Shamaine Daniels is the Democrat who will try to beat Rep. Scott Perry
Democratic candidate Shamaine Daniels will face off with Republican incumbent U.S. Rep. Scott Perry in the fall for the 10th Congressional District.
Perry was the only Republican on the ballot for the seat. Vying for the Democratic nomination were Rick Coplen, a Carlisle Area School District school board member and a teacher, and Daniels, an immigration attorney and Harrisburg City Councilwoman who moved to the U.S. from Venezuela at the age of 13.
While these results are not official, with all precincts in all three counties of the district reporting, Daniels earned 31, 947 votes to Coplen’s 29, 027 votes.
Coplen was the clear winner in Cumberland County, but Daniels was highly-favored in Dauphin County. York County votes were nearly split down the middle between to the two Democrats, with Daniels pulling slightly ahead.
Daniels ran on issues of women’s health, infrastructure and agriculture. She also supported raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.
Daniels said she wants to unseat Perry because the right to vote is under attack by people who know they’d never win another election if all voter voices were heard. The councilwoman will have an uphill battle to make that dream a reality in November. The Republican representative has served in Congress for 5 terms.
Perry was first elected to Congress in 2006. The district has been re-numbered and reconfigured since then and now covers all of Dauphin County and parts of York and Cumberland counties. The cities of York and Harrisburg are in this district.
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The congressman serves on the House Committees on Transportation & Infrastructure, and Foreign Affairs. In November 2021, Perry was elected chairman of the House Freedom Caucus.
Perry has recently come under fire for his actions surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection. He was the first sitting lawmaker to be asked to testify before the House Jan. 6 Committee investigating the incident. He refused.
Perry was cited more than 50 times in a Senate Judiciary report that detailed Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The House Jan. 6 investigative panel issued a subpoena May 12 to the congressman as part of its probe into the incident.
According to the Washington Post, Perry has a track record of supporting conspiracy theories. After the 2020 presidential election, he pushed baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, despite overwhelming evidence that no such fraud happened. He also touted QAnon conspriacy theories that British and Italian governments were manipulating U.S. elections via satellites, and alleged that CIA Director Gina Haspel conspired with them. These claims have been debunked.
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After the Las Vegas shooting, Perry said the gunman was not only alive, but also a member of ISIS. Neither of those claims is true.
In 2020, former Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale ran a very tight race against Perry, but he ultimately lost by nearly 5 percentage points.
Read More: Shamaine Daniels is the Democrat who will try to beat Rep. Scott Perry