HARRISBURG, Pa. — As she stood with more than two dozen retired national security leaders behind her, Democratic hopeful Janelle Stelson might have been expected to focus on her opponent’s views on election denial and the 2021 attack on the Capitol.
The bipartisan group of former generals and ambassadors came to Pennsylvania on Monday because they view her opponent, Rep. Scott Perry, as a potential threat to democracy.
But instead of starting her remarks with an account of Perry’s role helping the Trump White House strategize before the Jan. 6, 2021, joint session, she began by highlighting his votes on bread-and-butter issues: a vote against legislation to help house homeless veterans, a vote against helping firefighters get better protective gear and vote against a bill to combat sex trafficking. Only then did she turn to the Capitol insurrection and national security.
Stelson, a former local TV news broadcaster, is among a group of Democratic challengers who are taking on Republican incumbents by casting them as symbols of a broken Congress, often weaving the 2021 insurrection into a broader narrative of Washington run amok.
To unseat Perry, the former chair of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, Stelson is trying to harness the energy of liberal activists outraged by threats to democracy and reproductive rights, while also appealing to moderates who may vote Donald Trump at the top of the ticket.
“Yes, it was a terrible attack on democracy, and now we’ve learned how deeply involved Scott Perry was,” Stelson said in an interview at her campaign headquarters. But, she continued, that theme has “morphed” into a focus on Washington’s dysfunction. “You have the 118th Congress that has achieved fewer pieces of legislation than at any time since the 1800s. Something is very wrong.”
Democratic challengers are leaning into a pox-on-both-their-houses approach to the crisis at the border. Kirsten Engel (D-Ariz.), for instance, is running ads promising to “set aside politics” on the border, blaming the Biden administration’s handling of the border and Republicans for walking away from a bipartisan deal over the winter.
It’s a model that Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) ran on successfully in a February special election in a competitive Long Island district, bashing Republicans for opposing that bill and blaming the Biden administration for mishandling the border.
“Both parties have been botching it for decades. You know, this is an American problem that we need to reach across the aisle,” Stelson said.
Perry knows he is in for the fight of his political life, and he is swinging hard in this campaign. But unlike many swing-district Republicans, he is not trying to soften his image for independent voters. In fact, he boasts about not having many friends.
“After I voted against every Democrat tax increase, they despise me. And after I opposed my own party’s reckless spending of your money, I lost friends. But here’s the thing, you didn’t send me to Congress to make friends,” he said in his campaign’s first ad.
And Tuesday night, during their debate, Perry defended his votes where he was one of only a dozen or so lawmakers to oppose popular bills. He said these bills, often passed with bipartisan support during President Joe Biden’s term, led to increased federal spending and, in his view, spurred rising costs.
“That’s the reason that we have the inflation that we do. So I’m looking out for them by trying to curb that inflation and making sure that the things we spend money on are the things that are important,” he said in the debate.
Until January 2023, Stelson, 64, was a registered Republican who said she happily supported traditional conservatives like the late Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the 2008 GOP presidential nominee, or Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah), when he was the 2012 nominee.
Back then, the region leaned more Republican. In 2012, Cumberland County, just west across the Susquehanna River, delivered an 18-point margin for Romney over Barack Obama.
In 2020, Trump only won the entire congressional district by a little less than 4 points, in part because his margin in fast-growing Cumberland shrank to 11 percentage points.
Dauphin County, with Harrisburg as its anchor, has grown increasingly favorable for Democrats, so much so that last fall they took control of the three-member county commission for the first time in more than 100 years.
But Perry kept winning by comfortable enough margins, almost doubling Trump’s performance in 2020 with a nearly 7-percentage-point victory, and despite Gov. Josh Shapiro’s double-digit margin in the 10th two years ago, Perry won by nearly 8 points.
Enter Stelson, who started at the local ABC affiliate as a reporter in 1986 before becoming the NBC affiliate news anchor in 1997.
She resigned last year and jumped into the race with the type of name identification that most challengers in congressional races have to spend a few million dollars to generate.
She has raised more than $4.5 million for the race — a bonanza for a first-time candidate. Perry, who has not announced his third-quarter haul, had less than $780,000 in his campaign account as of June 30.
He has spent almost $300,000 on a legal team that has helped him since he got entangled with the Trump investigations. The House investigation into the Capitol attack revealed that Perry attended a December 2020 planning meeting with Trump to discuss the congressional certification joint session and that he fed conspiratorial ideas to Trump’s team.
In the debate, Perry said he was never himself under investigation — even though the FBI seized his phone — and he stood by his claim that the 2020 election was not run properly.
Since the start of the general election, Stelson and her outside Democratic allies have reserved or spent $8.1 million on TV ads, a $2.5 million advantage over the incumbent’s side, according to AdImpact, the political spending research firm.
Perry’s longtime opposition to abortion — he co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act four times — has proved to be energizing to Democrats here, particularly now that Vice President Kamala Harris is leading the ticket.
“I have purple hair, tattoos and a uterus. I’m voting for Kamala,” Madelaine Brunson, 37, said Monday while tending bar at Federal Taphouse, two blocks from the Capitol.
She and her husband, both registered independents, decided years ago to not have children, making reproductive rights their top issue.
Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), Trump’s running mate, further alienated her with his disparaging remark about “childless cat ladies.” Brunson counts four cats — Anakin, Roswell, Absinthe and LC — among a household filled with pets.
Her first annoyance with Perry, she said, was his opposition to some veterans benefits, including the 2022 bill to provide extra health benefits to members of the military who were stationed near toxic burn pits.
Stelson believes the final few percentage points of victory will come from people who are not animated by the Capitol attack or the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs ruling that overturned the Roe v. Wade decision.
She devotes as much time in her stump speech to votes such as Perry’s opposition to allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices and past support for raising the age at which seniors can receive Social Security benefits.
“Yeah, it’s January 6th, yeah, it’s Dobbs,” she said in her campaign office. “But it’s a whole lot of other things.”