Member Newsletter
One of the many surprising things in the floppy and shambling political career of Colorado’s Lauren Boebert is that she has always been full freak show, a full Freedom Caucus stalwart, despite being from a GOP-leaning swing district. We expect the crazies to be from lopsided Republican districts where they’re never going to face any real price for their antics. But something’s caught my eye over the last week or so. There are actually three members of the Freedom Caucus who appear to have real races on their hands at the moment.
Each race is different, both in how serious a challenge the individual rep faces and in how much evidence we have to suggest they could be in danger. So let me go through all three.
The race that has gotten the most attention is Rep. Scott Perry in PA-10. Perry is a very prominent and hardcore Freedom Caucus guy. He was deeply involved in the coup attempt. In terms of both ferality and prominence, he’s as Freedom Caucus as you can get. He was also previously the chair of the group. But even with all those antics, he’s only in an R-5 district — Republican but not by a lopsided degree. He’s being challenged by a longtime local TV anchor named Janelle Stelson, who is herself a former Republican. Notwithstanding Kari Lake’s record, former TV anchors come into races with real assets since lots of people in the district feel they know the person, have some baseline level of trust in them, etc. Stelson has also dramatically out-raised Perry.
Perry has proven resilient in the past. There’s not a huge amount of polling. But the last one from Susquehanna showed Stelson up by eight points, albeit with a tiny 300 LV sample size. A DCCC poll from late summer showed her up by one and an early summer poll from respected Franklin & Marshall showed him up by only one point. The most credible sign the threat is real is that Republicans are now rushing in big money to save him.
Next up is Anna Paulina Luna in Florida’s 13th district. Luna is what you’d technically call a right-wing whackjob influencer. She lost in 2020 but then came back and won the district in 2022 after it was more effectively gerrymandered. Cook now calls it an R+6 district, very similar to Perry’s. She’s punched every Trumpy ticket in her two years in the House. Unlike Perry, who Cook now rates a GOP-leaning tossup, Cook still has Luna’s district as Likely Republican. But the only two polls out, both from St Pete Polls, show Luna in real danger. A late August poll showed Whitney Fox up over Luna by four points. A new poll out from them from a couple days ago showed the race tied. The only other poll is one sponsored by Club for Growth from late August which showed Luna up by five.
It was the internals of this new poll, though, that really caught my attention. The poll has the two exactly tied at 45.9%. So far so good. But then it shows Harris ahead of Trump by three points — 50% to 47%. That seems odd for an R+6 district in Florida. Like really odd. Maybe it’s just a bad poll? But the poll has Ron DeSantis’s approval rating at 52%. And that sounds about right for an R+6 district. It doesn’t sound like their sample is just obviously tilted too far toward Dems. In any case, Luna is a highly polarizing figure in her first term. So she’s clearly got a race on her hands.
Finally we have Eli Crane in Arizona’s second district, which takes up a big chunk of the northern and eastern part of the state. Crane is also in his first term. Trump won this district twice, the first time by ten points and the second time by eight points. But a new poll commissioned by Inside Elections showed the race tied at 42%.
The same poll shows Trump ahead comfortably — 52% to 43%. So the counter would be that Trump’s strength and the large number of undecideds will pull Crane to victory. That’s certainly the most likely outcome. But there are some additional factors. The same poll shows Ruben Gallego up by five points. So there may be something going on here beside Crane’s low name recognition and this being just an outlier poll.
There’s also the ethnic-racial composition of the district, which is 55% white and over 20% Native American. Critically, Crane’s challenger is Jonathan Nez who was president of the Navajo Nation (2019-2023), much of which is in the 2nd district — along with 11 other Indian reservations. Nez has also substantially outraised Crane, notwithstanding neither candidate getting much attention or funding from their national parties. There are too many variables that I don’t have enough insight into. But the Navajo Nation and Native American dimensions of this race suggest there’s more potentially going on here besides the normal dynamic of a little-known first-term incumbent in a district that favors his party.
My sense is that these are pick-up opportunities for Democrats roughly in descending order. The PA-10 and FL-13 contests look like real races to me. AZ-2 hasn’t been on anyone’s radar as near as I can tell. And we’re really going off a single poll. Having said all this, while I don’t want to put too much stock in the above, if this is a Trump year I would not expect to see multiple Republican members of the House in generally Republican districts moving into the red-lights-flashing zone the last few weeks of the campaign. Is it a harbinger? I really don’t know. But it might be.