Feeling some deja-vu?
I don’t blame you. If the echoes of Susan Wild’s campaign in PA-07 were eerily familiar to you in comparison to 2020, Matt Cartwright’s in PA-08 will be as well. After squeaking by in a 3.6-point win against Jim Bognet two years ago, he did so yet again versus the same person this November by a slightly narrower 2.4-point margin.
Talk about consistency, am I right? You have to thread a lot of fine needles to be able to hold up a repeat performance like that, especially when you’re running in a district that Cook PVI rated as having an R+4 partisan lean. On top of that, 2022 was a Dem midterm, which usually doesn’t bode well for people like Cartwright in those types of districts.
Having said that, Pennsylvania certainly didn’t see an environment anything like what a lot of people expected this year. But that’s not the only reason why Cartwright won. A lot of factors came into play in this battleground district, home to a familiar TV show that many people hold near and dear to their hearts.
So, how did Cartwright pull it off?
Overview
PA-08 is a district located in the northeastern part of the state and is composed of the following five counties.
Lackawanna
Luzerne (parts)
Monroe (parts)
Pike
Wayne
Functionally speaking, little has changed about the district from its pre-2022 composition. The lines had to be drawn out a little more to the south and west to adjust for the intended population target, but the composition remains more or less the same.
If you want a district where old-school ancestral Democrats reside, it’d be this one. The bulk of the population resides in the ancestrally-Dem cities of Scranton and Wilkes-Barre and has extremely strong populist tendencies. Consequently, it’s trended to the right in recent years with Trump making massive gains in the area in 2016 given the populist nature of his original campaign. Since that disruptive splash, the area has more or less stabilized (for now) in terms of being a battleground district with a slight Republican tilt, but not necessarily an easy win for candidates running under that party banner there. Democrats remain strong in the area, buoyed by their solid federal and statewide candidates. Enter Matt Cartwright and his campaign to keep the homeland of The Office in the blue column.
Numbers
In an R+4 district, Cartwright needed to do a couple of things to win. Namely, get as high of a margin as possible in Democratic-friendly Lackawanna County, maintain a robust margin in Monroe, and keep Luzerne as close as possible while putting up okay-ish numbers in GOP-friendly Pike and Wayne. Sure enough, all of those things happened. Lackawanna came in big for Cartwright, with Scranton itself providing a massive lift for him to get almost 60% in the county. He also did well in Monroe and got almost 55% there while only barely losing Luzerne by a little over 2.5 points.
It cannot be understated how much Lackawanna is Cartwright country. To demonstrate, let’s look at key vote comparisons between him, Josh Shapiro, and John Fetterman from some Scranton precincts.
SCRANTON W-01 P-01
Fetterman: 411
Shapiro: 410
Cartwright: 418
SCRANTON W-02 P-01
Fetterman: 292
Shapiro: 305
Cartwright: 307
SCRANTON W-12 P-03
Fetterman: 340
Shapiro: 353
Cartwright: 361
Cartwright was able to outrun both Shapiro and Fetterman in a good number of precincts in the city and in nearly all cases, at least match Shapiro. In a year where top-of-the-ticket races saw massive success statewide, that’s a good thing. Shapiro did do better than Cartwright in a lot of rural areas, however. So there’s a little bit of a tradeoff there.
Truth be told, the numbers were fantastic for Dems here this year. When you take the aforementioned comments into account, blends of different candidates were able to appeal to different areas in PA-08. Cartwright and Fetterman in Scranton, Shapiro further outside of the cities, Fetterman over Shapiro (to a lesser extent) in some suburbs, etc. The strong appeals to a healthy mix of demographics all across the Dem ticket in the district helped Cartwright.
Polling
Due to the high profile of this race, it got a fair bit of polling attention, especially in comparison to other House races. A few credible pollsters and not-so-credible ones ran multiple screens over Q2/Q3 2022 and got the following breakdowns.
There are a few interesting takeaways here. Even though most of the toplines of individual polls were kind of all over the place, the average of all of those polls got extremely close to the final result. In fact, the final aggregate topline share (D+2.7) was almost dead-on to what happened in November (D+2.4).
Having said that, GQR and Siena College/NYT just about nailed Cartwright’s % of the vote. On the flip side, Cygnal was on the mark when it came to Bognet’s share with the other polls undershooting him by a fair bit. Patriot Polling is on its own planet and is something of a meme on Election Twitter, so there’s not much to offer perspective-wise there.
All said, polling for this race was actually pretty solid from an aggregate point of view. A slight Cartwright tilt was evident for the duration of the race if you were looking at decent polls and not ones conducted by Republican-leaning hack firms. Some of the people involved with the Siena one didn’t even trust their own poll, but they were vindicated!
Spending
Mailers, events, ground games, etc. None of these things can happen without proper funding. Consequently, a lot of money was spent on this race. Not accounting for independent expenditures by outside groups, both candidates raised and spent the following amounts.
Pretty big disparity, am I right? For all of his efforts running a race in a competitive battleground, Cartwright certainly wasn’t lacking in the money he needed to be able to run an effective campaign. Next, we move on to how much money was spent by both sides.
Yes, you are reading this chart correctly. Cartwright spent more money than what his fundraising indicates with the FEC, mostly by drawing from other sources and small transfers to augment his spending. Bognet, on the other hand, didn’t use all of the money he raised. By the end of the election cycle, both campaigns had the following leftover cash in their coffers.
It’s clear to see that Cartwright was by far the better user of money in this race. He aggressively raised a lot of cash and outraised Bognet by a staggering $2.5 million. On top of that, he used practically every single dollar he had available to him and then some.
As for Bognet, he left twice as much cash on hand in the end over Cartwright, as well as not using all of the money available to him. Any outstanding loans or debts on behalf of either candidate were owed by committees associated with them. Neither one of them owed any money or debts to committees.
Moreover, Cartwright’s massive personal fundraising advantage continues to highlight the significant problems Republicans face when it comes to being able to match Democrats for small-dollar and parity cash without being forced to rely on super PACs and dark money. This is one of the catastrophic effects of electoral realignment, giving Democrats access to high-propensity voters who are more inclined to donate and have the means to do so.
Campaign Style - Cartwright
Going into this election, Cartwright knew that he had to do everything right to eke out a victory. There wasn’t exactly a lot of room for error, so the campaign needed to keep things simple and focus on the key ingredients that would prompt voters to actually turn out.
Salient Issues
It’s no secret that the Democratic base across the country was galvanized by a number of issues that helped stop the bottom from falling out and kept Democratic turnout at levels reasonable enough to avoid losing. Dobbs and a number of other choice-based issues were leveraged by Cartwright to properly contextualize the stakes of his race. This was incredibly important because of PA-08’s populist tendencies. Give those people red-meat issues to come out on and they will be pretty responsive! Whether it be Pennsylvania’s status as a battleground or the severity of what could happen on the local level, most counties in the district turned out at super high rates comparable to the last midterm (2018). Had that not happened, Bognet would’ve been able to pull it out with his base. There were some districts where the enthusiasm among Dems was not there, but that wasn’t the case with this one (at acceptable levels, at least).
GOTV
In Pennsylvania, mail-in ballots have steadily become more and more ingrained in voting culture. It’s no secret that most votes cast via that method in the state skew heavily Democratic. In a district like PA-08, every vote counts. Cartwright’s team understood the stakes early on and pushed diligently to make sure voters who used that option returned their ballots free of errors. And if there were errors, they were rectified in quick order. This is most evident in Luzerne and Monroe counties, where almost half of Cartwright’s votes from those areas came from mail-in ballots. Lackawanna trailed behind both of them with only a third of those votes being mail-in.
Offense
The phrase “the best defense is the best offense” characterizes Cartwright quite well. He and his team knew the Republican lines of attacks were coming. As opposed to Dems elsewhere who struggled to respond effectively (as in New York), Cartwright pushed back aggressively on the campaign trail. Here are some of the things he did.
As it is with Republican and Democratic campaigns across the country, entire departments of oppositional research are set up to support party apparatuses. As luck would have it, the DCCC (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) has a file on Jim Bognet with over 600+ pages covering his past activities and positions. Cartwright used many of those research points in his ads, but aren’t you interested in seeing all of them? I have a link to the file for those who want to look.
Campaign Style - Bognet
On paper, Bognet should’ve been able to win. Other than the obvious caveat of the statewide environment not doing him any favors, he made some missteps along the way that didn’t quite help his image among the electorate.
Trump
Bognet tied himself quite closely to the former president, in both rhetoric and association. He made sure to drive home Trump’s support for him on and off Twitter in addition to campaigning heavily with Trump-endorsed candidates like Dr. Oz. On top of that, he hasn’t shied away from election skepticism in the slightest. Here’s one example below, a few weeks after the election.
In an election where voters overwhelmingly punished election deniers, it’s hard to see how Bognet’s conduct helped him with middle-of-the-road/indie voters, who heavily broke for Dems this year.
Conservative Credo
When I say Bognet went full-out on conservatism, that is in no way an understatement. In comparison to Lisa Scheller in PA-07 and Jeremy Shaffer in PA-17, Bognet was the most full-throated of the three about appealing to conservatism. You had the usual inflation and immigration attacks, sure, but he by far used the most aggressive tones possible for those playbooks. Scheller, in comparison, was much softer about that type of rhetoric. If you take a look at both campaigns’ social media channels, you can notice the difference pretty well.
Bognet may have had the luxury of running in the most R-friendly district out of the three, but he forgot it’s still a tossup district. Or he did and was just expecting a red wave to wash out Cartwright. Either way, it’s a terrible mistake to embrace a hardline approach in a district where there is an electorate big enough to reject that kind of tactic.
Moderatism / Tightrope-Walking (?)
The conservative nature of Bognet’s campaign made some of his later moves a little jarring to some voters. More specifically, his repeated attempts at reconciling his hardline rhetoric on immigration, etc. with his supposed pro-business approach. Here’s a collection of some of the organizations he got to endorse him.
Getting the endorsements of pro-business groups is all well and good, but you’re going to have issues if you can’t weave them into your campaign that well. The constant flood of negatively partisan attacks on illegal immigration and inflation drowned out a lot of what goodwill could be generated by having a more visible profile on business. If I had to guess, being business-focused compromised maybe 10-15% of the media pushes by the Bognet campaign. The rest were a lot more grievance-focused, which is a big turnoff for voters.
Conclusions
Cartwright is a stubbornly strong incumbent in a close district. He and his team knew what to do to win, ranging from making sure ballots were returned at good rates to wise usage of money. Short of a red wave, he won’t be dislodged easily. But it would be a mistake to assume that he’s as safe as, say, Chris Deluzio in PA-17 (frankly, Deluzio is a lot safer). There’s a real chance that PA-08 could continue its rightward turn, but we’re going to have to wait for more elections and ensuing months of voter registration changes to have a better handle on the situation. As I said earlier, for now, it at least appears to remain stable as the electorate readjusts itself after the jolt of Trump left its mark. There are still a lot of ancestral Democratic voters there. We’ll also see how Scranton and Wilkes-Barres do in years to come.
As for Jim Bognet, he is now a two-time loser in a district that former president Trump carried. If he wants to try again for the third time in 2024, he can be Cartwright’s guest. But expecting to campaign the same way you have in the past and expecting the electorate to just swallow and accept you is a pathetic move. The key to winning PA-08 is to pursue popular, choice-based policies bundled with a well-liked, positive image. Not a campaign focused on grievances and the constant griping of everything that’s apparently going wrong. It worked for Trump for a while, but it doesn’t always work for other people! You can’t count on an electorate to always lean Republican and subsequently focus your efforts to stoke the flames of that particular base.
Suffice it to say, Cartwright will keep running here for as long as he wants to. The onus is on Republicans to figure out a different strategy. And that’s assuming their primary voters don’t nominate an outright lunatic if Bognet taps out for good. The track record for them on that front has started to get spotty in recent years.
And that’s all I have to say about that. Enjoy the holidays and I’ll see you on the flip side. Until next time!