WASHINGTON — The most dangerous outcome for Republicans in Tuesday’s special House election is not the prospect of a Democrat taking over one of their seats.
It was the shrugging off by voters of the party’s biggest legislative achievement: the tax cut measure that Republicans hoped would be their major campaign message as they head toward a turbulent midterm election.
Though the popularity of Trump’s tax plan has grown since it was passed last year, it seemed to have stalled as an election issue in Pennsylvania, leading Republicans to shift away from it late in the campaign in search of another topic to energize supporters of state legislator Rick Saccone.
“It looks like it just petered out,” pollster Patrick Murray of the nonpartisan Monmouth University Polling Institute said of the tax plan’s impact on the election.
As they pondered whether Saccone or Democrat Conor Lamb would ultimately win in a district Trump seized by almost 20 percentage points — the two were essentially tied awaiting the counting of additional ballots — Republicans chose to blame their candidate rather than question the impact of the issue that is almost certain to be the GOP’s biggest calling card as it tries to retain control of Congress in November.
“Campaigns and candidates matter,” said Matt Gorman, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, which works to elect GOP House members.
Gorman brushed aside the idea that tax cuts were less politically potent than hoped, noting that candidates are responsible for defining opponents, raising sufficient money and telling an empathetic story — elements that Republicans in Washington and Pennsylvania have cited as deficiencies in Saccone’s campaign.
Asked whether he was blaming the messenger over the message, Gorman replied, “If you can’t get your message out, then you don’t have a message.”
The election in the Pittsburgh area, to replace a Republican incumbent who resigned in disgrace, was of limited utility; the district has already been gutted in a redrawing of congressional lines by the state Supreme Court, so the winner will have to run elsewhere in November.
But coming in the spring of an election year that already appears to be a stiff climb for Republicans, the race was being watched for what it would say about the effect of a nationally unpopular president whose presence in the White House has fanned unprecedented levels of Democratic enthusiasm.
Democrats already were riding successful efforts at the end of 2017 in a host of Virginia races and the contest for a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama.
Gorman was just one of several Republicans to fiercely dispute the notion that Tuesday’s results showed that there were limits to the political impact of the tax cut plan.
Corry Bliss directed two outside groups working to elect Republican House members that ran multiple ads citing the tax cut plan and trying to link Lamb to Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco. He said that regardless of Tuesday’s results, he sees both topics as beneficial to Republican candidates.
“If I could sign a deal … with Democrats that the only two things we talk about are the tax plan and Nancy Pelosi, I would do that in a second,” Bliss said.
The closing days of the Pennsylvania campaign, however, showed evidence of ambivalence. Saccone continued to talk about taxes; on Monday he and Donald Trump Jr. arrived at a candy shop in the district to tout fiscal benefits to the store and its workers as a result of the tax measure.
During a Fox News appearance Tuesday morning, Saccone returned to the topic.
“Every day it seems people are still coming up to me, telling me how it’s benefiting them _ single moms and small businesses that are expanding,” he said.
Republicans in Washington have been relentless about touting the tax measure. At their weekly meetings with reporters, GOP leaders have marched one by one to the microphone to tell of their district visits to giant home improvement stores and small businesses, recounting stories of voters who said their prospects had been boosted as a result of the new law.
But several people looking at the 2018 races suggested that several factors weighed against the GOP tax cuts developing enough strength to cut into the Democratic advantage this year.
Trump is the election’s animating force, for one thing, overshadowing any specific issue and even the candidates. The president held a Saturday night rally in Pennsylvania that was ostensibly to boost Saccone, although the candidate was only minimally mentioned.
Even before Trump’s election, the political environment had grown bracingly partisan; the antagonism between the sides is believed by many to limit the impact of any one issue in turning public opinion among voters who side with their self-selected partisans.
Trump won in places like Pennsylvania in 2016 with a sharp message playing to voters’ anxiety about being displaced in modern-day America. Robert Jones, chief executive of PRRI, which conducts regular polls on national politics, said it was not clear that a more prosaic message about tax savings would have the same heft.
“Something like an extra 100 bucks in my tax return _ I don’t think it’s going to stand up very well against ‘The immigrants are coming for my job and ISIS is coming for my children,’” he said. “Those messages are much more powerful.”
