All politics are local? Not in this election

Abortion rights supporters rally near the Georgia state Capitol in Atlanta on May 14.

Oct. 12, 2024 3 AM PT

WASHINGTON — Asked at a candidate debate this week about President Biden’s border policies, Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez didn’t hesitate.

“My seriousness in taking on the Biden administration’s failed border security policies” has been key to congressional action on the subject, she said. “It’s not racist to want to secure the southern border.”

A day earlier, Democratic congressional candidate Janelle Stelson was similarly direct at her debate when asked whether Biden’s border efforts had failed.

“Yes. I don’t think they acted fast enough,” she said.

“We have to secure the border,” Stelson added. “We need to send people who cross illegally … back home.”

And here’s Democratic candidate Kirsten Engel responding to a similar query at her debate:

“President Biden? Let’s be real. He was late to see what a crisis it was becoming,” she said. “We need to secure the border.”

National issue top voters’ concerns

Perez represents a district in southwestern Washington state. Stelson is trying to oust a six-term Republican incumbent in central Pennsylvania. Engel hopes to unseat a freshman Republican in southern Arizona. All three races are among the closest in the country.

Thousands of miles separate their districts, which also differ significantly in politics and demographics. But a listener tuning in to the candidates’ debates this week could easily lose track of which was which.

The late House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr. famously used to say that “all politics is local.” Four decades later, almost the opposite is true.

Local questions do still crop up occasionally: Perez and her opponent, Joe Kent, differed about plans for rebuilding the I-5 bridge over the Columbia River. Engel and her opponent, Republican Rep. Juan Ciscomani, talked briefly about water policy.

But the decline of local news, the nationalization of grassroots fundraising, the increased power of party leaders in Congress and the intense polarization of politics have combined to marginalize regional differences.

Democrats shift on the border

In their place, campaigns now turn on a small set of national issues — this year primarily the cost of living, abortion and the border. Candidates, coached by party strategists using party-financed polls that test messages for their electoral effectiveness, wind up using almost identical language to address issues.

That’s why Democratic candidates in swing districts have embraced tough border security measures and efforts to restrict asylum petitions.

Their positions borrow from the playbook that Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi used to win a hotly contested special election in New York’s Long Island suburbs early this year, and they sharply diverge from those the party’s candidates took as recently as 2020.

That frustrates advocates for immigrants, who say Democrats have wrongly accepted Republican framing of border issues and have adopted policies that will create further hardship for migrants. But the shift matches the movement of public opinion, which has become far less sympathetic to immigrants over the course of Biden’s term.

The nationalization of congressional races and the shift on border policy are two of the lessons that jump out from half a dozen congressional debates that aired over the past week — courtesy of C-SPAN, which rebroadcasts most of them.

Extreme candidates may hinder GOP

Here’s another: The choice by Republican primary voters to embrace extremist candidates in some swing districts continues to hamper the party’s chances of holding on to the House majority.

Perez’s Vancouver-area district in southwest Washington provides one of this year’s clearest examples.

The district leans to the GOP; Trump carried the district by eight points in 2016 and four in 2020. But Perez squeaked through in 2022, defeating Kent 50% to 49%.

Kent, a former Army Special Forces officer, was a polarizing candidate who had defeated a moderate Republican incumbent in the primary that year. He took part in demonstrations on behalf of people convicted or accused of storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, called for Anthony Fauci to be charged with murder and espoused many of Vladimir Putin’s arguments for invading Ukraine.

This time around, national Republican leaders hoped that some other Republican would replace Kent as the party’s nominee, but he easily made his way through the state’s top-two primary, setting up a rematch with Perez.

In their debate, she highlighted his inflammatory rhetoric.

On immigration, for example, Perez used what’s now a standard Democratic line — noting that Republicans killed a bipartisan border security bill this year in deference to Trump. The former president wanted to keep the border in crisis, the better to make it a campaign issue, Democrats say.

“Joe [Kent] and his buddies, they supported killing the most conservative, bipartisan immigration bill we’ve seen in a generation,” she said.

But she went a step further, citing a town hall two years ago in which Kent appeared to agree with a right-wing questioner who called for a 20-year ban on all immigration in order to forestall the “demographic replacement that’s happening.”

Kent “wants a white majority. I want a secure border,” Perez said.

In response, Kent denied advocating a white majority, but did endorse mass deportations of immigrants in the country without legal authorization.

He also repeated his calls for ending aid to Ukraine, saying U.S. money was only prolonging the war and putting humanity “closer to World War III than we’ve ever been.”

Newscaster takes on former Freedom Caucus leader

On the other side of the country, in south-central Pennsylvania, Republicans face a similar dynamic with their incumbent, Rep. Scott Perry.

The former head of the House Freedom Caucus, Perry is one of the few members of that far-right group to represent a closely divided district, rather than one that is solidly Republican.

Since first being elected in 2012, Perry has won five times, but in recent years, his district has grown more Democratic. Republicans have lost ground in the suburbs of Harrisburg, the state capital, and across the Susquehanna River to the west, where the growing population of Cumberland County is increasingly Democratic.

As the district has changed, Perry has become an increasingly uncomfortable fit.

According to the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 riot, he took a prominent part in meetings with Trump advisors on efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. In 2022, FBI agents seized his cellphone as part of the investigation into the election plot. In 2023, after Republicans took control of the House, he was one of the 20 far-right lawmakers who repeatedly held up Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s election as speaker.

His opponent, Stelson, worked for 38 years as a television reporter and anchor for stations in the area. That has given her wide, favorable name recognition.

“The viewers have gotten to know me as a trusted, nonpartisan voice,” she said during the debate, contrasting her pragmatism with Perry, whom she characterized as “the chief obstructionist” in a Congress that has accomplished little.

The long shadow of Dobbs

A former registered Republican, Stelson says she decided to run for office after the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe vs. Wade and ended the nationwide guarantee of abortion rights.

Stelson repeatedly hit Perry for his past backing of a nationwide abortion ban without exceptions.

The decision over ending a pregnancy should be left to women and their doctors, she said.

“There’s no reason why Scott Perry knows better than they do what to do with their own bodies in their most intimate decisions.”

Perry insisted that he does support exceptions for cases of rape and incest or to protect a pregnant person’s life, but added that “we need to be mindful … that there are two lives at stake here.”

“I defend, vehemently, the sanctity of life,” he said.

Similar exchanges over abortion took place in each of this week’s debates, and they highlighted how the shift in public opinion since the Dobbs decision has changed both parties’ approaches to the issue.

Democrats shift left on abortion

In the 2022 midterm elections, a backlash against Dobbs helped power Democratic victories in swing states.

At the time, many Republican candidates were caught flatfooted on the issue. This time, they’ve largely coalesced around the position Trump advocates, saying that they support the high court’s ruling and that decisions over abortion should be made at the state level, not nationally.

Democrats have sought to convince voters that those statements can’t be trusted and that if they have the majority, Republicans will try to restrict abortion nationwide.

Republicans counter that their opponents are the real extremists, saying the Democrats won’t agree to any limits on when abortions should be allowed.

Democrats used to shy away from discussions of so-called late-term abortions — those occurring after 24 weeks of pregnancy, typically because of lethal fetal abnormalities or risk to the woman’s life. They account for less than 1% of all abortions in the U.S.

Today, Democrats are more comfortable pushing back on GOP efforts to set limits.

“There’s no timetable. Pregnancies can go bad at any point,” Engel said in her debate, setting out what is increasingly the party’s prevailing view.

“Women have lost their lives” because of state laws that restrict abortions, she said. And even when those laws have exceptions designed to allow abortions in certain circumstances, “these exceptions don’t work.”

“This is not something we leave to politicians.”

Abortion, immigration, inflation: If polls are accurate, the two sides have largely fought to a draw on those issues. On average, Democrats hold about a one-point edge when polls ask voters which party they want to see in control of Congress after this election.

Enough races remain as toss-ups that either party could win control of the House. But in our increasingly parliamentary system, where national trends have swamped local issues, here’s one prediction: Whichever party wins the White House will probably gain control of the House as well.