Republican Rob Bresnahan is the projected winner of Pennsylvania’s Eighth Congressional District — an extremely positive development for Republicans who hope to maintain a House majority.
Shortly before 1 a.m. ET, with 97 percent of the votes in, NBC News projected Bresnahan to be the victor over the Democrat incumbent — a flip for Republicans. At the time of this writing, the Republican leads Rep. Matt Cartwright — who has held the seat since 2013 — by 2.2 percent, or 8,160 votes.
The Cook Political Report identified this race as one of several competitive matchups in the country, categorizing it as a Democrat tossup.
Notably, Cartwright — who reportedly accepted tens of thousands of dollars of campaign donations from Uyghur labor-linked corporations during his time in Congress — was one of the over two dozen Democrats that House Republicans identified in their target list for 2024, releasing that first list in March 2023.
Speaking to Breitbart News Daily just days ahead of the election, Bresnahan said Republicans in Pennsylvania were seeing a higher percentage of low-propensity voters turn out and vote than Democrats were, describing the “shocking” energy on the ground:
Bresnahan said the GOP currently has about 17 percent participation from low-propensity voters in the state — people who did not vote in 2020 and/or 2022 — compared to the Democrats, who are seeing 11 percent participation from that same group.
“The response that we’ve had at the door — we’ve knocked over 30,000 doors as a campaign. We just had Leader Scalise here on Wednesday the 30th, and the excitement — I mean, we had an outing, a small little rally that turned into 200 people at a manufacturing facility in the district. But even in downtown Scranton, where it is traditionally a darker blue area, people are just fed up,” he said, explaining that they are “fed up” with the economy and with “paying too much for everything.”
“They’re concerned about the crime and they’re concerned about the southern border. So all of these issues are really strong for a challenger candidate. And this is an area that Donald Trump won in 2016. He won it in 2020, and he’s going to win it again in 2024, and we’re going to win as well,” he predicted, adding, “We’re going to expand that House majority from at least four to five.”
He described his race as a “must-win race for Republicans.”
