Race begins
It came as no surprise that Republican U.S. Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Hollidaysburg, announced this week that he’s running for re-election.
Shuster has represented the 9th Congressional District since May 2001 when he won a special election to replace his father Bud Shuster. The far-flung district includes all of Fayette, Indiana, Bedford, Blair, Fulton and Franklin counties, along with parts of Greene, Washington, Westmoreland, Cambria, Huntingdon and Somerset counties.
Shuster touted his conservative credentials in his announcement, noting he’s looking forward to working with a Republican president next year to implement a conservative agenda. Shuster pointed toward the more than 60 votes he has cast over the years against the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, and a recent one to defund Planned Parenthood.
Shuster has been very critical of President Barack Obama in the past, and in his announcement he blasted Hillary Clinton, the front-runner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. He contended that Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state was “terrible for us” and charged that she was “the architect” of a failed foreign policy.
However, Shuster claimed that he’s also been able to work with Democrats in Congress, citing as proof the passage of the recent highway bill. Shuster, who is chairman of the House Transportation Committee, said the funding from the bill should result in better roads and bridges, here and across the country. The bill doesn’t include any increase in the federal gas tax, which Shuster strongly opposed.
But that bipartisanship doesn’t sit well with Republican Art Halvorson, who ran against Shuster in 2014 and has already announced plans to challenge him this year.
“It’s distressing to me,” Halvorson said. “It missed a huge opportunity. It’s going to mark Bill Shuster’s tenure as a Washington insider. It increases the debt to dangerous levels. It’s just spend and spend and borrow and borrow and uses smoke and mirrors to hide it.”
It will be interesting to see if Halvorson does any better this spring than he did in the GOP primary two years ago. Back then Shuster received 53 percent, winning every county in the district except Bedford. Halvorson received 35 percent of the vote while Travis Schooley garnered 13 percent. There’s been no word yet on whether Schooley will run again. Halvorson has to hope Schooley doesn’t enter the race, to avoid splitting up the anti-Shuster vote.
There’s also been no word on whether he’ll face a Democratic challenger. In the 2014 general election, Shuster easily defeated Democrat Alanna Hartzok winning 63 percent of the votes.
She was another in a long line of underfinanced and unknown Democrats to lose big to Shuster. The district used to be overwhelmingly dominated by Republicans, but that changed with the Congressional redistricting in 2011, when all of Fayette County was added to the district along with parts of Greene and Washington counties. Within just those three counties, Democrats have a voter edge over Republicans of 77,324 to 31,599. Overall, the district now has 191,439 Republicans and 185,561 Democrats.
So, it’s possible a Democrat could challenge Shuster and give him a run for his money. However, the candidate is going to have to be someone with more mainstream views than Hartzok, who was against both fracking and coal. The national Democratic Party would also have to raise a lot of funds for the candidate to have a chance. The national Democratic Party has contributed little in past elections, apparently figuring Shuster was a shoe-in.
At any rate, we’ll know soon if Shuster has a Democrat challenger. With the Republican and Democratic presidential primaries on the ballot, the primary election has been moved up from the middle of May to April 26. The first day to circulate nomination petitions is Tuesday, Jan. 26, and the last day to file the petitions is Tuesday, Feb. 16.