CAMP HILL, Pa. — Democrats have long tried to oust Rep. Scott Perry, the former head of the far-right Freedom Caucus and a staunch Donald Trump ally, in this Pennsylvania swing district. But this time, they think they have a real shot with their candidate, Janelle Stelson.
At first glance, Stelson appears to be taking a throw-everything-at-the-wall approach. She has ripped Perry for backing restrictions on abortion. She blamed him for Washington’s failure to solve the border crisis. She has hammered Perry, a six-term MAGA congressman, for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election results, labeling him one of the “primary fomenters” of the Jan. 6 attack. And she has called out Perry for voting against bipartisan bills, including those to award medals to police officers who defended the Capitol that day, to help homeless veterans find housing and to expand health benefits for war veterans exposed to toxic burn pits.
But Stelson, a former TV reporter and anchor who has been telling stories here in the Harrisburg area for nearly four decades, is weaving those threads together into a scathing narrative about Perry in Pennsylvania’s 10th District.
“He, in no way, shape or form, represents Republicans anymore — he’s so extreme,” Stelson, a former Republican herself, said in an interview at Cornerstone Coffeehouse in Camp Hill, just across the Susquehanna River from the State Capitol.
“It’s all part of the same partisan nonsense. Most people … they just want better lives for their families, their children. They want to be able to afford things. They want good-paying jobs. We need to be educated, we need to be safe, we need to be healthy,” she continued. “All these things that he has not been able to help accomplish because he’s so extreme.”
It’s not yet clear whether that messaging strategy will work against Perry, who has proven to be resilient against past Democratic attempts to defeat him.
Though the swing district leans Republican, recent polls have Stelson leading Perry, and she raised more than three times than he did in the quarter that ended Sept. 30: $2.85 million to $853,000. National Democrats like that she’s a Washington outsider and a trusted voice running against a six-term incumbent with lots of baggage but also someone who has built-in name ID because she has been on voters’ TV screens for decades.
Over the course of an hour at the local coffee shop, several patrons recognized her and wished her luck.
Still, registered Republicans outnumber Democrats here. Trump beat Joe Biden in the southern central Pennsylvania district in 2020 by more than 4 percentage points, and he’s expected to win it again. Perry easily defeated Harrisburg City Council member Shamaine Daniels by 7.6 points in 2022, the same year popular Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Josh Shapiro won the district against a controversial GOP nominee by 12 points.
In a phone interview Wednesday, Perry pushed back against Stelson’s litany of attacks, saying that she has distorted or lied about many of his positions and that she is ignoring critical issues like the economy, crime and foreign policy on the campaign trail. He also minimized her Emmy-winning television career.
“It’s just a whole host of DCCC talking points and coaching. And, you know, she just rattles it off,” Perry said, referring to the House Democrats’ campaign operation. “When she was asked about the economy [at a debate], she talked about abortion. … Crime is up; she won’t talk about it. … She’s not a journalist. … She’s an anchorperson, so she read somebody else’s thoughts for 38 years.
“She’s not talking at all about what’s happening on the international stage,” continued Perry, a former Army brigadier general who served tours in Iraq. “Maybe she doesn’t care; maybe she just doesn’t have the depth of knowledge about it. Because again, reading is one thing. Going out, being a beat reporter is another thing.”
Perry has also knocked Stelson for living in Lancaster, outside the district: “This person is asking the whole 10th District to vote for her, and she can’t vote for herself.”
Speaking to Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC, Stelson said Wednesday that she previously lived in many different homes in the district, including in Dauphin and Cumberland counties. Stelson first moved to Harrisburg in 1986 to become a reporter and weather anchor at ABC affiliate WHTM. She joined NBC affiliate WGAL as a news anchor in 1997 before she stepped away last year.
“I know this area intimately, and also, very importantly, this area knows me,” she said.
Abortion and the border
Stelson’s challenge is one Democrats are navigating across the country: 2024 shaping up to be an election dominated not by one or two particular motivating issues, but rather by many issues all at once.
In 2020, Democratic voters were driven to the polls by what they saw as Trump’s mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic. And in the midterms two years later, Democrats overperformed expectations — holding the Senate and staving off a GOP wave in the House — thanks to backlash to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade.
On the campaign trail, Republicans have zeroed in on two key issues: high prices and the “border invasion” they say has threatened national security. But Democrats like Stelson appear to be hammering their opponents on a much broader range of issues, in part because voters themselves don’t agree on which issue is most important.
In an NBC News poll this week, 22% of registered voters said they would vote for or against candidates based on their views on abortion, 19% said immigration/border security, 18% said protecting democracy, 16% said the cost of living, 9% said Israel’s war against Hamas and Hezbollah, and 8% said guns.
On immigration, Stelson sounds much like Perry and Trump, calling for more border funding and deporting those who are in the country illegally.
“I believe this has been botched by both parties for a very long time and that it’s one of those uniquely American problems that we need to appropriately fund. … We got to secure the border. We got to keep the fentanyl from coming across,” she said. And anybody who doesn’t have a legitimate claim to be here needs to be sent home in an expeditious fashion. That takes more judges, more attorneys, and I think that people who are here illegally need to be sent home, as well.”
Stelson was on set at WGAL when the bombshell Dobbs decision was handed down two years ago. She recalled that Perry was “dancing a jig” after the ruling, and she has knocked him for backing the GOP’s Life at Conception Act, which states that human life begins at the “moment of fertilization” or “cloning” — which critics say could jeopardize in vitro fertilization.
“Turns out women just don’t want to be told what to do with their bodies, no matter what kind of party they’re in, or have Scott Perry making the most intimate decisions they’ll ever face in their lives,” Stelson said. “Turns out they want their health care professionals and their doctors to be in partnership with them to make those decisions, and they don’t want Scott Perry telling them when, how or if to start a family.”
Perry said he doesn’t believe the Life at Conception Act would jeopardize IVF and noted that he is the lead sponsor of the IVF Protection Act, which would bar a state from receiving Medicaid funding if it banned IVF. He called Pennsylvania’s current law allowing abortions up to 24 weeks of pregnancy “a reasonable compromise.”
“It concerns me the longer that it goes. Twenty-four weeks is a long period of time,” Perry said. “But the taxpayer funding of abortion and abortion for sex selection and those type of things are things that each state needs to grapple with and address.”
Fights with leadership and Jan. 6
Perry, a thorn in the side of even his own GOP leadership, said he has taken many hard-line positions because Washington needs a “reformer.” But he said it hasn’t stopped him from working across the aisle at times. He worked with Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., on legislation that would bar lawmakers from trading individual stocks; it hasn’t come up for a vote. He also teamed with liberal Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., on a bill to direct the government to sell a long-vacant school property, which passed the House unanimously.
Perry also explained some controversial votes. He voted against the popular PACT Act, which became law and provides assistance to veterans who were exposed to burn pits, even though, he said, he worked near them himself in the military. The law, he said, was too broad, allowing even those who served on aircraft carriers or in space to access the new health benefits.
And although he supported one bill honoring Capitol Police officers, he joined 20 other Republicans in voting against another that awarded medals to the officers who protected the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He said he specifically objected to an officer who was killed in an unrelated incident months after the Capitol attack being named in that legislation.
The assertion that he’s against military veterans and police, he said, is “absurd.”
It was Perry’s role in Jan. 6 that propelled him onto the national scene and made him a top Democratic target. After Biden’s 2020 victory, Perry shared unfounded conspiracy theories about Dominion voting machines, attended a White House planning meeting during the Trump administration to discuss pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to block certification of Biden’s win and urged Trump to appoint Jeffrey Clark as acting attorney general so he could investigate the election.
The FBI seized Perry’s cellphone in August 2022 as part of an investigation, and many of his text messages related to Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss have been made public, but he hasn’t been charged with a crime.
Perry said that the FBI informed him he wasn’t the target of its investigation and that he was vetted by law enforcement agencies when House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., appointed him to the Intelligence Committee in June. Johnson campaigned and raised money for Perry just last week.
Stelson has pointed to the Jan. 6 committee’s findings that Perry was one of a handful of GOP lawmakers who asked for pardons after the attack on the Capitol — which Perry vehemently denied Wednesday.
“You don’t ask for a pardon if you haven’t done anything wrong,” Stelson said.
“There’s zero proof,” Perry shot back. “And you know how I know it’s not true? Because I never requested one.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
