PITTSBURGH — Rep. Chris Deluzio faced the same economic headwinds as Vice President Kamala Harris, Sen. Bob Casey and two other swing-district House Democrats, but he survived the red wave that swept Pennsylvania — and the country.
Democrats can draw many lessons from the 17th Congressional District race, but Deluzio told The Post they boil down to one: “You’ve got to have a clear economic vision.”
For Deluzio, that means his lefty brand of economic populism: fight corporate power, protect the union way of life. And though it’s inspired by Bernie Sanders, his supporters don’t seem to notice.
He just wishes Harris and other Democrats would have embraced it.
The economy was top of mind in the 2024 election. Years of inflation under President Biden had made Americans poorer, and polls repeatedly showed they trusted President-elect Donald Trump more than Harris to right the ship.
Yet the Harris campaign prioritized attacking Trump as a threat to abortion rights and democracy.
“That’s not what people needed to hear. People needed to hear more about the economy,” Hilary Flint, an environmental organizer in economically depressed Beaver County, which Harris lost by 21 points, told The Post.
And what people did hear about Harris’ promised “opportunity economy” — with its smorgasbord of policies from housing subsidies to small-business tax breaks, went over their heads, Flint said, while voters clung to Trump’s repeated word “tariffs” like a moth to a flame.
Democrats lost the working-class vote — both non-college-educated voters and and those making less than $100,000 a year, exit polls show.
“They just aren’t communicating with working-class people and just aren’t trying to win back the people they lost to Trump,” said Flint, a Harris voter who criticizes the veep for preaching to the choir and campaigning with Mark Cuban, Taylor Swift and other elites.
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Democratic Socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said the day after Harris lost.
But Deluzio won — in part because of Sanders’ influence.
Deluzio centered his campaign around union workers and railed against corporate “jagoffs” — Pittsburgh-ese for jerk.
With this strategy the Dem won the endorsement of the Pittsburgh Regional Building Trades Council — and even the votes of some Trump ticket-splitters.
The freshman rep outperformed the vice president across his sprawling swing district, including the college-educated suburbs northwest of Pittsburgh.
But his biggest margin over Harris was in blue-collar Beaver County, where the steel industry pulled out long ago and slowly turned the former union Democratic stronghold Trump-red.
Though Deluzio lost Beaver by about 13,600 votes, Harris lost by nearly 20,000.
That means something stopped those Trump voters from voting straight GOP to stick with Deluzio, Democratic strategist Mike Mikus told The Post.
Appealing to voters outside more prosperous Pittsburgh who feel screwed over by Washington and Wall Street, Deluzio and Trump were “basically fighting over the same turf,” Mikus said.
Deluzio admitted he taps into the same populist anger Trump does — but from the left. He bashes Washington for “lousy trade deals” that killed union jobs and politicians shilling for corporate America.
Rather than blaming inflation on Biden’s historic spending, Deluzio slammed corporations for price-gouging and praised the administration’s trust-busting — while Harris campaigned with billionaire Mark Cuban, who said he’d fire Biden’sFederal Trade Commission chair, Lina Khan.
“There has to be much more of a commitment to fighting monopolies and taking on corporate power,” said Deluzio, who was a Bernie Sanders delegate to the 2020 Democratic National Convention.
He sees that fight linked with giving workers more bargaining power, protecting small businesses and lowering prices for consumers.
Despite once confessing his “Bernie Bro” sympathies on a podcast, “he doesn’t come across as a socialist,” said Erin Gabriel, chair of the Beaver County Democrats.
While Sanders ran for president in 2020 on replacing private health insurance with government-run Medicare for All, Gabriel said Deluzio “understands we need to fix our health-care system before we shift to something bigger.”
The 40-year-old rep is a Navy veteran who served in Iraq and organized the University of Pittsburgh faculty union with the United Steelworkers. And the Italian-American father-of-four also refuses to be lumped in with anti-Israel progressives like Pittsburgh’s Squad member Rep. Summer Lee, instead calling himself a “western Pennsylvania Democrat.”
“We feel that Chris was more for the center,” said Mike Slawianowski, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Allegheny County Lodge 91, which endorsed both Deluzio and Republican Sen.-elect Dave McCormick.
That perception made it difficult for Deluzio’s GOP opponent Rob Mercuri to paint him as a “liberal extremist” or defund-the-police Democrat — messaging that worked to take down other Pennsylvania Democrats, like McCormick’s opponent Sen. Bob Casey, said GOP consultant Dennis Roddy.
But most important, Deluzio put his ideas into action and made his presence known.
Coming to Congress after Democrats lost control of the House in the 2022 midterms, Deluzio was handed the political gift of a lifetime: a toxic train derailment across the border in East Palestine, Ohio.
“He was on the ground, in people’s living rooms, holding hands with families” practically on Day One, Gabriel said, recalling Deluzio working with her on bringing drinking water to affected residents in his district.
Deluzio worked with the volunteer fire department, introduced bipartisan railway-safety legislation in Congress and railed against the industry in ads tying his anti-monopoly politics to the plumes of smoke billowing from the tracks.
It left an impression on the Trump-supporting county, which this election went another point towards Deluzio since his last triumph.
“We disagree over what to have for breakfast, but we agree there needs to be rail regulations,” said Mike Carreon, the Republican supervisor of Darlington who didn’t vote for Deluzio but was his guest at Biden’s State of the Union.
“The people in Beaver will really vote for the person they know rather than the political party they love,” Gabriel said.
Biden didn’t set foot in East Palestine for more than a year, which “hurt how people viewed the Democratic Party,” namely Harris, Flint said.
But Deluzio defied that trend.
“He’s for the people,” said Donnie Breeden, an 82-year-old truck driver who refused to vote for Trump or Harris this election cycle, but cast his ballot for Deluzio, whom he called a Kennedy Democrat.
“He’s got a job to do, and he’s trying to do it,” Breeden said, commending Deluzio’s efforts to not only rebuild the crumbling water systems on the Ohio River but protect unions and fight corporate “price-gouging,” which he blames for his inflated grocery bills.
Mikus likened Deluzio to a mayor.
Deluzio’s website boasts $2.2 billion secured for his district, largely for projects funded by Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law, and more than 2,000 cases serving constituents.
The problem for the bigger names up the Democratic slate is swing voters didn’t know them or what they did to help them.
“There was a real push to get the urban voters out,” Gabriel added, “and the rural voters did not feel prioritized” — Harris only visited the district once.
Gabriel said Harris, as a woman and a San Francisco liberal, was seen as “abstract” compared with Joe Biden from Scranton, Penn.
Even seasoned Sen. Casey, who shares Deluzio’s economic populism, underperformed in Deluzio’s district and narrowly lost to McCormick, whose dizzying ads painted the incumbent as “weak,” ineffectual and out of touch with Pennsylvanians after nearly 18 years in Washington.
“[Casey’s] running by name only,” said Michelle, an Allegheny County suburbanite who voted for McCormick, Trump and Deluzio, whom she said helped improve parks in her community.
Even Breeden, who voted for Casey, said he “was leaning towards Chris a lot more than Casey” because he felt Casey had been in the Senate too long.
Despite pushing progressive policies, “he’s working very closely with the working class,” Flint said.
“That’s what you need to do to survive in Beaver County.”
And perhaps Rust Belt America.