All four District 18 counties have tallied absentee ballots, and Democrat Conor Lamb has maintained his small lead over Republican state Rep. Rick Saccone. He has claimed victory in the race, while Mr. Saccone has remained silent while his party began talking of challenging the results.
Some provisional and overseas ballots are still out, but are not expected to alter the outcome. With the state election site reporting 100 percent of the vote count in, Mr. Lamb was ahead by more than 500 votes.
Mr. Saccone, of Elizabeth Township, and Mr. Lamb, of Mt. Lebanon, had a hard-fought special election campaign flooded with money and national attention.
Because the race was so tight — at one point the vote total difference was 95 votes — officials waited for absentee ballots to be counted. Allegheny County finished well before midnight, with Mr. Lamb prevailing, and Westmoreland County finished after midnight, with Mr. Saccone winning.
Washington County officials counted through the early morning hours, finishing after 5 a.m. The count shows Lamb with 609 votes and Saccone, 547.
Greene County elections counted Wednesday morning, and 93 went to Mr. Lamb, 107 to Mr. Saccone and one went to Libertarian candidate Drew Gray Miller.
Before the counting was done, though, Mr. Lamb told his supporters shortly before 1 a.m. that “we did it.”
Mr. Saccone had taken the stage at the Youghiogheny Country Club at 11:30 p.m., family at his side, to thank the dozens of supporters who stuck around, and then left.
Mr. Lamb, introduced as the “congressman-elect” at his after-election event at the Hilton Inn at Southpointe, said: "It took a little longer than we thought, but we did it. You did it!" He spoke for several minutes about the campaign, thanking those who had worked for him, and said, “"We followed what I learned in the Marines: Leave no one behind. We went everywhere, we talked to everyone, we invited everyone in."
Some news outlets have called the election for Mr. Lamb, but most continued to say it was too close to call.
If the race is still too close to call after the absentee ballots are counted, voters or candidates could call for a recount or recanvass of votes, but the process is onerous. Voters have until officials are done with the computation of the votes on Friday to file a challenge with their county Board of Elections. The computation includes the counting of absentee ballots.
Voters can also seek relief from a county Common Pleas Court. In such cases, three voters in the same precinct must provide evidence of fraud or error in the vote counting and pay a $50 fee. If they don't present evidence of fraud or error, they must "file qualified petitions in every single precinct in which ballots were cast for the office in question," according to state officials. Those petitions have to be filed within five days of computation of the votes.
After the 2016 presidential election, the Green Party filed such a challenge in 52 Allegheny County precincts, and the results taken from electronic voting machines used at those polling places were retabulated. No vote totals changed as a result.
According to a GOP source, the Republicans are gearing up for a challenge, alleging irregularities during the voting Tuesday.
Observers said the close result meant that while neither side could claim the victory, partisans of both could already claim some vindication.
“Republicans can say, ‘We took the best shot the Democrats could give — a candidate who fits the district well — and we survived it in a fairly strong position,’” said Chris Borick, a pollster at Muhlenberg College.
Democrats, meanwhile, may say that Mr. Lamb has shown that candidates can be competitive in districts won by Mr. Trump. Terry Madonna, a veteran pollster at Franklin & Marshall College, said, “Moving forward, that tells Democrats that in districts Trump won by 8, 10, 12 even 20 points not to nationalize the race.”
Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald praised the candidate. "Conor is a great candidate and he ran a great campaign. ... I've never seen a campaign with so much grassroots enthusiasm."
With the extremely close results, Mr. Borick said, “the big question mark is whether the energy Trump creates can be transferred toward other candidates. You’re going to have lots of people questioning whether they want Trump anywhere near them this year. Already people in the Philadelphia suburbs don’t want him anywhere near them. Now you may see that kind of thinking spread.”
Two years ago, 18th District voters supported Mr. Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton by a double-digit margin of percentage points. In Tuesday’s voting, the margin vanished.
The “r” shaped 18th District is anchored in the southwest corner of Pennsylvania, just under the city of Pittsburgh, hugging the West Virginia panhandles. It is made up of a diversity of suburbs — ranging from wealthy to rural — in portions of Allegheny, Greene, Washington and Westmoreland counties and has a population of just over 700,000, according to the latest census data.
More than 93 percent of those in District 18 are white and the average age is over 44, making it the second-oldest electorate in the state.
The district was safely Republican in each of the past three congressional elections, so much so that Republican Tim Murphy ran unopposed in 2014 (when he got 166,076 votes) and 2016 (293,684). In 2012 he defeated Democrat Larry Maggi, who mustered only 36 percent of the vote, losing 216,727 to 122,146 votes.
Neither Mr. Lamb nor Mr. Saccone could likely have anticipated having the other as a foe, or even of competing in the 18th Congressional District at all.
The seat had been held, securely, by Mr. Murphy since 2003. Mr. Murphy was adept at straddling the district’s patchwork political geography, which joined union households with rural communities and college-educated suburbs. But Post-Gazette reporting of an extramarital affair, and subsequent allegations that Mr. Murphy mistreated Congressional staff, forced his resignation last fall.
A field of Democrats had already been laying the groundwork to challenge Mr. Murphy last year: Mr. Lamb, a 33-year-old former federal prosecutor who served as a lawyer in the Marine Corps, got into the race only after the resignation.
But although his name surfaced late, it was distinctly familiar for many Democrats. Mr. Lamb’s grandfather, Thomas Lamb, was a Democratic leader in the state Senate, and his uncle Michael Lamb is the city controller for Pittsburgh. Conor Lamb beat six other Democrats, including some who’d been in the race for months, during a mid-November vote by the party’s committee members.
Throughout the campaign, Mr. Lamb played his cards close to his vest, divulging his opinions on issues like abortion on his own timetable, rather than that of the reporters covering the race. While his campaign drew on the energy of progressives animated by anger over Mr. Trump’s election, Mr. Lamb himself campaigned as a moderate, rarely challenging the president directly even while faulting leadership in Congress.
Mr. Saccone, 60, had arguably made more of a name for himself by the time Mr. Murphy stepped down — and an extensive legislative record meant he couldn’t be coy about his staunchly conservative principles even had he wanted to. A former Air Force officer with a background in counterintelligence, he served in South Korea and later tried to help facilitate the development of a power-plant in North Korea — part of an effort to entice the country to abandon its nuclear-weapons program.
First elected in a Democratic-friendly state House district in 2010, the Elizabeth Township Republican was a strident foe of abortion and supporter of gun rights. He was selected by more than 200 Republican “conferees” in a three-way contest with state Sens. Guy Reschenthaler of Jefferson Hills and Kim Ward of Westmoreland County.
From the outset, Mr. Saccone styled himself as “Trump before Trump was Trump,” a populist.
But to a large extent, observers say, the campaigns’ messages were shaped by who was paying for the microphone.
As a candidate, Mr. Lamb had raised $3.9 million — four times Mr. Saccone’s total — by mid-February. Mr. Saccone, however, was bolstered by outside spending made by national Republican groups that by Election Day had spent over $10 million on his behalf. Most of that was spent by just two groups: the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Congressional Leadership Fund.
That assured Mr. Saccone an edge in airtime, which Republicans used to insist Mr. Lamb would be too closely in the fold of House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi — though Mr. Lamb said he wanted new party leadership.
Despite his youth, Mr. Lamb ran a campaign that made use of old-school tactics, paying close attention to the deployment of yard signs and retail-level politics. Other than a highly touted campaign visit by former Vice President Joe Biden, who is popular with union voters, Mr. Lamb sought out little national Democratic support,
Mr. Saccone, meanwhile, made ample use of his access to national resources. He appeared with Donald Trump twice — the second time at a rally three days before the election — with Vice President Mike Pence, and with Mr. Trump’s daughter, Ivanka.
The difference in focus lasted right up until the eve of the election: Mr. Saccone spent the last day of the campaign with Donald Trump Jr., touring a chocolate facility while the national media squeezed between racks of chocolate bunnies for a camera angle. Mr. Lamb, meanwhile, eschewed the media, reaching out to voters that campaign workers identified as still on the fence.
Mr. Borick said that while the 18th had a strongly Republican bent (Mr. Trump won it by about 20 points in 2016) there were always the makings of a close race.
“I always say, take the candidates out of the equation and think about this in a structural sense. In race after race in the past year, Democrats have outperformed their numbers — both because of the president’s unpopularity and because we’re in a mid-term election cycle.”
The election’s impact on actual floor votes should be modest. Going into Election Day, Republicans control the House by 238-193. And the 18th District itself is likely to disappear in its current form. Under a new district map mandated by the state Supreme Court, Mr. Lamb will be moved into the 17th District, which overlaps territory currently held by U.S. Rep. Keith Rothfus. Mr. Saccone, meanwhile, will be drawn into a district that includes Pittsburgh, which is currently represented by Democrat Mike Doyle.
But Tuesday’s outcome may well reshape the political landscape far beyond those borders.
“The real impact of this race has to do more with the symbolism of the outcome as a harbinger of things to come, and as a reflection of President Trump’s popularity,” said Mr. Borick.
But Kris Kanthak, an associate professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh, said there was a danger in reading too much into a special election. The November midterms, she said, would be a much broader gauge of Mr. Trump’s popularity and the Democrats’ ability to provide a bulwark against him.
Whatever the outcomes, she said hours before the counting of ballots could begin, pundits and campaign professionals alike will leap to a conclusion that “will be much more dramatic than it ought to be. November is a lifetime away in normal politics ... and it's about four lifetimes away in Trump politics."
Chris Potter: cpotter@post-gazette.com. Staff writer Andrew Goldstein and Julian Routh contributed.
First Published: March 14, 2018, 2:51 a.m.
Updated: March 14, 2018, 4:59 p.m.
