Two Northampton County residents who consider themselves conservative Republicans hope to pull an upset in November and defeat U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwright.
Both consider Cartwright a liberal Democrat, but before Matt Connolly or Glenn A. Geissinger get the chance to unseat him, one must win the Republican nomination for the 17th Congressional District seat in the April 26 primary election.
Politically, both face an uphill battle to election.
The district has about seven registered Democrats for every four Republicans. Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, Pittston and Pottsville are the major cities in the district, which includes parts of Lackawanna, Luzerne, Carbon, Monroe and Northampton counties and all of Schuylkill County.
Two major Washington-based congressional election forecasting organizations — the Rothenberg & Gonzales Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball — rate the race as “safe Democrat.” Another, the Cook Political Report, considers the seat “solid Democratic.”
The upshot: Cartwright remains a heavy favorite to win re-election.
Geissinger, at least, appears to be preparing a real run.
Through the end of last year, he raised $108,589, which includes $80,000 he loaned his campaign. He has $101,990 left. By comparison, Connolly, who ran unsuccessfully for the nomination two years ago, raised only $1,400 and has $1,459 left, which includes money left over from his previous campaign.
Both have a long way to go to match Cartwright. He raised $440,710 in the current two-year House election cycle and has $650,813 in cash left. First-quarter 2016 campaign finance reports are due Friday.
“I do not feel personally that Cartwright has properly represented the people of the district,” Geissinger said. “His voting record is extremely liberal and this is not an extremely liberal district.”
Geissinger, 50, of Plainfield Township, chastises Cartwright for backing President Barack Obama’s national health care reform law, an out-of-control federal Environmental Protection Agency and federal regulations destroying the coal industry.
The Northampton County councilman and advertising agency owner said he would vote to repeal Obamacare and replace it with a plan that relies on the free market because the reform law is pushing up health insurance rates.
He would limit EPA’s regulation of bodies of water beyond “navigable waters,” which means streams that ships can use. The agency’s “overreach” allows for first-time regulation of hundreds of thousands of acres in Pennsylvania, and endangers small farmers, among others, he said.
“And I have nothing against clean air and clean water. We all want clean air and clean water, but I certainly don’t think that we need to regulate them down to the point where we destroy our economy,” Geissinger said.
As an Army veteran, Geissinger said he never would have voted for the Iran nuclear deal and would have voted to block “unfettered Syrian refugee immigration.”
“I understand what the security of the Middle East means from a first-hand perspective,” he said.
He favors increased military spending to reduce the number of deployments of American soldiers.
He also favors reducing the corporate net income tax so companies aligning with foreign corporations to avoid American taxes stop doing that.
“They’re parking hundreds of billions, probably trillions of dollars overseas,” he said.
A tile installer as a teenager, Geissinger said building his advertising business at the outset of the latest recession gives him a better background than Connolly to be a congressman.
“I understand what it means to lay everything on the line,” he said. “I understand what it means to be a blue-collar guy, I understand what it means to be a white-collar guy. I understand what it means to write on a paycheck on both the front and the back.”
Connolly, 50, of Bethlehem Township, a home-heating contractor and historic-building preservationist, thinks Geissinger is too moderate.
“I want the America as it was founded ... to be reinvigorated,” he said. “We have to hit the brakes and do a U-turn.”
That means leaving the federal government with the jobs of national defense and enforcing civil rights and contracts and leaving the rest to the states, Connolly said.
“The states should be in charge of a whole lot more than they really are,” he said.
That means repealing Obamacare and eliminating the federal Department of Education and the EPA, and leaving education and environmental protection to the states, he said.
Shifting power to the states will curb the corrupting influence of lobbyists.
“When you have top-down management from the federal government, then you are taking away the ability of the states to manage their own destiny,” he said. “If you took away that top-down federal management, then corruption would be gone because each state would be different ... Education was never mentioned in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.”
He favors going back to the former system of the federal government backing student higher-education loans instead of having the government loan the money.
To replace Obamacare, he favors allowing health insurers to compete across state lines and tort reform to protect doctors from frivolous malpractice lawsuits.
“Why, in Obamacare, wasn’t tort reform part of it if they were really trying to keep the costs down?” he said.
He called Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals “incredibly inefficient” and favors allowing veterans to seek care in private hospitals to eliminate delays in getting care.
“They should be able to go to any hospital. Period,” he said.
In defending himself, Cartwright said he and his staff studied the Iran nuclear deal for hundreds of hours, many of which he spent poring over classified documents.
“I regard national defense of the United States as my most serious responsibility as a member of Congress,” he said. “It was the best path toward preventing a nuclear-armed Iran.”
He defended his vote against blocking Syrian refugees, saying the required United Nations’ two-year screening process assures terrorists seek entry through other means.
“So I think being afraid of victims of ISIS from Syria is being overly fearful, and we don’t need to do that,” he said.
He defended the EPA’s work in ensuring clean air and water and denied federal regulation is killing the coal industry.
“What’s destroying the coal industry is the cheap price of natural gas,” he said. “And I am not going to apologize to anyone for standing up for the environment. It’s something that I ran on. I also ran on supporting the Affordable Care Act so I’m not embarrassed or apologizing for that either.”
He said health insurance premiums routinely rose for years, sometimes by 20 to 30 percent a year, and that doesn’t happen any more.
“To blame health insurance increases on the Affordable Care Act is very, very shortsighted,” he said.
He said independent online congressional watchdogs such as Lawmakers.org and GovTrack.us consider him a moderate.