Sure. The House races are as close as the presidential race.
Scott Perry is one of the worst MAGA congressmen in the country. And he’s in trouble:
Perry, a former chair of the far-right House Freedom Caucus who was first elected in 2012, had reportedly done plenty to aid former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The FBI seized Perry’s cellphone in 2022, which led to the revelation of text messages showing his extensive attempts to install an attorney general who would help keep Trump in office. Perry’s preferred candidate was Jeffrey Clark, a now-indicted Department of Justice official whose main qualification was spreading claims of election fraud.
I started by noting that Perry was the one who’d introduced Trump and Clark. He cut me off.
“An introduction?” he said, incredulously. “Is that illegal now?” Perry accused me of repeating “a narrative that has been promoted by the left” that the mainstream media have refused to verify. “Somebody said, Can you introduce me? I said sure,” he explained, saying it was no different than if he had introduced me to one of his aides standing nearby. “So no, I’m not embarrassed.”
Whether Perry agrees with it or not, the “narrative” about his role ahead of the January 6 assault on the Capitol is part of why he’s the most vulnerable Trump loyalist in the House. “For a lot of normie, older Republicans, all that January 6 stuff was really a line of demarcation,” Christopher Nicholas, a GOP strategist who lives in Perry’s district, told me. In their hunt for a House majority, Democrats are targeting Perry like never before, and they’re running a candidate, the former local-news anchor Janelle Stelson, who can match both his regional fame and his fundraising.
The race could help determine the House majority, and in the state that could decide the presidency, Perry is once again sharing a ballot with the ally he tried to keep in office four years ago. The issues that have defined Trump’s comeback attempt—immigration, abortion, trying to overturn the 2020 election—have also figured prominently in Perry’s race. Until this year, Perry had demonstrated even more political resilience than Trump; he outran him in 2020, winning his district while Trump narrowly lost Pennsylvania. That might not be the case in November.
If Perry loses his seat in Pennsylvania, I would guess Trump will lose too. If that fellow quote above is right, that it’s January 6th that has freaked out the “normie, older Republicans” then the man who instigated the whole thing is going to lose their vote too. Fingers crossed…