By most metrics, the Feb. 7 special election to replace the late state Rep. Tony DeLuca will be a tough climb for Republicans.
DeLuca, a Democrat, represented his 32nd state House district for nearly four decades before he died in October. And the district itself — which is centered on Penn Hills and includes Verona, Oakmont and a bit of Plum Borough — voted Democratic by 2-1 majorities this past fall.
But Clay Walker, the Republican nominee, has faith. As pastor of the local Mustard Seed Church, he has lots of it. He also has staunchly conservative views on issues such as gun rights — and on what he sees as an effort to cow people like him into silence.
"Simply because I'm new to politics doesn't mean I'm new to the system,” he said. “This is a serious race. It impacts the entire state. And I need everybody to get involved.”
Walker’s contest with Democrat Joe McAndrew potentially has statewide significance because, along with two other special elections set to take place in Allegheny County, it could determine control of the closely divided state House.
McAndrew is no stranger to politics: A former head of the Allegheny County Democratic Committee, he heads the Democratic Committee in Penn Hills.
By contrast, this is the first time Walker, who also works as a health care customer service representative, has run for office. But he adds that his ministry has often addressed topics of the day, and he has spoken out about violence and other issues in local media. (He may also get a boost from the fact that he has the same name as a country-western singer — though he joked “I’m better looking.”)
Unlike McAndrew, whose nomination as the Democratic champion took place in public view, Walker was selected quietly by GOP leaders. But while Democrats had an all-white slate of candidates to choose from, Walker is a Black candidate in a district that is one-quarter Black. The Republican Committee of Allegheny County hails him as an Army veteran and “a firm defender of the 1st and 2nd Amendments, specifically a proud voice for religious protections and freedoms.”
Indeed, Walker received a perfect score on a questionnaire that earned the endorsement of the hardline Gun Owners of America. He believes concealed-carry permits, which gun owners are required to obtain before carrying a hidden firearm, are unconstitutional: “There should be no impedances placed on my ability to own or carry a weapon.”
Such a stance might seem odd for a pastor whose faith looks toward a day when swords are beaten into plowshares. But Walker said, "A lot of people take those things that [Jesus] said and they misquote them … to apply to their own personal belief system.”
Walker notes, for example, that Jesus said, “if you live by the sword, you’ll die by the sword. But he never condemned [his follower] Peter for carrying the sword to begin with.”
Walker, who said his own son died in a homicide, also took a dim view of some criminal justice reform efforts, such as ending cash bail. And while he said it is important to address racial or other biases that could warp criminal-justice decisions like sentencing, “The punishment needs to fit the crime. And I don't believe that we should be negotiating lesser sentences because we don't want to offend a certain population.”
Walker took a cautious tack on abortion, an issue he said presents both moral and political challenges. (“I believe that issue is what prevented Republicans from doing better than we did in the 2022 election,” he said.) He said that forcing a pregnancy that threatens the life of a woman would be “inhumane.” And while he believes “all life is God-ordained,” forcing a pregnancy to be carried to term in case of rape or incest would be “a further indignity” visited upon the victim, he said.
He was also wary of directly addressing issues such as transgender athletes in school sports, but he contended “we’ve become a feelings-oriented educational system,” rather than one focused on academics. Students, he worried, would “not be able to function in a world that doesn't care about your feelings.”
To Walker, that insistence smacks of a form of social control in which “people on the right are not permitted to share their views without being careful,” or else they risk being told, “We're phobic in some way.”
“The agenda of the left goes beyond what we refer to as cancel-culture,” he added. “It is literally about suppression. We are losing freedom every election where Democrats win.”
Walker’s own solutions draw from familiar Republican remedies.
“One of the things that hurts us most as a community is taxes,” he said, because they burden communities that might otherwise be able to “take our own shot” at growth by starting businesses on their own.
Walker also decried poor performance in some school districts and said he favors an expansion of school choice that would allow students to travel from one district to the next. But he expressed more skepticism of private-school vouchers and charter schools, which he said “are struggling also” in terms of student performance. “I don’t want to take children from one swamp and put them into another," he said.
There is less than a month to make such arguments, and Walker said the race so far had been “fun chaos, but it’s been chaos nonetheless. We’re getting out and about. We’re going to hit it really hard.”
