PA-12 Postmortem
The Misfortune of Summer Lee
Where do I even start?
Of all the congressional races that took place in Pennsylvania during the 2022 cycle, PA-12 is the one that merits the most explanation. Candidates like Cartwright and Wild did incredibly well in their districts and were deserving of thorough analyses (as I’ve done in other articles), but it’s pretty straightforward to understand how and why they won. Summer Lee’s story, on the other hand, is a little more complicated. You can see the results of her election below.
On paper, the numbers look fine, right? A healthy 12 point win against a paper candidate in a deep blue district? Except, the problem is that PA-12 is much bluer than what Lee’s results indicate. To illustrate, observe the comparison between her and the Senate race at the top of the ticket.
Quite a stark contrast, isn’t it? Fetterman outran her by 17 points, though not solely because this district is his home turf and he’s well-loved in the area. The composition of PA-12 makes it so that a solid Democratic candidate should be getting pretty close to or clearing 60% of the vote here. It doesn’t need to be a serial overperformer either. A generic, run of the mill Dem could do just fine.
Now, having said that, PA-12 is not the same as it was in the 2020 cycle. It was extended into a small sliver of Westmoreland County after redistricting, making the district a few points redder in the process. Even still, Lee’s share of 56% of the vote is a far cry from the prior incumbent who held this seat, Mike Doyle, and the routine Assad margins he got. If he wasn’t running unopposed, that is. More glaringly, Madeleine Dean (PA-04) and Chrissy Houlahan (PA-06) are in districts with less Democratic-friendly partisan index scores per Cook PVI and they still did much better than Lee did.
Before I go further, let me make it clear that this article is not a pointed critique of Representative Lee. A lot of people are curious as to why she underperformed, so this should help explain what happened.
Overview
As a PA politics guy, I consider Allegheny County as the Holy of Holies in the state. The vast majority of PA-12’s voters live in the portion of the district that encompasses it, with its deep blue nature being relatively friendly to progressives. All hail Pittsburgh, my brothers and sisters.
Raving aside, my other articles on PA races have explored the campaign tactics of opposing candidates, but this one focuses on the forces pushing back against Summer Lee, particularly in Allegheny. There’s not much else to look at, especially since she ran a pretty standard progressive candidate playbook and she was up against a paper candidate that warrants little discussion since he wasn’t running a serious campaign.
Who was that paper candidate, anyway? The answer is this - Mike Doyle.
Wait, what? Isn’t that the name of the guy who just retired from that same congressional district? You would be correct. As luck would have it, there are actually two Mike Doyles. The Democratic Mike Doyle and the Republican Mike Doyle. The name is pretty common in Irish families around Allegheny, so it was bound to pop up again somehow.
The guy on the left is the real Mike Doyle. The other is the fake one. That opens up an entirely new can of worms, so it’s worth diving into how it impacted the race in PA-12. Before we can look at other issues, we have to address the most pertinent one.
The Question of Mike Doyle
So, who exactly is Mike Doyle? Not the Democratic Mike Doyle. The Republican Mike Doyle. His campaign website is still up and can be found here.
It should be clear relatively quickly that Doyle’s material is the hallmark of a paper candidate who didn’t take the idea that he could win pretty seriously. You see them all the time in deep blue districts where they do the bare minimum to have some sort of presence, but nothing else outside of that.
However, the mere presence of fake Mike Doyle proved to be a bigger problem than originally thought. As a longtime incumbent, it was pretty easy for voters in the district to reflectively check his name on their ballot(s) without paying attention to the party label next to it.
The confusion was so much so that the Democratic Mike Doyle had to post a clarification on his social media handles and hold a news conference announcing that he wasn’t A) running for re-election and B) voters shouldn’t vote for the other Mike Doyle under the assumption that he was the actual Mike Doyle.
I know, very confusing. Naturally, some voters were confused by this as well. If there was ever an example of incumbent familiarity backfiring, it would be in this race. This likely cost Lee a few points of her win, which is reinforced by the fact that I’m aware of quite a few door-knockers and volunteers for the Lee campaign having to clarify that the Republican Mike Doyle wasn’t actually the real Mike Doyle.
Don’t believe me? Here’s a real life example of someone whose grandmother voted for fake Mike Doyle.
On top of that, Summer Lee had to cut an ad to help clear up the confusion.
Blink fast enough and you’ll miss a Dr. Oz cameo. Still longer than he’s ever lived in PA, regardless.
Fun times, am I right? It’s pretty clear that a strategy was in place to run this fake Mike Doyle in the hopes that he would siphon votes away from Summer Lee apropos of doing literally nothing else. What’s more is that there was some considerable planning behind it, which brings us to the other issues contributing to the forces working against Lee.
Issues
Money
Lee herself is a solid fundraiser, being able to outraise and outspend Doyle by a ratio of roughly 10 to 1. Without accounting for spending by outside groups, you can see how both candidates fared against each other.
Despite that, the apparent gap doesn’t tell the entire story. Partially as a consequence of the fake Mike Doyle thing, some outside groups saw a potential opening. This was spurred by a number of polls that showed a tighter than expected race. I never believed them or put much stock into those numbers, which was prescient, but those groups are going to do whatever they want with their data. Organizations like the NRCC poured money into the district, helping push mailers and ads that ran the classic soft-on-crime playbook, among others, that were a favorite of Republicans in the 2022 campaign. One group, however, was far more notorious than the rest and proved to be a thorn in Lee’s side - AIPAC.
AIPAC
The American Israel Public Action Committee (AIPAC) has quite the reputation, loving to wade into Democratic primaries to try and influence the outcome of races where they feel that certain candidates don’t demonstrate a certain level of positive ideological purity toward Israel. They’ll also interfere in general elections if need be. Unfortunately for Lee, they decided to do both. In the primary, they spent well over $3 million to help Steve Irwin against her and well over a million in the general election. Even more conspicuously, they have a habit of not mentioning Israel policy in their attack ads and instead using alternative means to drag down a candidate’s profile. Here’s an example of a mailer they put together.
Knowing that airing out their laundry with pro-Israel positions would be a political landmine, AIPAC prefers to work in the shadows like this. They’re inconspicuous that way, but deadly if not taken seriously. Lee had a good ground game and help from the DCCC/outside groups of her own, so she was able to maintain relative parity with cash and combat some of what was happening on the ground. Not everything, of course, but she definitely didn’t take her race for granted.
Progressivism
It’s no secret that Lee is an unabashed progressive in the vein of The Squad. Much has been debated about their viability in their individual races versus their district compositions, but I’ll leave it to other people to do that. I offer no critiques of Lee’s policy positions, though will point out that it’s easy for fodder to be created out of them. You saw AIPAC use them, you saw the NRCC use them, you saw the Doyle campaign (whatever existed of it, at least) use them. Pittsburgh itself is pretty accepting of Lee’s stuff, so whatever areas where those attacks would find some traction was outside of the city and more toward Westmoreland. None of those organizations thought there would be a fantastic chance of winning the race, but hey, if you’re going to take the chance on a YOLO fake Mike Doyle with money, you might as well weaponize progressivism in the process. To get an idea of how Lee ran her campaign and what could be offered as a contrast against it, check out some of her ads.
Sanders-style progressivism draws in a whole host of varying conversations, but turnout was definitely not impacted by it. Not especially by Fetterman at the top of the ticket, who espoused many of those same ideas. Allegheny turnout was good. No, Lee’s margins were impacted by a bloc of voters susceptible to the forces I wrote at length about. Most of them can be drawn back to her with time and effort, which warrants some takeaways of the whole thing.
Takeaways
The situation is simple. We had a non-incumbent who ran and underperformed against a tidal wave of factors mostly not of her own making. Lee was dealt a bad hand that is unlikely to be replicated the same way in future races. PA-12 is a deep blue district and it’s going to remain that way for the foreseeable future, especially with the Allegheny portion getting bluer and bluer with each successive cycle.
My advice to others is to hold off on making determinations on Lee’s viability as a candidate until she has another cycle or two under her belt. We need to see how she does when she’s not running against a fake Mike Doyle and as an incumbent. Let’s also see if AIPAC and other outside groups find it worth pouring money into the race again, though I suspect they won’t in a general election. Lee won’t lose there no matter how hard they try; that much is clear. Their only chance of knocking her off is through a primary, which they almost did last year. But with her newfound status as an incumbent, I’m not sure if they’ll make any further attempts. Only they know.
As for Team Lee? My advice is to keep up the strong ground game and spend some time rebuilding her image in the district. She’s got a lot of state work periods ahead of her and plenty of events she can attend to strengthen her incumbency. You want your voters, especially those who were fooled by fake Doyle to remember you the second time around and onward. You also want to ensure that your brand of politics is palpable to voters who had concerns generated by the shadow organizations who hit you hard this cycle. It’s pretty straightforward. Just don’t do anything super crazy, or you may open yourself up to what almost happened to Ilhan Omar, where she barely won her last primary.
Also, a word for Republicans - now that you’ve tried the fake Doyle thing, it’s time to give it a rest. You already know how far it can go and 2022 was the high water mark in terms of how well it could work. Unless you clone Brian Fitzpatrick and the district shifts to the right pretty dramatically, you’re going to have a very tough time here.
Until next time.