Graphic: Intelligencer, Wikimedia Commons
Congressman Scott Perry is eating chocolate ice cream in the shadow of Newt Gingrich’s childhood home in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania, during a street festival on a warm late-summer weekend, when his mood turns sour. “Now, I think it’s pretty rich that they will go and say that President Trump tried to steal the election, and President Trump is subverting democracy, and Republicans are against democracy,” he says stridently of Democrats dumping Joe Biden for Kamala Harris. “They just disavowed every single one of their votes and installed someone that got zero votes. So please don’t preach to me about that.”
The topic of subverting democracy is a touchy one. The former chair of the House Freedom Caucus, Perry was one of Donald Trump’s key congressional allies in the efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election — federal investigators even seized his phone. He has long insisted he did nothing wrong and compared his efforts to ensure “election integrity” were like a murder investigation where “we have got to find out who did it,” which he says is different from “trying to resurrect the body.”
Perry is the only member of the Freedom Caucus to represent a swing district and, despite that, he has not changed his political views an iota even though the swath of central Pennsylvania he’s represented for six terms has become more moderate. A traditionally Republican-leaning area that includes the state capital, Harrisburg, the district has recently moved thanks to the mid-Atlantic transplants filling subdivisions over what used to be farmland. It is almost a stereotypical middle ground: In the war of sports fandom that divides the state, loyalties are split between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh teams, and there is a salient of Baltimore fans that juts north of the city, propelled there by white flight across the Mason-Dixon Line. Demographically, the area is broadly reflective of the rest of the state, with over 70 percent of residents who are white, while Black and Hispanic residents each make up another 10 percent, respectively. The result is a jigsaw of fading industrial cities, prosperous suburbs, and rural towns that, combined, Trump has won twice, but by a tighter margin in 2020 than in 2016.
Representative Scott Perry.
Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images
The district is a key battleground in the presidential election in what is potentially the decisive battleground state. If Harris wins this swing district, it would be almost mathematically impossible for her to lose the state. Local television attests to its importance, with political commercials airing almost nonstop on local news. Between the presidential campaigns, the congressional race, and the Senate race between incumbent Democrat Bob Casey and Republican Dave McCormick (a millionaire funding his own campaign), it’s a nonstop barrage not just by the campaigns but by super-PACs too. It is the congressional race, though, that is most like the presidential one, pitting Perry, a Republican firmly associated with the party’s MAGA wing, against Janelle Stelson, a Democrat banking on the revulsion of suburban women over the Dobbs decision.
For the incumbent, the big question is whether his uncompromisingly conservative approach can still appeal to enough voters. As he put it in his first campaign ad this year, “You didn’t send me to Congress to make friends.” Both Democratic and Republican operatives believe he’s uniquely vulnerable as the district’s political make-up shifts. Dauphin County, surrounding Harrisburg, was won only twice by Democratic presidential candidates in the 20th century, but Democrats have held it in every election since Barack Obama won it in 2008 and have steadily made gains down ballot, such as winning the county courthouse last year for the first time in over a century. Across the Susquehanna River in Cumberland County, Democrats are making progress too: John Fetterman only barely lost the congressional district in 2022, while Josh Shapiro won it by double digits, albeit against a weak opponent. Both Perry and Trump need to prevent further erosion in order to win.
Democrats, meanwhile, need to keep winning over the voters who are filling the newly erected townhouses springing up off four-lane highways that crisscross the district while turning out the party’s traditional base of minority voters. Last Saturday, Stelson was busy campaigning at the Hispanic Heritage Festival in Harrisburg, where she occasionally dodged processions of paraders carrying Puerto Rican and Dominican flags. Attendees stopped her for selfies given her status as a bona fide local celebrity after decades as an anchor on the local NBC affiliate. At one point during our sit-down interview, a man named Omar recognizes her while riding by on his bike and stops for a picture, proclaiming that Stelson is his “idol.” After nearly 40 years on TV, Stelson is particularly gifted at retail politics for a first-time candidate, telling starstruck locals, “I’m out of my box. I have legs.”
Democratic House candidate Janelle Stelson campaigning in York, Pennsylvania in April.
Photo: Joe Lamberti/The Washington Post/Getty Images
Stelson recalls with perfect clarity the day she decided she would run for office: June 24, 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. “And then I was live on the set when it happened, and it took a chunk out of my heart that day,” she says. “I had to look out into the camera in my best nonpartisan way at the time every woman watching had her rights rolled back 50 years.” Abortion is a centerpiece of her campaign, which features a television ad hammering Perry for co-sponsoring a bill that says life begins at conception.
She echoes standard Democratic-messaging notes on the economy, blaming inflation on price gouging and saying that she would not vote to extend the Trump tax cuts and instead push to “restructure the tax system to make sure everyone is paying their fair share,” and increase the child tax credit.
As Republicans are fond of pointing out, Stelson doesn’t even live in the district: She is a longtime resident of Lancaster, which is only a few miles away and indicates she was particularly motivated to run because of her own personal disdain for Perry. She derides the incumbent as a do-nothing congressman who is “so extreme” that he “doesn’t even represent Republicans anymore,” going so far as to joke with a voter from Perry’s hometown of Dillsburg that it’s “otherwise known as the devil’s den.”
Only a few miles away at the Hummelstown Art Festival, Perry mixed with voters almost incognito. Save for a staffer walking behind him with stickers and door-hangers, one would have no idea why this middle-aged man in a polo shirt was different from all the other middle-aged men in polo shirts. He slowly worked through the crowd greeting voters, including old friends and the small town’s mayor. Some attendees didn’t know who he was. Others were far too aware, such as one man who thought that state environmental agencies were covering up fatal solar radiation. Perry patiently showed interest in the conversation before the man finally ends by saying, “I’m not kidding, they are killing all of us.” Perry earnestly responds, “I don’t want to be killed.”
It’s a typical response. Perry simply states his views and lets voters take them or leave them. “The point is that because I’m honest with people, they know where I stand and why I stand there, and I don’t fool around with ’em,” he says. “I don’t try and tell everybody what suits them just to pander to them. This is where I am, this is why I’m there.”
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