The Trump Loyalist Democrats Have a Chance to Defeat
11 min read
Scott Perry seemed to be in a good mood. When I found him on a recent Saturday, the Pennsylvania representative was visiting a local Republican office, joking with volunteers as he helped them prepare campaign materials for canvassers who would be knocking doors later that day. Perry was friendly with me too, until I asked whether he regretted any of his actions leading up to January 6.
That’s when I got a taste of Perry’s pugilistic side, which has both endeared him to conservative hard-liners and convinced Democrats that they can defeat him next month.
“And what were those actions, sir?” he replied, as if testing me.
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. Both of their races are toss-ups, but at the moment, the bigger underdog might be Perry.
Perry’s district, which includes Harrisburg as well as nearby suburbs and small towns, became significantly bluer after Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court redrew the state’s congressional map in 2018. Trump won the new district by just four points in 2020, and two years later, the Democrat Josh Shapiro carried it by 12 points during his victorious campaign for governor.
Perry’s district may have shifted, but he has not. He’s a small-government conservative known for opposing bipartisan deals in Washington and prodding GOP leaders to dig in against Democrats, even if it results in a government shutdown or a debt default. Perry scoffs at “so-called Republicans” who say he should moderate his stances or his approach in order to accommodate the additional Democrats he now represents. “Doing the right thing is always doing the right thing,” he told me.
So far, his stubbornness has paid off. After winning a close race in 2018, he’s padded his margins in each of the past two elections. In 2022, he defeated the Democrat Shamaine Daniels, a member of the Harrisburg city council, by more than seven points, running well ahead of the Republican candidates for Senate and governor in Pennsylvania that year. “That is a mystery to a lot of us,” State Representative Patty Kim, a Democrat running for a state-senate seat in the area, told me. “He goes further right, and he gets away with it.”
For Perry, what’s changed this year is Stelson, whose decades on television in the Harrisburg market have made her a local celebrity and the most formidable challenger he has faced. “She’s a trusted voice in the community,” Shapiro, who has campaigned for Stelson, told me in a phone interview. “She’s been in people’s living rooms for so many years.” I followed her as she canvassed a mostly Republican neighborhood that has been shifting left. People greeted her with the slightly startled look of finding a TV star at their doorstep. “Oh my goodness, Janelle Stelson,” Jeff White, a 66-year-old retired welder, told her. “You look even prettier in person than you do in the news.” Another man didn’t even wait for a knock on the door. He called out to her on the street, “Janelle, I’m voting for you!”
Stelson relishes these encounters. She tends to deviate from the list of houses that her campaign prepares for her, in search of harder targets. “My favorite words in the English language are I’m a Republican, and I’m voting for you,” she told me with a laugh. Stelson used to be a registered Republican, although she told me she hasn’t voted for a GOP presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan. She made sure her viewers knew nothing about her politics. “That makes them not hate you,” she said.
Democrats have found sufficient GOP support for Stelson to make them optimistic about her chances. Stelson told me her internal polls show her slightly ahead, and a survey released last week by a Harrisburg-based polling firm found her leading Perry by nine points. She has raised more than $4.5 million and, as of July, had more cash than Perry, who’s had to spend a considerable amount of his campaign funds on legal fees related to the 2020 election. (In 2022, by contrast, Daniels raised less than $500,000.) In an indication that Republicans are worried about Perry, the House GOP’s main super PAC began airing ads in his district.
Stelson describes herself as centrist, and although she mostly sticks to her party’s line on issues such as abortion and voting rights, she is more hawkish on immigration than even the most conservative Democrats. During a debate with Perry last week, she largely backed Trump’s call for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants (though she conceded that she doesn’t know how that might be accomplished). As part of her bid to win over Trump voters, Stelson declined for months to endorse Kamala Harris. When I asked her if she was voting for Harris, she replied that she would “absolutely support the Democratic ticket,” and then asked to go off the record. During the debate two days later, she confirmed that she would vote for Harris.
Stelson’s lack of a voting record—or really any history of expressing political views—has made her a difficult target for Republicans, who have tried criticizing her for living a few miles outside the district. “If you had to be nitpicky, that’s a big issue. But for me, it’s not,” Kim, the Democratic state representative, told me. Although Stelson has worked in the district for decades, Kim suggested that she may have taken a risk by not moving before the election: “I think there was an easy fix, but I respect her decision.”
Stelson says she decided to run after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022. She recalls being on air when the ruling came down, trying to keep her composure while describing the jubilant reactions of Republicans, particularly Perry. Abortion became a driving issue for Stelson’s campaign, and Perry has struggled to articulate a consistent position. He’s said the issue should be left to the states, and like Trump, he backs exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. But he has co-sponsored legislation called the Life at Conception Act, which guarantees “the right to life” for all people and says that a human life begins at “the moment of fertilization.” The bill doesn’t mention abortion, but Democrats say it would effectively ban the procedure. When I asked him whether he’d support a federal abortion ban with the exceptions he’s laid out, he said, “We don’t need to have that.” But he wouldn’t rule out voting for one if it came to the House floor: “I’m not going to get into hypotheticals.”
Perry is also elusive on a question that’s tripped up other Trump loyalists, most recently the vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance: Did Joe Biden win the 2020 election? “Biden received the electoral votes necessary to win,” he told me. “I was right there at his inauguration. I saw him put his hand on the Bible,” Perry continued. “So there is no doubt that Joe Biden is the president.” I was surprised to hear this from the man who’d suggested to the Trump administration that people in Italy might have used military satellites to manipulate the vote count. So I tried a second time: Did Biden legitimately win the election? Again, Perry pointed to Biden’s Electoral College win. He bristled when I asked whether Trump should stop telling voters that the election was stolen. “Should Donald Trump give up his First Amendment rights because you don’t like what he says?” Perry replied. Is Trump wrong? “Why don’t you ask Donald Trump that.”
I saw a different side of Perry as I accompanied him across his district. Trailed by a few aides but no TV cameras, Perry evinced a childlike enthusiasm while doing things that many candidates treat as requisite indignities of political life. At a local fair, he seemed to genuinely enjoy feeding goats and playing carnival games. (Perry drew the line at the mechanical bull: “There’s the headline: ‘Candidate Breaks Back.’”) In the newer, bluer part of his district, he attended an event at a community garden where a mural was being unveiled. He gleefully stuck his hands in paint and planted them on the mural, along with neighborhood children. Unlike almost everyone else, he made his prints upside down.
When Perry was a child, he moved to Pennsylvania with his mother, the daughter of Colombian immigrants. They were escaping his abusive father and lived for a time in a house without electricity or running water. “We often ate food that was not only day-old but expired,” Perry said during his debate with Stelson. “But we got through it.” During his 2018 campaign, he said he’d been “embarrassed and humiliated to be on public assistance.”
Few people know Perry better than Lauren Muglia. The two met in the Army in the early 1990s, and when he went into politics, she became his chief of staff. “We fight like cats and dogs, and that’s how it’s been for 30 years,” she told me as we walked through the fair. When Perry loaded up on chocolate treats at a bake sale, Muglia joked about his addiction to chocolate. “I represent Hershey!” he replied. Muglia told me that Perry enjoys arguing with his staff, especially when they encourage him to take a more moderate stance. “He’s not a person who likes yes-men,” she told me. I got the sense that Muglia wishes more voters saw the Perry she knows—a demanding boss but also a loyal friend.
The deprivation Perry experienced in his childhood was worse than what he’s shared publicly, Muglia told me. He and his brother would sometimes scrounge for food in dumpsters. His mother would post ads in newspapers in search of people who could watch them for weeks at a time while she worked as a flight attendant. As a 4-year-old, Perry would cry for hours when his mother dropped him and his brother off. One couple who was taking care of them left him in a shed used for storing corn so they wouldn’t have to hear him scream. After Perry stayed there, he told Muglia, the couple made headlines when a child died in their care. Perry recounted this story to her a few years ago without any emotion, but she was brought to tears.
Learning about another child’s suffering helped prompt Perry to change his mind on marijuana policy—the one issue on which he will admit to moderating his views over the years. Perry had been opposed to any legalization of cannabis, but he began hearing from constituents who benefitted from medical CBD. The conversation that finally flipped him, Muglia told me, was when a father told Perry about his epileptic daughter, who had 400 seizures a week and had to travel to Colorado to receive medical-CBD treatment. “I became convinced that I was in the wrong place,” Perry told me.
Yet for the most part, he remains as unyielding as ever, and that, more than anything, might prove to be his undoing. He usually finds a reason to vote no, and not only on Democratic proposals. For much of the campaign, Stelson has criticized Perry for opposing abortion rights and for his role leading up to January 6, but in the closing weeks, she is focusing just as much on casting him as a cause of Washington’s dysfunction.
The House Republican majority, distracted by leadership battles, has been historically unproductive, and Perry is often in the middle of the party’s infighting. Even when Congress has managed to enact significant legislation, Stelson points out, Perry has usually tried to stop it. Indeed, Democrats have found that highlighting Perry’s opposition to popular bipartisan bills, such as the 2021 infrastructure package and legislation extending health benefits to military veterans exposed to toxic burn pits, is their most effective message.
Perry justifies his “no” votes by saying that the bills he opposed spent too much money on unnecessary things. And he’s tried to appeal to voters beyond his base by pointing out that some of the proposals that he fought came from Republicans. “When the stuff that is unaffordable, unnecessary, unwanted, outweighs the stuff that we need, I’m going to vote the way I need to,” he told me. For Perry, in other words, the bad parts of legislation too often outweigh the good. His trouble is that, come November, voters in his district might make the same judgment about him.
