Pennsylvania Rep. Matt Cartwright, A Trump Country Democrat, Finds A Different Right-Wing Villain

STROUDSBURG, Pa. — If you’ve listened to Democrats talk about immigration policy this election cycle, you’ve undoubtedly heard them blame former President Donald Trump for killing a border security deal negotiated by a bipartisan group of senators.

It’s the heart of Vice President Kamala Harris’ argument on the topic — and not without good reason: The deal collapsed in February shortly after Trump came out publicly against it.

But not every Democrat is singing that tune. Embattled Rep. Matt Cartwright (D-Pa.) doesn’t mention Trump at all when describing what happened. He pins the blame instead on House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).

“There were a bunch of bipartisan senators that were behind this, and all of a sudden, Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, said, ’Don’t bother bringing that to the House. It’s dead on arrival in the House,’” Cartwright said in his Oct. 23 debate with Republican challenger Rob Bresnahan. “Imagine for us to be able to stop fighting over the border, and Mike Johnson didn’t want anything to do with it.”

In a brief interview after the early Veterans Day parade Sunday in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, Cartwright cited Johnson’s insistence that Trump’s pressure had not played a role in his decision to oppose the border security deal.

“I am not privy to the firsthand discussion, but when Mike Johnson said, ‘No, it was my own idea,’ I’m going to take him at his word,” Cartwright told HuffPost.

There’s more than a little truth in Cartwright’s analysis. Even without Trump’s opposition, Johnson would likely have faced enormous pressure from his right flank not to put a Senate border bill up for a vote.

But for Cartwright, a trial lawyer who has represented northeastern Pennsylvania since 2013, there are also political reasons to avoid bringing Trump into the discussion.

Cartwright represents a largely white, blue-collar stretch of Pennsylvania that has been drifting right for years despite being including President Joe Biden’s hometown of Scranton.

That makes him something of a Democratic Party unicorn. One of just five Democrats in the House running for reelection in districts that Trump carried twice, Cartwright is the sole member of the group to have been on the ballot in such a district in both 2016 and 2020.

Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, another longtime Democrat in that group, was only drawn into a district Trump would have won ahead of the 2022 race; the remaining three Democrats — Reps. Jared Golden (Maine), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.) and Mary Peltola (Alaska) — were all elected after the 2016 race.

What’s more, unlike the newer members of the Trump country quintet, who are all members of the centrist Blue Dog Caucus, Cartwright has refused to back away from his support for “Medicare for All” and his membership in the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Cartwright has instead found more subtle ways to break with Democratic Party leaders and cultivate support from the Trump-voting majority, while still painting Bresnahan — and the Republican majority he could help cement — as a threat to voters of all ideological stripes.

One of them is tying Bresnahan, the heir to a union electrical contracting company, to Johnson, who has visited Cartwright’s district — Pennsylvania’s 8th — to raise money for and campaign with the GOP challenger.

In his opening statement at the debate, Cartwright said he has “always stuck my thumb in the eye of the huge corporations that are raising the costs for everybody by profiteering and gouging us again and again.”

“They don’t need anybody’s help,” he continued. “They don’t need my help. They’ve got Mike Johnson and his handpicked candidate.”

Whether Cartwright succeeds in nabbing another term could determine how Democrats running in pro-Trump districts pitch themselves to voters in the future.

His fate remains unclear. The Cook Political Report rates the race a toss-up.

But if Cartwright falls short, it won’t be for lack of material provided by the gaffe-prone House speaker.

In addition to Johnson’s role in the demise of the bipartisan immigration bill, Cartwright has singled out Johnson’s recent promise to try to undo the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. According to video obtained by NBC News, Johnson was speaking about health care reforms with supporters in an adjacent Pennsylvania district on Oct. 29, when an event attendee asked him, “No Obamacare?” Johnson replied by rolling his eyes while saying, “No Obamacare,” even as he acknowledged dislodging the deeply embedded law would require “massive reforms.”

“The Johnson/Bresnahan plan to rip coverage away from northeastern Pennsylvanians is utterly consistent with their campaign mantra: Corporations over families,” Cartwright said in a Wednesday statement responding to the report.

Bresnahan has not responded or publicly outlined his views on the matter.

Bresnahan has no policy record to speak of, but he has spoken positively about the Trump tax cuts, calling them “incredible.”

The vast majority of the benefit from the Trump tax cuts went to the top 1% of highest-earning Americans. Democrats like Cartwright say they want to allow the reduction of the top income tax rate to expire, while providing additional tax relief for the middle class.

Cartwright has used Bresnahan’s position on the tax cuts and ties to Johnson to depict Bresnahan as a stooge for Corporate America.

“He’s for cutting taxes for billionaires,” Cartwright told HuffPost. “I’m not.”

Bresnahan insisted on his independence from Republican Party leadership during his debate with Cartwright, vowing to leave office if he were to ever vote with party leaders 98% of the time or more. “I’m not going to be beholden to anyone, not Donald Trump, not Mike Johnson,” he said.

Bresnahan’s greatest asset is likely that the workers at his family’s electrical contracting company, Kuharchik Construction, are members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union.

“These are family-sustaining wages you earn while you learn,” Bresnahan said in the debate. “These jobs will always be needed.”

But Cartwright’s Democratic allies have sought to convert an asset into a weakness, seizing on the fact that Bresnahan took over as a top executive when he was just 19 and that he presided over the sale of the company to a private equity firm in July 2023. Bresnahan has said the sale has spurred additional hiring at the company, but private equity firms have a history of squeezing workers to slash costs over time.

Bresnahan “took over the family business as a teenager, cashed out by selling it to a foreign private equity firm, and invested his money in China,” says the narrator of a TV ad by House Majority PAC, House Democrats’ main super PAC. “Now, Bresnahan and his allies have a plan to give a huge tax break to millionaires like themselves and risk your hard-earned Social Security and Medicare.”

Unlike Bresnahan, Cartwright also boasts the support of Pennsylvania organized labor’s umbrella organization and backs the PRO Act, a sweeping bill making it easier for unions to organize. Bresnahan doesn’t support the bill in its entirety, according to a CNBC report from mid-October.

And Cartwright faults Bresnahan for claiming to oppose Social Security cuts without getting behind a plan to shore up the program’s revenue in a way that would make cuts avoidable. Cartwright is a co-sponsor of a bill eliminating the cap on Social Security’s taxable income for earnings greater than $400,000 a year.

“It’s not about ‘not cutting.’ If you don’t do anything up until 2035 then all of a sudden, it’s going to be, ‘Oh, we have no more runway left, and our only option is to cut benefits for seniors,’” Cartwright told HuffPost. “That’s the quiet part out loud.”

For his part, Bresnahan has seized on the fact that Cartwright voted in line with Biden’s position 100% of the time in 2021 and 2022, according to FiveThirtyEight. And the GOP challenger has cited Cartwright’s membership in the Congressional Progressive Caucus as evidence of his radicalism.

Cartwright has responded by pointing to 16 bipartisan bills he introduced that became law. Four of those bills passed under Trump, including a measure to increase financial restitution for victims of child sexual abuse material.

One of Cartwright’s TV ads also features a Republican mother and Democratic daughter who bond over their shared support for abortion rights, police funding, and Cartwright, a champion of both. A similar Cartwright spot last cycle featured a Biden voter and a Trump voter backing Cartwright.

As for the term “progressive,” Cartwright harked back to the early 20th century’s Progressive Era when asked about it, citing President Teddy Roosevelt as his model.

Roosevelt built the Panama Canal and sought to expand health care access, Cartwright noted.

Roosevelt “believed in something that all progressives understand, that there are big things that government can do, and do well,” Cartwright said. “Happy to align myself with him.”