Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-PA), attends a campaign event for Sen. Bob Casey, (D-PA), with members of the Veterans for Casey coalition in Pittsburgh on October 10, 2024.
This story is part of the Prospect’s on-the-ground Election 2024 coverage. You can find all the other stories here.
With a week to go, there’s a story of two elections emerging in western Pennsylvania, a critical region that could decide who takes the White House.
At the presidential level, Democrats are biting their nails as the Kamala Harris campaign’s numbers have continued to sag in recent weeks. There are mixed indicators from polling and focus groups, but as of now the Pennsylvania race is a dead heat.
Yet, in the state’s 17th congressional district, which in prior years has been a major bellwether for the presidential race, first-term Democratic Rep. Chris Deluzio stands on much more solid footing for his re-election bid.
The 17th, which straddles Allegheny and Beaver counties, is the most competitive seat in the region, with more registered Republicans than Democrats as of 2023. Even so, Inside Elections recently changed its rating for the seat to “Likely Democratic,” though Cook Political still has it only as a slight lean for Democrats. Available polling has shown Deluzio up by between four to eight points, either way significantly better than Harris. Conor Lamb previously held the earlier version of seat before redistricting, flipping it blue in 2018.
Deluzio’s pitch seems to be resonating with voters more than the national ticket in a Rust Belt area where Democrats have struggled to retain their footing. He’s largely doing so by running on the most popular parts of the Biden administration’s agenda, whereas the national ticket tries to carefully tiptoe around much of it.
Of course, there are many factors for why a down ballot race might overperform the national ticket. But some of Deluzio’s appeal can be attributed to his platform and messaging.
Deluzio has run his campaign on a unified strategy of connecting the Democrats' “freedom” agenda, such as abortion access, to economic liberty. “Freedom from these monopolies, freedom from these abortion bans, freedom to know that our self-government is strong and that we don't have these attacks on our way of life,” he told the Prospect in an interview last week.
HIS GOP OPPONENT, ROB MERCURI, is a two-term state lawmaker and military veteran who previously worked for PNC Bank. Inside Elections noted in its analysis that “There’s not much excitement from Republicans about this race,” despite the fact that Mercuri was added to House Republicans’ “Young Guns” roster.
Deluzio has targeted Mercuri’s record on a host of unpopular issues, to undercut his self-depiction as a moderate.
Mercuri has said on the trail that he’s against criminalizing abortions in the state and believes there should be exemptions for rape and incest. This triangulation has become a mainstay position for embattled Republicans.
The problem is that in the state legislature he co-sponsored a bill as recently as 2021 that effectively would have criminalized legal abortions after six weeks once a heartbeat is detected. The bill contained no language about exceptions for medical emergencies, rape, or incest.
Along with that record, Deluzio has added that any House Republican will have to bend the knee and follow the lead of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who is a pro-life hardliner.
Deluzio also charged his opponent with not standing up against the “stop the steal” movement to contest the presidential election in 2020. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA), who is actively stumping alongside Mercuri in the final stretch of the race, continues to peddle this narrative.
Deluzio is uniquely suited to campaign on this issue. Before running for office, he was a legal counsel and policy expert at University of Pittsburgh, specifically on election security and voting rights.
Along with democracy reforms at the ballot box, Deluzio has equally focused his attention on economic democracy in the workplace.
In his first term, Deluzio has burnished his reputation as one of the most stalwart champions of the core pillars of the Biden administration’s economic agenda on labor, antitrust, and industrial policy. In no small measure, these policies were targeted at winning back parts of the country like western Pennsylvania that were hit hardest by deindustrialization and slipped away from Democrats in the 2016 election.
“Republicans have nothing but trickle-down, which has never worked for my region or in this country,” Deluzio said.
The political unpopularity of President Biden’s agenda, setting aside the personal doubts about his age and capacity, has been caused by inflation and the rising cost of living. Deluzio doesn’t run away from the issue. He attacks it head-on by talking about price gouging by large corporations. He’s been lauding the trustbusting of the Federal Trade Commission and renewed competition policy to prevent monopolies from hacking up prices on consumers.
Part of how he’s sold Democratic spending programs in an election year is not as some lofty ideological shift but really in a more traditional sense as “bringing home the bacon.” The first item you see on his website are the $2.2 billion in federal funds he’s delivered to the district from the legislation Democrats passed, namely the Inflation Reduction Act, the bipartisan infrastructure law, and the CHIPS and Science Act, along with other funds.
One major example is a green energy company named Mainspring Energy, which recently received a massive $87 million grant from the Department of Energy, funded by the infrastructure law, to make generators for the electrical grid. That project will also create 891 jobs in the district.
Deluzio readily admits that these industrial policy initiatives are long-term investments and ones that may not immediately appear to address people’s everyday pocketbook concerns. But they are popular and produce many tangible benefits that he believes Democrats need to do a better job of selling.
For example, there’s infrastructure money going to his district to renovate a bridge on the I-79 highway and also the Montgomery Locks and Dam on the Ohio River, both badly in need of repairs. These renovations will be built with union construction workers, because of project labor agreements that the federal government used those funds as leverage to secure.
For Deluzio, creating union jobs through federal investment is one plank of re-energizing the American labor movement. His platform includes passing the PRO Act and other associated legislation to clear the pathway for more collective bargaining in the workplace.
“Republicans have nothing but trickle-down, which has never worked for my region or in this country,” Deluzio said.
Democrats are still struggling with sizable shares of working-class voters, especially those without a college degree. One flashpoint of this tension was the International Brotherhood of Teamsters opting not to endorse the Democratic presidential ticket. (The Pennsylvania Conference of Teamsters, like many locals across the country, did endorse Harris-Walz.) But the Teamsters’ local Joint Council 40, along with other labor groups, have endorsed Deluzio and are part of his campaign’s outreach to voters. The ground game components of organized labor have been critical for Democrats around the country, including in the 17th district.
Deluzio has not shied away from diagnosing why he thinks some share of union workers continue to shift to the GOP, placing some blame on his own party’s past policies.
“I'll be honest, Democrats and Republicans also made horrible decisions around trade that really hurt a lot of union workers, like NAFTA,” he said. “So there is skepticism, correctly, of the folks in Washington.”
Past trade deals hold a particular resonance in Pennsylvania, which bore the brunt of offshoring. Deluzio and Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) together released a policy guide earlier this year for what they called the “Make Stuff Here” agenda. It was focused in large part on stronger enforcement to protect American industry from illegal trade violations, product dumping, and country-hopping to avoid tariffs. The framework is targeted at shoring up tariffs that the Biden administration has placed on imports, such as steel, aluminum, solar panel cells, and critical minerals.
Some of those tariffs were originally imposed by the Trump administration, though Biden has kept them in place. The Trump campaign is doubling down on protectionism by promising an across-the-board ten percent tariff on all imports. This has put the Harris campaign in an awkward position politically. They’ve mostly opted to bash Trump’s proposal as a regressive sales tax.
But Deluzio thinks there’s a better way to navigate this issue. When I asked him whether he thinks the party has done a good job articulating the distinction in their vision on trade in contrast to Republicans, he flat-out said no.
He believes Democrats need to expose the rifts within the GOP coalition on trade, especially between so-called America First candidates and the donor class. For example, the Republican Study Committee puts out reports defending free-trade agreements, which most Republican elected officials still support, in direct contrast to Trump.
“There is no cohesive view, so Republicans don't know what they believe anymore. Certainly their corporate bosses want to continue to push a free-trade agenda that has just crushed a lot of manufacturing communities in America,” Deluzio said.
This strategy allows Democrats not to appear like the doves on trade in this political moment without endorsing maximalist protectionist views.
“That's showing that you can be strong and stand up for workers, regions and industries but in a way that is also smart policy, not just this across-the-board stuff, which I think really hurts consumers,” he said.
Nothing is certain in this election. But based on where the polls currently stand, Deluzio could very well represent the road not taken for Democrats this election year, and a model for how to win back left-behind parts of the country.
