GOP gets top candidate in western Pennsylvania’s only competitive House race
Salena Zito
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PITTSBURGH — Republican state Rep. Rob Mercuri said Tuesday he would seek the Republican nomination for the U.S. House seat held by freshman Democrat Chris Deluzio in what is projected to be one of the nation’s most competitive congressional races in the country next year.
Mercuri said in an interview he knows it won’t be easy but that he has run before in a seat that people expected Democrats to win.
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“I think as a West Point-trained veteran, it’s about leadership, and I’m going to be fighting for our region and really to restore the American dream in the hearts and minds of people, “ said Mercuri, a western Pennsylvania native who owns a small business in Pittsburgh’s northern suburbs with his wife.
“We need leaders who will unite us, and that’s why I’m running is to be that leader for our region and to step up and represent our district,” Mercuri said.
Three years ago, Mercuri stepped up to run for the state House seat that had been held by Republican then-Speaker Mike Turzai since 2001. It once was a solid Republican seat, but Pittsburgh’s northern suburbs were in a state of flux in 2020, with many Republican voters fleeing the party under former President Donald Trump.
Mercuri said he understood in 2020 that voters were looking for a candidate who was running to represent the needs of the district, not to represent the whims of any political party.
“We were a bellwether race of what voters were looking for from their representative in a year when Republicans struggled with voters; we outperformed the national trends and even the state trends, which I was proud of,” he explained.
Republican congressional candidate Sean Parnell lost the surrounding congressional district that year, and Trump underperformed. But, Mercuri said, “ We outperformed the top of the ticket. So, that’s what we’re planning to do again this time, is try to share our story and drive turnout and get people mobilized to bring our region back.”
Pennsylvania’s 17th
Congressional District is complex; it is fairly evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, and the voters here don’t seem to have much of an appetite for representation from an extreme from either party.
Last year, Deluzio of Aspinwall won the only competitive congressional district in western Pennsylvania by running his campaign as a problem-solving centrist. However, soon after he was sworn in, he immediately shed his centrist veneer and jumped in and joined the Left as a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
The House Democrats’ campaign arm named Deluzio as one of the party’s most endangered incumbents.
Last year, Deluzio won the seat 52% to 48% over Republican Jeremy Shaffer to replace outgoing U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb. The district is overwhelmingly white, made up of rural working-class voters who abandoned the Democratic Party in 2016 and suburban voters who abandoned Republicans in 2020.
Mercuri joins the Rev. Jim Nelson, a veteran and former law enforcement officer, who announced his plans to challenge Deluzio in the spring.
The political mood here has evolved since 2020 with changing demographics from voters fleeing the city and leaning Democratic despite unhappiness over Democratic politics that had caused them to leave the city of Pittsburgh, a shift that has the Cook Political Report currently listing the seat as “leans Democrat.”
Mercuri said neither party should ever consider the district reliable Democratic or Republican. “These are voters looking for representation that accommodates centrists and the needs of the voters — not the needs of a political party.”
As for the inevitable Trump question — the day after the former president was indicted for the fourth time, Mercuri said he is focused on his race and what is on voters’ minds in their daily lives, not on rehashing the past.
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“We’re divided as a country right now, and in order for us to move past this moment, we need to start talking in terms of unification and solutions, so rehashing prior elections and talking about contentious issues, while it gets a lot of attention in the media, it doesn’t move us forward,” he said. “It does not make the grocery bills lower. It doesn’t defend our country. It doesn’t solve the border issues and the drug use issues.”
“So,” he added, “I’m going to run a race that is very laser-focused on local issues and talk to people about what their concerns are. And as a state representative, I hear a lot of people who are very frustrated, and being a solutions-oriented problem solver who wants to represent all of us is how I’m going to do it.”