WASHINGTON _ It was the day of a special election in Pennsylvania's 18th Congressional District, and the Republican candidate was missing.
Never mind that national Republicans were spending millions on the Pittsburgh-area race, desperate to avoid a humiliating defeat in a district that President Donald Trump had won by nearly 20 percentage points. As Republican Rick Saccone's watch party got underway that March night, according to three sources with direct knowledge, his own campaign couldn't find him.
"We had panicked calls from our folks in the state being like, 'We can't find him.' We were like, 'Yeah, we have an hour left until he loses,'" said one senior GOP official heavily involved in the national House fight. "It was fitting. At that point, we could just laugh and have a nice little encapsulation of the campaign."
It was just one seat. But Republicans would later recognize it as the beginning of the end.
"Rick Saccone was a terrible candidate, but he was still a harbinger of things to come," said Mark Harris, a Pittsburgh-based GOP strategist. "The suburban wipeout he experienced repeated itself across the country on Tuesday."
This is the behind-the-scenes story of the race for the House. It is based on interviews with more than 30 Republican and Democratic officials intimately involved in the midterm campaign, who described a battle marked by sudden strategic recalculations, Republican finger-pointing and persistent, if private, Democratic anxiety.
This reporting revealed that the GOP's acute panic about 2018 began as early as the weekend of Trump's inauguration. Internal Democratic data, which has not previously been reported, showed a path to a wholesale realignment of the political parties by summer. And even as Democrats tried to focus their campaigns on pocketbook issues, behind the scenes they were also preparing for Trump's late push on immigration.
Ultimately, Conor Lamb's victory in that western Pennsylvania district offered a template for the eventual Democratic takeover, as a telegenic, well-funded Marine Corps veteran with no voting record and a profile independent of the national Democratic Party beat out a GOP politician who couldn't keep up in fundraising. Even in a conservative district, Lamb managed to capitalize on anti-Trump sentiment without fully alienating Republican voters.
Republican candidates in competitive districts, meanwhile, could never fully claim independence from Trump's polarizing presidency.
"Everything became about Donald Trump," said retiring GOP Rep. Ryan Costello of Pennsylvania. "And we did not find a way to assert a separate identity as a Congress, or more in particular, for those members in competitive districts.
"We became victims," he added, "of the 2016 election."
