Pennsylvania representative Mike Kelly trails his Democratic opponent Ron DiNicola 51-47 percent in a new Susquehanna poll of the four-term congressman’s Republican-leaning district.
The commonwealth adopted a new congressional map this election cycle, making Kelly’s territory in the northwest part of PA the new 16th district, instead of the previous 3rd district. The redrawn turf is more Democratic than it was previously; it now includes all of Erie County, which is traditionally blue, although Donald Trump carried it by 1.6 percentage points in 2016.
Even if the change has turned Kelly’s district into one he actually has to contest—he ran unopposed for reelection two years ago—it still favors a generic Republican by 8 percentage points, per the Cook Partisan Voting Index. It voted for Trump by nearly 20 points, according to the elections website Ballotpedia. This makes the Susquehanna poll a shocker, says CNN campaign analyst Harry Enten.
Were Kelly to get caught by the expected “blue wave” on Tuesday, what is left of the Tea Party’s echo would fade a couple of decibels more. The former automobile dealer was part of another midterm realignment, in 2010, when he accompanied a new freshman Republican class propelled by economic protests and anti-Obama backlash. The motivations of the Tea Party—were they about Washington spending, jobs, Obamacare, cultural identity, race?—were jumbled. But Kelly represented the economic wing—and he gave it a memorable voice.
In July 2012, Kelly was among the most vocal proponents of the Red Tape Reduction and Small Business Job Creation Act, which would have prohibited federal agencies from issuing regulations estimated to cost more than $50 million unless the unemployment rate was less than 6 percent. (At the time, it was 8.2 percent.) Restraining the Obama administration’s bureaucracy was a core substantive component of the GOP’s agenda; Kelly made sure everyone knew about it.
On the day of the vote, Kelly spoke on the floor for five minutes about the experiences of friends and constituents with banking regulations and, famously, seemingly superfluous safety regulations.
“We spent a couple of million dollars to renovate our ballpark. The day we were going to open up, I got a call at the dealership, he said, Mike, would you come down? I said why, what’s going on? He said, ‘we’re having trouble with the occupancy permit.’ So I went down to see, I said what’s the problem? He said well here, come into the men’s room, let me show you what the problem is. I said you know, we have 1,500 people who want to come and see the opening ball game. He said yeah, but we’ve got a major problem. You see the mirrors in the restroom are a quarter of an inch too low. So you can’t possibly open that ballpark.”
Kelly weaved such anecdotes into an unscripted, anti-regulatory screed that concluded with several lawmakers gathering behind Kelly to sit (including then-Rep. Tim Scott) and a standing-O.
The speech was cable-news gold, earning airtime from Fox News’s The Five and CNN’s Lou Dobbs. He was interviewed by Fox’s Neil Cavuto, who introduced Kelly by saying, “Man, oh, man, I think a star was just born there.”
Turns out there wasn’t. While Kelly’s sentiment was reflected in the Republicans’ regulatory agenda, the man himself never became a leader of a wider movement. Donald Trump, of course, filled that vacuum three to four years later, with a much more personally confrontational style than Kelly’s.
Kelly has had Trump’s back—he told the Washington Examiner’s David Drucker last May that “[t]here’s a feeling back home that [Trump] is not getting the support he should have, and we don’t like the way the inside game is working against him.” He’s welcomed multiple members of Trump’s cabinet to his district. He campaigned with Trump in Erie last month. The only advertisement Kelly touts on his reelection website is about his credentials for protecting Medicare and Social Security.
But while times have changed, the GOP’s effort to go after regulations hasn’t. Its use of the Congressional Review Act to overturn Obama-era rules is one of the few legislative efforts that all Republicans, even the Trump-skeptical ones, say has been a notable success the last two years. Kelly was one of the sparks.
