Wild Campaign Holds Fundraising Lead in Pivotal Pennsylvania Congressional Race

With just a few months to go before election day, opinions on who will control the House in 2023 are beginning to shift. Early polls projected that Republican control of the chamber was a near certainty, but now that Americans are staring down the barrel of a post-Roe world and dealing with the very real, very awful consequences, that certainty is gone.

While there are a number of swing districts in the US, Pennsylvania’s 7th district might be a key indicator of the shifting landscape in this congressional cycle. The 7th is currently represented by Democrat Susan Wild, who beat her current opponent, Republican Lisa Scheller by a 52% to 48% margin back in 2020.

This time around, the most likely deciding factor in the race will not be support for Donald Trump, but support (or lack of it) for a woman’s right to choose.

Wild, who has vigorously opposed the overturning of Roe, currently holds a $2 million advantage over the staunchly anti-choice Scheller, who said in a primary debate back in April that she “would never vote for a bill that would codify Roe.”

Scheller also said she would not support exceptions to anti-abortion laws, even in cases of rape and/or incest.

Scheller also echoed the Trump line by questioning the results of her 2020 loss to Wild:

“In fact in 2020 on Election Night, I was up by more than 30,000 votes in my race against Susan Wild only to find myself three days later after mail-in ballots were counted being told that I had lost the election.”

There is absolutely no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. Scheller lost because she lost, and mail-in voting is both viable and widely used all over the US. Some states vote almost entirely by mail.

While it is certainly presumptuous to assume that the gap in fundraising exists entirely due to a clear contrast on a single issue, there has not been a single issue as pivotal as the overturning of Roe in a very long time.

The current polling landscape still shows an advantage for House Republicans in the coming election, but the gap is narrowing. The numbers say there is a shift happening, even though we do not know how far, or how fast it will develop.

The numbers also say that anti-choice rhetoric is far less popular when it becomes anti-choice law that affects real people, and strict adherence to the Trumpian Big Lie isn’t nearly as popular as it used to be.