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Some of the people defending democracy most vocally right now, ironically enough, are the same ones who face the steepest struggle at the polls.
Take Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey, who faces a formidable challenge in the May 20 Democratic primary from County Controller Corey O’Connor.
How formidable? According to a previously unreported poll of 500 likely Democratic voters compiled on behalf of O’Connor’s bid, O’Connor led Gainey by the end of March by a margin as large as 50 to 32.
O’Connor leads by a 35-to-20-percent-point margin among voters whose minds are made up, says the Lake Research Partners survey. When you factor in less ardent supporters and “leaners” who haven’t made a final decision, O’Connor’s lead increases to 18 points.
Those numbers are consistent with other polling floating around, and they are better than those compiled by the same pollster at the end of February, when O’Connor polled with a 12-point lead.
“O’Connor heads into the remaining six weeks of the primary campaign with a majority of voters already planning to vote for him,” says a memo accompanying the poll.
Gainey’s team has scoffed at the notion that this is a double-digit race, and of course, polls that are good for a candidate have a way of finding their way into media reports like, well, this one.
Gainey’s favorability does remain above water at 51%. That’s lower than O’Connor’s 63%, but arguably not bad, given that only 37% of voters ranked Gainey’s actual job performance as “excellent” or “good.”
What you can hear in the data, in other words, is voters saying Don’t get me wrong, Gainey is a nice guy, but …
And he may have some room to grow. Among undecided voters — who make up nearly 1 in 6 of those Lake Research surveyed — political observers say a sizable chunk are the kind of young progressives that Gainey has long counted on.
So it’s no surprise that during a joint appearance with U.S. Rep. Summer Lee this week, for example, Gainey fused his long-running fight over UPMC’s tax-exempt status with a critique of its withdrawing some medical care for trans children — a move many critics see as a surrender to the Trump administration.
“All they really care about is themselves,” he said.
More broadly, Gainey has taken up the mantle of community protector, fending off Trump’s policies on immigration and almost everything else.
“It ain’t that I don’t wake up scared some days. I do,” he said. “[But] I allow my faith to always outshine any fear that I may have in me in order to make the world a better place.”
The conventional wisdom here is that Gainey hopes to “nationalize” the race, trying to distract from the day-to-day duties and community expectations of a mayor. And if you want to know where this race stands, look at each candidate’s “red box” — the messages they post on their own campaign websites with messages they hope supporters will amplify.
Red boxes are used to communicate with independent-money groups that campaigns are not allowed to coordinate with directly. And here’s what Gainey’s site wants you to know if you happen to be looking for a way to spend some TV ad dollars: “The first priority is for voters who watch broadcast channels to see three ads at maximum volume about Corey O’Connor that all show how big developers, real estate tycoons, MAGA donors, and Trump consultants are trying to buy the Mayor’s office.”
For its part, O’Connor’s campaign asserts, “Pittsburgh voters need to see on broadcast and read in mail” that Gainey has “failed on the most basic services — not removing trash in our neighborhoods, roads and bridges falling apart, surging homelessness and housing costs.”
O’Connor isn’t shying away from Trump entirely: His page also reminds supporters that Gainey briefly tried to “lure Donald Trump and the Republican Convention to Pittsburgh” for the 2024 election. And Gainey isn’t running from his record. He routinely cites a drop in serious crime rates during his administration, and this week he has called attention to his administration’s efforts to increase the supply of housing, and breathe life into once-moribund programs such as the city’s land bank.
But, yeah — if it sometimes sounds like he’d rather run against Donald Trump in Pittsburgh than against Corey O’Connor, can you blame him?
Gainey may be swimming against national political currents. Just this month, St. Louis voters delivered a landslide defeat to Mayor Tishaura Jones, handing a victory to challenger Cara Spencer in a race whose themes may sound familiar. Spencer ran on a pledge to improve city operations amid voter discontent with services such as snow removal, even as Jones touted lower crime rates and accused her rival of being funded by developers and other monied interests.
But if national themes register in a local race, it may be because of fears that national leaders themselves — like Pennsylvania’s U.S. Sens. John Fetterman and Dave McCormick — are ignoring them.
Fetterman and McCormick often seem focused on the Congressional equivalent of replacing street signs — by backing a bipartisan bill to expand burial benefits for veterans, for example. It’s useful work, but no match for a White House that is disrupting the global economy and upending the government.
“You could be doing so much more on the issues you care about,” is how former U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb, who lost to Fetterman in 2022, put it during a “town hall” held for the senators in absentia.
Lamb has made a number of such appearances lately — and again, the somewhat cynical view is that he’s positioning himself for another Senate run in 2028. But that needn’t discredit his concern about democracy: You can’t win an election that isn’t allowed to take place.
And as Gainey knows, if you can’t nurture the hope of your staunchest voters, you may not have a hope at all.
