U.S. Rep. Susan Wild (D-7th District) speaks at a rally for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris on Nov. 4, 2024, at Muhlenberg University in Allentown. (Capital-Star/Peter Hall)
The 2018 blue wave carried U.S. Rep. Susan Wild into Congress as voters voiced their disaffection with the first Trump administration. At the end of this year, that now-ebbing tide is carrying Wild out of office after three terms.
In addition to a second term for President-elect Donald Trump, the GOP ousted U.S. Sen. Bob Casey after 18 years and flipped two of Pennsylvania’s U.S. House seats, including Wild’s in the 7th Congressional District.
Wild told the Capital-Star that she worked to keep her campaign focused on her constituents as she faced Republican state Rep. Ryan Mackenzie, who aligned himself with Trump and the GOP’s positions on inflation, immigration and abortion.
And while Wild was among the first Democrats in July to voice concern “about President Biden’s electability at the top of the ticket,” she said in an interview earlier this month that she would “stay away from that” in unpacking where her party and her own reelection campaign fell short.
“Where we really went wrong,” Wild said, “was that the party as a whole spent too much time on issues that were not affecting people’s everyday lives.”
Wild’s race was among the 10 closest congressional races in the nation, according to the nonpartisan election analysis website Inside Elections. Despite outspending Mackenzie by a 5-1 margin, Wild lost by just more than 4,000 votes.
The race was also one of the most expensive of the cycle. Wild raised $8.8 million to Mackenzie’s $1.7 million. But third-party groups spent more than $27 million to influence the race including nearly $10 million to oppose Wild from the Congressional Leadership Fund super PAC, according to OpenSecrets.org.
“At some point, you’re thinking, well, the other guy’s raised a fraction of what I’ve raised. And doesn’t really seem like raising money is our problem,” Wild said, noting that super PAC spending in the race dwarfed fundraising by both candidates. “I don’t look back and say, ‘oh geez, I wish we had spent more time on call time. I would have won.’”
Mackenzie simply had the good fortune of being on the same ballot as Trump, Wild said while noting that she outperformed both Casey and Vice President Kamala Harris in all three of the counties in the 7th District.
“I enjoyed an advantage with a lot of people who did not vote for Bob Casey or Kamala Harris, but voted for me,” Wild said. “The GOP registered a whole lot of new young voters, MAGA type voters, And they showed up and enough of them voted for the next line down … it hurt me. I don’t mean to be ungracious, but I can’t identify any secret sauce other than good fortune.”
Muhlenberg College pollster Chris Borick said the biggest factors in Wild’s loss were the political-economic cycle that created a headwind for all Pennsylvania Democrats and the redrawing of her district after the 2020 Census to include part of deep red Carbon County.
“Her path to reelection became much more difficult. And you saw that in 2022,” Borick said, noting that Wild won by a smaller margin that year than in her first two campaigns.
After four campaigns, Wild says running for election is the most frustrating part of public service, not because of attack ads or gerrymandered districts, but because it gets in the way of legislative work.
“The American people are not getting what they deserve out of their legislators when 10 months out of every second year becomes campaign season,” she said.
While unhappy with the deep divisions in Congress, not only between Democrats and Republicans but within the GOP itself, Wild said she has not let that prevent her from finding pathways to passing legislation.
“After Jan. 6, a lot of my colleagues were talking about … a list of people that they absolutely would not work with,” Wild said, referring to the attempted insurrection after President Joe Biden’s election. Wild was the subject of one of the most enduring images of the U.S. Capitol takeover, as she laid on the floor of the House chamber, visibly frightened.
U.S. Rep. Susan Wild (D-7th District) speaks at a rally in Allentown where Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff appealed to Latino voters to support his wife Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential bid. (Capital-Star/Peter Hall)
“If you really want to get things done in Washington, you’ve got to find the issue that you really care about, and then the person on the other side of the aisle who cares about it like you do, and you cannot exclude people for any kind of arbitrary reason,” Wild said.
Looking ahead to the next two years and beyond, Wild said she plans to keep advocating for the Lehigh Valley, which she has called home since the 1980s, and isn’t ruling out another run to take back the 7th District seat.
“I love being in the House. I love representing a district that you can really get to know … every corner of it,” Wild said, adding that the Senate and other statewide offices don’t interest her. “Anybody running for statewide office in Pennsylvania has to go to 67 counties, and there’s no way you can possibly get to know them all that well.”
Wild said she’s proud of what she accomplished in her advocacy for price caps on medicine and improved access to fertility treatments, the work that happened in her district office brought the greatest satisfaction.
“I could be out shopping and a random stranger would come up and tell me his or her experience with … having waited for years, in some cases, to resolve a problem with Social Security or the IRS and so and so in my district office just greased the wheels and got it done,” Wild said. “That really makes me proud, and I think it’s probably what we will most be remembered for.”
On the campaign stage, however, Wild most often talked about her work to get relief for Americans struggling with the costs of insulin and other prescription drugs. Language that capped out-of-pocket prescription costs for Medicare recipients, including limiting the cost of insulin at $35 per month, passed as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022.
“I felt that I went to Congress in 2018 with almost a mandate to work on that issue as my number one priority,” Wild said. “Frankly … it was not top of my radar when I first started running.”
As she knocked on doors and got to know voters, the cost of prescription drugs, especially insulin, was the No. 1 thing Wild heard about, she said.
“In terms of, like, individuals really feeling it, I have gotten so much positive feedback from the people who feel like they finally got saved from their pharmaceutical company,” Wild said.
Among the projects she delivered for the district, $5.6 million for an expansion of Lehigh Valley International Airport’s terminal to provide more space for the Transportation Security Administration to screen passengers most often gets top billing.
“That was one of the very first things that was brought to me when I became a member of Congress,” Wild said. It was the first project in the nation to be completed with funding from the $5 billion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed in 2022.
“I think we as a party got so caught up in the reproductive rights message that we neglected other topics that would resonate more with these communities.”
– Rep. Susan Wild
But Wild noted that she secured funding for more modest projects such as a food pantry in Carbon County and a new location for Neighborhood Bike Works, a nonprofit that teaches youths to build and maintain their own bicycles.
“It wasn’t all just huge stuff, like airport terminals,” Wild said.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs ruling set up one of the dominant issues for Democrats in this year’s elections, as Trump and other conservative federal candidates discussed the prospect of a national ban on abortion. While Wild’s campaign highlighted Mackenzie’s votes on anti-abortion measures in the state House, it wasn’t the focus of her campaign.
Wild told the Capital-Star this month that she worked to keep her campaigns focused on her constituents, manufacturing and jobs as she ran against Republican opponents aligned with Trump and the GOP positions on the economy, immigration and abortion. Wild said she believes the Democratic Party spent too much time on issues that were not affecting people’s everyday lives.
“Sometimes our focus is on issues that necessarily aren’t as important to them as simple things like, are my kids going to a good school? Am I in a safe neighborhood, and can I pay the rent?” Wild said, adding that the Democratic Party often gets stuck on a single message. “I think we as a party got so caught up in the reproductive rights message that we neglected other topics that would resonate more with these communities.”
“We need to diversify our message, but I also think we need to listen and pay attention to some of the bright, younger leaders in our party, and stop doing things in an old school kind of way,” Wild said. “We need to reinvent how we campaign.”
The GOP, by contrast, built on the loyal base that it has won through decades of investment in cable news by embracing podcasts and “deep, dark social media that I don’t even know the names of,” Wild said. She cited reports that Trump’s 18-year-old son Barron was influential in his campaign “because he was listening to, watching, whatever the things that young men his age watch, and somebody smart on the campaign realized that it was worth listening to that.”
The GOP also sought to make inroads among young people of color, particularly Latinos who make up a majority of the population in Allentown, the most populous community in the 7th District. Wild said she didn’t lose because of the Latino vote or young men of color voting for Trump. Although such electoral patterns are more difficult to track, Wild claimed she fared far better than Democrats at the top of the ticket.
“There’s a reason for that. I showed up, and I don’t mean in the last six weeks before the election. I mean throughout my time in Congress, I was in those communities, going places, getting to know these people,” Wild said.
And while Wild acknowledges that’s easier to do as a congressional candidate than a presidential candidate, reengaging with minority and working class communities will be essential for the Democratic Party going forward.
“People ask me many times, how do we get back rural America?” Wild said. “And there’s a really simple answer to that. You literally show up in rural America … and you meet people, and you go to township meetings, and you hear what they care about.”
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