Democratic Pennsylvania congressman caught calling Trump voters ‘fascists’

PITTSBURGH — Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-PA) is under fire after widespread airing of four-year-old remarks in which he called former President Donald Trump’s voters a “horde of budding blood-and-soil fascists.”

The Pennsylvania Democrat said that sentence in a political podcast he taped ahead of the 2020 presidential election. At the time, Deluzio was a policy scholar for the University of Pittsburgh. He made the comments during a Save Us From The Johns program now called Save Us From The Op-Eds.

Deluzio announced several months after the comments that he would seek the House seat held by former Rep. Conor Lamb, a Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania, resident who decided to seek the Democratic Party’s primary nomination for the U.S. Senate in the 2022 midterm elections.

Deluzio won the seat 52% to 48% over Republican Jeremy Shaffer.

Pennsylvania’s 17^th Congressional District is complex and one of the most evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, not just in the state but in the country. The district is overwhelmingly white, made up of rural, working-class voters who abandoned the Democratic Party in 2016 and suburban voters who abandoned Republicans in 2020.

His 2024 opponent, GOP state Rep. Rob Mercuri, first ran for office four years ago to fill the suburban state legislative seat that had been held by then-Speaker Mike Turzai, a Republican, for 20 years. Mercuri entered the arena as voters in Pittsburgh’s northern suburbs voters fled the party under former President Donald Trump.

At the time he decided to run, Mercuri said he understood in 2020 that voters were looking for a candidate who was running to represent the needs of the district, not the whims of any political party.

“We were a bellwether race of what voters were looking for from their representative in a year when Republicans struggled with voters,” he explained. “We outperformed the national trends and even the state trends, which I was proud of.”

Mercuri said he first found out about Deluzio’s remarks from a New York Post story on Thursday. The U.S. Military Academy graduate and small business owner said he was stunned Deluzio would consider talking that way about half the people in the country, his home state, and the district in which he would decide to run.

“When I read what he said yesterday in the national news, I was startled and very upset to realize that Chris Deluzio has labeled half of his constituents as fascists,” Mercuri said.

The Washington Examiner reached out to the Deluzio campaign for comment but was merely directed to an X post from his account that reads as follows:

“Patriots of every political strip have a home on our team, but it is shocking that Rob Mercuri would open his arms to fascists. My opponent’s continued embrace of election deniers and insurrectionists who tried to help Donald Trump overthrow our democracy is dangerous.”

“Lowbrow name-calling and divisive rhetoric is the opposite of what this country needs right now,” Mercuri said. He added that he is running for office for the opposite reason: “I want to unite this country and our community, find common-ground solutions, and move us forward.”

Mercuri said what Deluzio did was the opposite: “He has denigrated and insulted half of his constituents, and he needs to apologize or resign as somebody who’s unfit to lead the people of Western Pennsylvania.”

Elected officials running for office insulting voters is nothing new, and sometimes they pay a price. Think of 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton calling half of the country thinking about voting for Trump, a “basket of deplorables.” Sometimes, though, politicians get away with insults, as in then-candidate Barack Obama’s famous quip about Pennsylvania voters being bitter and clinging to their Bibles and guns. He still won the state in a landslide in 2008.

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However, neither Deluzio nor Clinton are Obama-type figures who seem to transcend politics.

Last month, the Cook Political Report listed the race as “lean Democrat.”