Courtesy Chris Deluzio for Congress
Chris Deluzio, Democratic candidate for Congress in Pennsylvania’s 17th District
PENN HILLS, PENNSYLVANIA – The race for retiring Rep. Conor Lamb’s seat in Western Pennsylvania is being fought in starkly populist terms, as Democratic nominee Chris Deluzio pushes a pro-labor, anti–corporate greed campaign against his opponent, self-funding millionaire businessman Jeremy Shaffer.
Like Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman’s run for Senate, Deluzio’s bid is something of a test case for Democrats who believe economic populism is the key to preserving their edge in former labor strongholds where Republicans have gained ground in recent elections. Early indications are that the strategy is working. Two recent polls commissioned by the campaign and the DCCC indicate that the race is currently tilting in Deluzio’s favor. While internal polls should be taken with a grain of salt, it’s notable that Shaffer and the NRCC have not responded with numbers of their own.
Pennsylvania’s 17th Congressional District stretches north and west of Pittsburgh, grabbing the parts of Allegheny County not included in neighboring Democratic nominee Summer Lee’s 12th District, as well as the entirety of exurban Beaver County. While Pittsburgh and its suburbs have mostly trended blue in recent years, Beaver County has trended right. Lamb held the seat for a couple of cycles, but his ill-fated bid for U.S. Senate has left it open.
With an R+3 lean after redistricting, it is daunting territory for Democrats, especially in a midterm year, though the area has had Democratic representation since 2018. Most forecasters have kept the race in the toss-up column, an outlook that appears to be shared by national party committees, which are investing heavily in the race.
Groups affiliated with House Democrats and House Republicans have spent over $4 million so far, and that number is expected to balloon in the closing weeks. Shaffer has also boosted his personal campaign coffers with a million-dollar personal loan, and he has benefited from nearly $300,000 in spending by the Koch-affiliated Americans for Prosperity. While Shaffer’s loan and outside spending advantage have left him with a financial edge overall, Deluzio has handily out-fundraised Shaffer, and the two appear poised for an exceptionally tight—and brutal—closing stretch.
In recent weeks, Deluzio and Shaffer’s campaigns have gone distinctly negative. Deluzio’s team and national Democrats have lambasted Shaffer for self-funding his campaign, and relentlessly tried to tie his personal wealth and corporate executive title (for a company “that creates jobs in China”) to the economic pain Western Pennsylvanians have endured in recent decades. Most recently, national Democrats have tried to tie Shaffer to Doug Mastriano, the unpopular Republican gubernatorial candidate in Pennsylvania.
But Democrats have struggled to puncture Shaffer’s image as an outsider and moderate consensus-seeker, which he has rooted in his success as a businessman. Like some of the corporate interests that have supported his campaign, Shaffer has managed to maintain his bipartisan veneer by painstakingly avoiding taking any clear stances on conservative social causes.
His campaign website includes various stock diatribes against cancel culture and critical race theory, but so far that rhetoric has been paired with few policy specifics. He has avoided questions about the legitimacy of the 2020 election, as well as LGBTQ rights, where Shaffer has consistently refused to reveal whether he supports basic constitutional protections, such as the right to same-sex marriage, before this year.
Deluzio’s bid is something of a test case for Democrats who believe economic populism is the key to preserving their edge in former labor strongholds.
In a particularly telling example of Shaffer’s approach, he once skipped a vote on an LGBTQ nondiscrimination ordinance by the Ross Township Board of Commissioners when he was an elected member. At the time, Shaffer was in the midst of a tough state Senate campaign. (He went on to lose that campaign narrowly, but the measure ultimately passed on a 5-2 vote.)
Prior to Roe’s reversal, the distinct exception to Shaffer’s avoidance of hot-button issues was on abortion rights. During previous runs for office, Shaffer indicated that he “strongly agreed” with the statement that “human life begins at conception and deserves legal protection at every stage until natural death.” Earlier this cycle, he endorsed further federal actions to restrict access to abortions. The DCCC has highlighted both of these stances in its ad messaging.
But since the emergence of abortion as the defining issue of the cycle, Shaffer has backtracked from those positions on his campaign website, where he now conveniently refers to abortion rights as an issue for state governments to address. Representatives for Shaffer’s campaign did not respond to the Prospect’s request for an interview, nor did they respond to a list of questions about Shaffer’s stances on the aforementioned issues.
For their part, Shaffer and national Republicans have engaged in their own brand of quasi-populism, by seeking to define Deluzio as a “radical socialist professor” with deep ties to the Sanders-AOC wing of the Democratic Party. As is typical in politics, each of those accusations holds a kernel of truth.
Deluzio, an attorney and Iraq War veteran, is not a full professor—he is the policy director at Pitt Cyber, an institute within the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Law—but he has taught a few courses as an adjunct professor, and he proudly touts the way his work at places like the Brennan Center has intersected with voting rights and election security.
While most of Deluzio’s issue positions are within the mainstream of the party, his unapologetically anti-corporate rhetoric would sound radical to just about any business roundtable (the business lobbies, like the Chamber of Commerce, have lined up behind Shaffer’s bid.) Deluzio’s politics have a distinct look and flavor from those of national progressives, but his decision to attend the Democratic National Convention as a Bernie Sanders delegate in 2020 continues to be the subject of frequent attacks.
At first glance, it isn’t hard to see why Republicans might think their message would land. While Fetterman’s populism is bolstered by his gruff aesthetic and mannerisms, Deluzio hardly looks the part of the working-class champion. Compared to Fetterman (who has been subject to similar conservative attacks), Deluzio’s demeanor is humorously chipper and disarmingly earnest. The button-down shirt and jeans he is commonly spotted in at campaign events hardly exudes the same man-of-the-people energy as Fetterman’s famed shorts and hoodie sweatshirt. In passing, one of Deluzio’s staffers joked about the differences between the two candidates. “[Fetterman] has the look; Chris doesn’t. Chris looks like he could be pulled out of a Brooks Brothers catalog, or something.”
Democrats in the 17th District’s harshest terrain, exurban Beaver County, say Republicans’ line of attack has been particularly potent in recent years, as local residents search for a political explanation for the steep decline of local industry. Marion Tavernaris, another gruff, old-school Pennsylvania Democrat, gave me the context for the showdown between Deluzio and Shaffer. She described several of the district’s residents, and its men especially, as former mill workers-in-waiting, who struggled to square Democrats’ previous chokehold on local politics with the area’s rapid economic decline.
In particular, she told me that the closure of the J&L steel mill, a massive operation that once spanned seven miles of the Ohio River, is the most pivotal event in understanding the district’s politics, despite it occurring decades ago. “I think it’s just shifted more and more from there, because faith left that, you know, Democrats were for the working people and could provide jobs,” she said. “Now everything has become a big culture war.”
Tavernaris, who volunteers with the local Democratic county party committee, declined to weigh in on how Beaver County’s growing Republican base has responded to Deluzio’s messaging, but she did say that the thrust of his campaign was in the right direction. She did warn that the biggest issue facing Democrats who attempt outreach in Beaver County is “the view that they’ve just become so elitist and inauthentic with working people.”
Republicans’ line of attack has been particularly potent in recent years, as local residents search for a political explanation for the steep decline of local industry.
As a perpetual skeptic of candidates who claim the populist mantle, I had the opportunity to vet Deluzio’s authenticity for myself in late September, at a listening session and free community picnic in Penn Hills. Deluzio joined a slate of local party officials and elected officeholders to hear about the issues facing the community, the largest and most diverse in the region besides Pittsburgh itself. Deluzio spoke animatedly—“Being an Italian guy,” he told the crowd apologetically, “it’s hard for me to not move my hands when I’ve got a microphone”—about the stakes in his bid against Shaffer.
He briefly recounted his service in Iraq and his work on cybersecurity and voting protections at Pitt Cyber. His mannerisms grew even more excitable when he talked about working on the effort to unionize the University of Pittsburgh’s staff with the United Steelworkers, which now has a large contingent of graduate students. After spending a few more minutes stressing the importance of “the union way of life”—a phrase Pennsylvania candidates love to brandish—he ended with some musings over what it means to be a patriotic candidate this election cycle. “I don’t think it’s patriotic,” he told the crowd, “to try to overthrow our democracy … I don’t think it’s patriotic to ship our jobs overseas and try to kill the union way of life in Western Pennsylvania … I don’t think it’s patriotic to attack women’s reproductive freedom.”
Deluzio bookended his remarks with aggressive jabs at “the corporate executive”—a title he delivers with palpable disgust—he’s running against. But with the exception of abortion rights, Deluzio also had noticeably little to say about the cultural fissures arguably driving Western Pennsylvania’s rightward shift.
In the Q&A that followed, residents turned little of their attention to the candidate running in a hotly contested congressional seat. Instead, the exchanges were primarily between first-term Penn Hills Mayor Pauline Calabrese and several residents who felt their local government was leaving lower-class and predominantly Black parts of the community behind. The other candidates and officeholders, including Deluzio, stood by meekly while Calabrese and a longtime resident discussed the city’s approach to unlawful trash dumping, which attendees appeared to unanimously agree favored whiter, more upper-class parts of the city.
Deluzio followed the panel with a healthy dose of retail politicking, bumping elbows and taking photos with any attendees who stuck around through the speeches and questions. After shaking his last hand, Deluzio caught up with me. I decided to ask Deluzio about a critique of his politics often found on the left, rather than the right: Does messaging rooted almost exclusively in the nostalgia for bygone Midwestern labor strongholds meet the moment for people of color, LGBTQ individuals, and women whose rights in the workplace and beyond are under assault, by an archconservative Supreme Court and increasingly emboldened Republican right wing?
As if to prove the necessity of the question, Deluzio stammered for a few moments before beginning his answer. “I think a labor union on the job is one of the most important things you can have to protect workers from racial discrimination, gender discrimination, whatever that may be,” he said. “The biggest, most powerful corporations, who are wielding all this power over our lives, want to divide us against each other … But the union way of life, that’s a message of solidarity.”
The answer struck me as ever so slightly tone-deaf, but his ardent belief in its core—in the power of labor politics to unlock equality in other facets of life—was unmistakable. We shook hands and parted ways without further grilling on identity issues. But before leaving, I decided to ask some of the lingering attendees whether they thought Deluzio’s politics met the moment.
Wynona Harper, a longtime activist who founded the nonprofit organization JAMAR Place of Peace after the shooting death of her son Jamar Hawkins, assured me they did. She described Penn Hills as increasingly segregated, and lamented the way other local politicians and representatives are “not willing to talk about those issues.” But Deluzio, she claimed, was different. “Look, I’m not in a union, and I’m not gonna be,” she said. “But I know he cares, and I know he’s willing to take our issues on.”
How did she know? “He’s called me, before all of this, he’s called me up to hear my perspective,” she said, before going on at length about Deluzio’s commitment to showing solidarity with every part of the district he intends to represent. Catching herself mid-sentence, Harper stopped and pointed across the park at Deluzio, who had looped back to speak more with a few other volunteers.
“And, well, he’s here right now, isn’t he?” she said.
