PA-07 Democrats Should Run A Democrat, Not Ryan Crosswell, A Republican Pretending To Be A Democrat

Courtesy of the Lamont McClure campaign

Let’s hope we don’t sit through a Ryan vs Ryan congressional race in the Lehigh Valley this cycle. Republican Ryan (Mackenzie) just narrowly beat New Dem PA-07 Susan Wild last year 50.5% to 49.5% in a district where Biden had beaten Trump in 2020 and where Trump had beaten Kamala last year. A classic swing district north of Philly, the PVI is R+1. Most of the district’s voters live in blue-leaning Lehigh and Northampton counties but the other two counties, Carbon and part of Monroe are overwhelmingly red. The district includes Allentown, Bethlehem, Easton, Nazareth, Bangor and Coopersburg. 

The other Ryan (Crosswell) is also a Republican but he calculated that it would be easier to run as a “Democrat” than to challenge Mackenzie in the primary, so he switched his registration and, voila! … he’s a “Democrat” who smells an awful lot like a Republican. Crosswell resigned from the Trump DOJ in February and may have moved to the district, where he’s never lived, from California. A Philadelphia Inquirer report from last week makes him sound a lot like a bloodless garden variety DCCC press release: “In Congress. I will work to lower costs for hardworking Pennsylvanians, protect health care, and the Social Security and Medicare benefits that seniors have earned, and fight political corruption and attacks on our democracy, rights and freedoms.”

Apparently, no matter how many times the DCCC loses with candidates like Crosswell, they never learn what Harry Truman told them in 1952: “If it’s a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat.”

There are 2 actual Democrats— Carol Obando-Derstine and Lamont McClure— already in the race, and a strong progressive, Mark Pinsley, the Lehigh County controller, likely to jump in in a few weeks. McClure, the Northampton County Executive told the Inquirer that “Crosswell ‘is a lifelong Republican who has never lived in the Lehigh Valley,’ and had spent time in the Trump administration ‘attacking civil rights.’ And a statement released by the office of Obando-Derstine, a onetime staffer for former U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, declared, ‘Voters don’t want a D.C.-backed Republican parachuting into this district. They want someone who understands their struggles.’”

Pinsley penned a guest post on fascism and authoritarianism for us yesterday and I asked him about how he sees the primary shaping up. He told us that "As a fellow veteran, I respect anyone who steps up to serve. Being a Congressman is a different kind of service. But Croswell just became a Democrat a few months ago, right before jumping into this race. Now he claims to stand against Trumpism. Where was he when Trump banned Muslims, put kids in cages, defended white supremacists, and instigated an attack on our Capitol?— He was working for Trump's DOJ. In this moment, when Trump throws himself a birthday military parade and shreds the Constitution, we don’t need carpetbagging Republicans in Democratic clothing. This time calls for courage and clear loyalty to the people who vote for you.”