The House Freedom Caucus is having a moment, though not necessarily the one its members, some of the chamber’s most conservative Republican lawmakers, envisioned as they steered the loose-knit and secretive group for nearly a decade now.
Home to some of the loudest and most rebellious rabble-rousers in Congress, the tough-as-nails attitudes and willingness to scuffle, even with their own party’s leadership, might be catching up with the conglomeration of brash personalities and political knife fighters.
Rep. Bob Good (R-VA) is the caucus’s chairman, but he won’t hold that position much longer after falling in his primary contest to state Sen. John McGuire last month. Good’s position atop the group of rebels who have made life difficult for House leadership since its founding in 2015, regardless of which party controlled the chamber, wasn’t enough to protect him in a gritty contest that split members of his caucus and pulled the attention of former President Donald Trump.
In November, former Freedom Caucus Chairman Scott Perry (R-PA) will try not to follow in Good’s footsteps and become the next to fall.
Perry has represented Pennsylvania in the House since 2013, and the Harrisburg and York 10th Congressional District is fairly competitive. Slotted between deep-blue Pittsburgh to the west and Philadelphia to the east, Perry and Republicans have enjoyed firm, but not overwhelming, control of the region. Trump, in 2020, beat President Joe Biden in the district 51.3% to 47.2%, though the Republican incumbent lost the state, and, of course, the White House.
Making a name for himself in Washington as a GOP brawler and staunch Trump ally has served Perry well so far, but the tide could be turning.
He was caught up in the investigations into the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, having to hand over his cellphone to the Department of Justice so that officials could access more than 1,600 messages related to Perry’s involvement in questioning the outcome of the 2020 presidential contest.
When Trump was convicted of 34 felonies in New York, Pennsylvania voters remembered how loyal Perry had been and appeared to punish him for it. Perry lost his 7-point lead over Democratic challenger Janelle Stelson in a Franklin and Marshall College poll taken after the verdict.
There are few public polls available for Perry’s race. The poll is shaky with a margin of error of plus-or-minus 6.1 percentage points, but it shows Perry and Stelson in a statistical dead heat — 45% support for Perry to Stelson’s 44% and 11% undecided.
Christopher Nicholas, a veteran Republican political consultant, told the Washington Examiner the pollsters happened to be in the field at the right time, gathering data both directly before and after the hush money verdict was announced.
“They published their findings in such a way both before the verdict and after the verdict,” he said. “And it was a huge shift.”
Victory would have looked like a much more comfortable proposition for Perry if the pollsters had headed home a day earlier. But without the initial support he picked up before the verdict was announced, it probably would have looked as though he was headed straight for defeat, Nicholas said.
Perry is a known quantity in the state. He’s a retired Army National Guard brigadier general who went on to be a state representative for six years. After Perry’s initial U.S. House win in 2012, he kept racking up easy wins until the Pennsylvania Supreme Court adopted a new congressional map in 2018 after determining the original map constituted an illegal gerrymander. The contours of Perry’s district changed somewhat, and so did some of the results. After walloping Democratic challengers by wide margins, Perry started to see his margins of victory shrink.
And Democrats appear poised to eliminate those margins.
Election analysts at the Cook Political Report haven’t exactly hyped Stelson’s chances against Perry, but when she announced her run last year, they moved the tilt of the race from “likely” to “lean” Republican.
A former TV journalist in the Harrisburg market, Stelson appears to be an appealing candidate who can tussle with Perry in the name ID contest. She doesn’t have a political record to pair with her familiar face, but that might be a benefit for her as Perry has 12 years of votes to account for if voters are indeed beginning to sour on him.
But Stelson isn’t an impeccable candidate. She has waffled in her messaging to voters about whether she is planning on moving into the district.
Stelson couldn’t cast a vote for herself in her primary contest because she lives in Lancaster County. She promised she would move into the district if she won her primary. But after she won, she said the address change would come only if she beat Perry in November.
And while Stelson has an advantage talking about abortion, Democrats’ strongest talking point that has spelled doom for Republicans in contests for the last two years, it isn’t the first time the anti-abortion Perry has had to counter a female opponent on the issue.
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Perry has retained his advantage for now, but Nicholas pointed out that while the ball is in Stelson’s court to put pressure on the incumbent, he won’t have the luxury of sitting back on his record.
“He’ll have to run an active campaign,” Nicholas said. “The district is too competitive … and the one big difference between his 2022 opponent and now is that Stelson will have a lot more money.”
