Pennsylvania’s Democratic U.S. Senate hopefuls hold a “friendly” on eve of endorsement meeting

Patriot-News - 1/28/2022

On the eve of a possible state committee endorsement vote in Harrisburg, seven Democratic candidates for an open U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania traded policy ideas and occasional jabs on electability and authenticity Friday night, in a mostly cordial, Zoom-based forum sponsored by the Pennsylvania Democratic Women’s Caucus.

Frontrunners Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb stressed their experience as candidates who have run and won in Pennsylvania.

Lamb, a former federal prosecutor who won a hotly-contested and widely-watched special election for a southwestern Pennsylvania House seat in 2018, periodically warned Democratic voters that they need to carefully consider their choices in the primary in order to select a general election nominee who has a chance to win votes from independents and moderate Republicans.

“You’ll hear other people talking about packing the Supreme Court and banning fracking and Medicare for all and many of the things that have come up tonight,” Lamb warned. “Those are not general election issues in a state like Pennsylvania, and that is not how we keep ourselves in the majority. Sometimes being a little bit more reasonable, bring progressive in the sense of making actual progress... is very important for our party to remember.”

Earlier in the debate, state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta advocated for expanding the size of the U.S. Supreme Court to counteract what he called Republican hardball on ensuing a conservative majority since 2016, and Kenyatta, Montgomery County Commissioner Valerie Arkoosh and Dr. Kevin Baumlin said they support moratoriums on any new fracking sites for natural gas, a practice that some argue carries too much environmental risk for the resources that it gains.

As an example of his ability to stay in touch with the center, Lamb said he’d revive a proposal dropped from Biden’s initial climate change policy: subsidizing economically struggling nuclear plants to keep them from retiring in order to preserve that large source of greenhouse gas-free power. “That’s also how we create the jobs that allow the steelworkers and pipefitters to support something like this and make it sustainable politically as well,” he said.

Fetterman, who has parlayed his larger-than-life persona into an early lead in the polls, played the electability card too, noting that he is the only candidate in the race who run and won in a statewide race, though it’s worth noting Fetterman’s general election win came as running mate to Gov. Tom Wolf.

Fetterman said he can appeal to voters in areas of the state that some Democrats have more recently begun to write off in recent years: “This is a 67-county race; every county, every vote. We need a new map. And that’s the kind of Democrat I am.”

Several of their rivals, meanwhile, suggested Friday that giving voters a sharp alternative to Republican policy choices - and the fence-straddling Democrats that enable them - will be the key to juicing the kind of turnout among younger, new and casual voters that can carry the Democrats to victory in the fall.

“If we are going to win this election, we have to have somebody who understands the urgency of this moment, and who can speak with the authenticity that we need,” said Kenyatta, a gay, Black Philadelphian who has been working hard through the past year to enlist an army of grassroots progressives for his campaign.

Arkoosh, meanwhile, repeatedly stressed the value of her combined experience in public health and leading on problems as a county commissioner serving through the opioid abuse crises and the coronavirus pandemic.

These issues of competence, personality and electability may loom large in the primary, in part because there’s so much national interest in the Pennsylvania seat as a potential pick-up for Democrats in a mid-term election in which both parties see majority control of the Senate as within their grasp. The seat is open because U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, a Republican, announced in 2020 that he would not be seeking a third term.

But they are also important because on so many of the major pillars of Democratic orthodoxy, all the candidates are singing from the same songbook

All the candidates declared themselves to be strong supporters of abortion rights; they said that they could support a renewed federal ban on assault-style weapons; and they said they would be enthusiastic supporters of President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” social welfare and climate change initiative.

They also said they would be willing to end the Senate’s filibuster rules that currently require the majority party to often have to get a 60 vote super-majority to pass legislation there; the filibuster rule has stymied Senate Democrats’ ability to deliver on Build Back Better, new voting rights legislation and other Democratic priorities this year.

“i think it’s critically important that our senators actually vote on legislation, and it’s on us to come back home and explain to you why we voted the way that we did, and then it’s up to you to decide if we voted the right way,” Arkoosh, an anesthesiologist by profession. “That’s how our democracy works, and the filibuster is preventing that from happening.”

All the candidates, on this issue, wanted to make clear to the Democratic electorate that they won’t be the next Joe Manchin, the senator from neighboring West Virginia who is one of two Democrats who have defended the filibuster as mechanism that helps build consensus in government.

“I have long said during this campaign that Democrats need to vote like Democrats,” said Fetterman. “We need to realize that we are under siege in this country like never before from a party whose platform now really consists of the big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from them, and that Donald Trump’s the greatest president in the history of the world.

“Under those kinds of terms and conditions the filibuster is an impediment to enacting the kind of legislation that the American people elected us to enact.”

Other candidates participating in Friday’s forum were Baumlin, an emergency medicine doctor and professor at Penn; Alexandria Khalil, a Jenkintown borough council member; and Lew Tapera, a retail store manager from Montgomery County, all of whom enjoyed a rare chance to share an equal stage with their better-funded rivals.

Several of the candidates peppered the forum with new ideas.

Baumlin, noting his job has given a front-row seat to crises ranging from the opioid epidemic to the coronavirus pandemic, said his experiences have led him to want to consider new approaches to old problems. On the war on drugs, for example, Baumlin suggested America look at approaches adopted in some other countries that have decriminalized consumption of all drugs, regulating and taxing their sale, and then reinvesting the proceeds to help those suffering from addiction to get into treatment.

Khalil pledged to bring her work and passion as a community activist working on issues ranging from voter registration to helping people get signed up for health care to work for all Pennsylvanians a bigger scale, and Tapera said he gives voters the chance to put a middle class worker just like themselves in a position of power. elevating the regular guys’ concerns over those of well-financed special interests in Washington.

Friday’s forum, which began with a thirty-minute question and answer session with Democratic candidates for lieutenant governor, will be broadcast in its entirety on PCN at 8:00 a.m. Saturday, and 12:15 p.m. Monday.

The Pennsylvania primary election is scheduled for May 17.