit early rather than serve out his term in the old Lehigh Valley district), and his prediction on that day seems credible now: “The issue for Republicans this year is the Democratic wave that’s brewing. Anybody can see this. This election is about the president of the United States and his conduct in office … The best-case scenario for House Republicans is, they hang on to the House by their fingernails. The worst case is, they lose more than 35 seats … Democrats need only 23, and I can get you another 12 in about a minute.” That dovetails with the new assessment from Stu Rothenberg, the nonpartisan Washington analyst, who wrote this week that Pennsylvania in particular looks like “a bloodbath for the GOP, with eye-popping Democratic gains almost certain.”
Dent’s reconfigured Seventh District is likely to flip blue; Ryan Costello’s Sixth District, even more so. And a brand new Fifth District, carved from a slice of Philadelphia and the western suburbs, is viewed as one of the Democrats’ easiest pickups nationwide. Democratic women, powered in part by strong female turnout, are poised to win all three. Indeed, Costello made it clear when he announced his retirement that he had no interest in defending Trump on the stump, not in this political climate. In a March appearance on MSNBC, he said: “I have little kids, and I don’t want them to ask me what Stormy Daniels does for a living. I don’t like to hear a lot of the things I hear when we tweet the way that we tweet … I think a lot of voters support a lot of [Trump’s] policies, but we cannot discount the fact that a lot of Americans legitimately look at any president of the United States and say, ‘He or she should be a role model’ … This stuff is not good for our country, it’s not good for our culture.”
Brian Fitzpatrick, in the Bucks County district (which remained largely intact under the new map), is arguably well equipped to withstand a blue wave. He touts himself as an independent; he’s been endorsed by the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, a federation of labor unions in the state, as well as the liberal-leaning Philadelphia Inquirer editorial page; and even though he has voted with Trump 84 percent of the time (a statistic that Wallace frequently cites), a nonpartisan think tank rated Fitzpatrick as the House’s third most bipartisan lawmaker in 2017. He recently told the press that he takes hits from both sides (for siding with Trump too much or not enough), but that that’s merely “the price you pay for being a centrist.”
Prior to this tumultuous year, Fitzpatrick’s “brand” would virtually guarantee reelection, particularly in a district that’s rated slightly more Republican than the national average. But it’s a sign of the times—and of Trump’s potential toxicity—that Wallace deems it advantageous to remind voters that Fitzpatrick is a Republican. In a debate last week, Wallace did it so often that Fitzpatrick bridled: “Scott, I’m hearing you throw the word Republican out. Do your best to try to keep party labels out of the debate, because it’s really important, okay?”