Out Like a Lamb

It took awhile, but the vote in the special election in Pennsylvania's Eighteenth U.S. House District is officially in, and Democrat Conor Lamb (below) has won.  His victory, however narrow, is an embarrassment to Trump, who carried the district by 20 points.

Lamb ran on local concerns and economic issues, meaning that he distanced himself from the national party and its establishment leaders.  In other words, he ran talking about the real concerns of the voters.  No identity politics, no "cultural" issues, none of that stuff, just the basic worries about jobs, the economy, education, infrastructure, and health care.  Martin O'Malley's Win Back Your State PAC, which discourages Democratic candidates for office from talking about Trump, backed him, and Democratic strategist Lis Smith said that Lamb's victory shows that Democrats can win Republican areas by running on local issues and not on the issues of the coastal elites.  Lis Smith, by the way, is a veteran of Martin O'Malley's presidential campaign.

I wonder how much Democrats will learn from this win.  They'll probably keep pushing Trump as an issue to get out the vote for the midterms but miss the point of Lamb's victory - responding to voters.  Even if Democrats don't nationalize the midterms, the Republicans might, and Tom Perez at the Democratic National Committee may not be well-equipped to counter such a strategy.  But the victory of Lamb, who will run for a full House this November in a newly redrawn district thanks to a court-ordered redistricting due to gerrymandering, has been a major wake-up call for the Republicans and a sign that the wave waiting to wash them out of power in November is in fact a tsunami.  The Democrats now know how to win. All they have to do is follow through.