Dee Adcock has spent the better part of the past few months playing the part of his cycle’s humble Republican challenger to Democrat incumbent Allyson Schwartz in Pennsylvania’s 13th district. The district, north of Philadelphia in Montgomery County, has been solid blue for a decade, and the Cook Partisan Voting Index has the territory as D +7.
Adcock’s campaign, rightly or wrongly, has not attracted the kind of enthusiasm that similar challenges by the likes of Mike Kelly in PA-3, Pat Meehan in PA-7, or Lou Barletta in PA-11 have received. But as of last week, that could be changing. Adcock’s campaign released a poll conducted in early September that suggests the race could not just be competitive, but may actually be a dead heat.
As Jim Geraghty at The Campaign Spot covered on Friday, the Adcock poll was conducted by Public Opinion Strategies and indicates a close match. “Forget the Democrat registration edge here,” said pollster Neil Newhouse, as “voters in this district are leaning toward the GOP candidate in the November election by a 44 percent to 42 percent margin.”
Battle ‘10 caught up with Dee Adcock to get a sense of the state of the race from his perspective.
“I saw Allyson Schwartz as too liberal for this district,” said Adcock, explaining his rationale for entering the race. “I’ve referred to her as the Nancy Pelosi of the East because of her voting record.”
Adcock, who is a member of the NRCC’s “Young Guns” program, described Schwartz as someone whose “beliefs, values, and votes don’t represent the more moderate to moderately conservative values of our district.”
“She didn’t represent me, and I didn’t believe she represented a majority of voters,” Adcock told Battle ‘10.
Adcock cited Paul Ryan as a philosophically like-minded member of Congress, and said he’s read Ryan’s “Roadmap for America,” a fiscal plan for addressing structural problems with the national debt. Adcock said he found Ryan’s plan to be “very interesting.”
On his opportunity to bring attention and focus to his challenge with three weeks to go, Adcock was upbeat, talking of the “positive wind at our back” thanks to strong leads by fellow ballot Republicans Pat Toomey and Tom Corbett in their bids for senate and the governorship, respectively.