U.S. Rep. Summer Lee represents Pennsylvania’s 12th District in Congress, a district that was redrawn in 2023 to include all of the city of Pittsburgh and a large part of the rest of reliably Democratic Allegheny County.
It also includes a smaller chunk of Westmoreland County, a traditional GOP stronghold. In the 2023 presidential election, former Vice President Kamala Harris won Lee’s district with over 59 percent of the vote. But a closer look at the election results shows that while Harris easily won the portions of the 12th District in Allegheny County, by nearly 64%, Donald Trump won 63.2% of the votes in Westmoreland County
Despite the differences among her constituents, Lee says their concerns ahead of the midterm elections are closely aligned, mainly around affordability.
“I think that when you're able to strip down what people actually want for themselves, for their own families, I think that you will find that the issues are largely the same,” Lee said in an interview with The Caucus.
She said a lot of political theater around an election, and Republicans stoking people’s fears, may create the impression that people don’t want the same things. “But when I talk to people from all parts of my district,” she added, “they all talk about things being too expensive.”
And in this unique political moment, Lee said, people are now tying existential concerns about democracy to their day-to-day problems.
“Democracy feels like a tertiary need when you can't afford your groceries, when you can't afford your housing, or you have student loan debt,” she said. “It seems like a luxury to talk about our democracy, the health of our country. But people are overwhelmingly realizing how these things are intertwined, right? We are in this affordability crisis because of policies that the Trump administration has made.”
Lee was one of the candidates who first ran for office — and won — in 2018 as part of the “blue wave” response to Trump’s first term, beating a longtime incumbent Democrat for a seat in Pennsylvania’s legislature.
After winning election in 2022 as the first Black woman to represent Pennsylvania in Congress, Lee has been part of a vocal faction of Democrats trying to steer the party toward more progressive policies. She was also responsible for forcing a vote in a GOP-controlled House subcommittee last year to subpoena the Department of Justice for documents related to its investigation of Jeffrey Epstein (despite the 8-2 vote in favor, the documents have still not been released).
With the midterm elections shaping up to be a nightmare for the GOP, Democrats have the opportunity to stop, or at least slow, some of what they consider to be the Trump administration’s more destructive policies during the remainder of his term. But Lee said the party has to be clear about what it’s for rather than just what it’s against.
“We are having a little bit of a tension point, even within the party,” she said, despite most Democrats agreeing that things are too expensive and life is growing harder for everyday Americans, not easier.
“We're watching corporate giants run away with our country. They're running away with our democracy. They are running away with our hard-earned dollars, and we're seeing less and less flow to the rest of us, and more and more flow to them,” Lee said. “At the same time, there's a recognition that we're facing these unprecedented attacks on our democracy from the president, from the Republican Party. But we still don't want to just be fighting back against them. We still want people who are going to have a vision for where we actually want to go.”
Especially in a city like Pittsburgh, which used to be one of the most affordable in the region, housing is the number one worry for many people, Lee added, whether it’s renters’ rights, private equity firms buying up senior citizen and assisted-living housing, or developers pricing lower- and middle-income people out of communities.
“And all of this is happening at the same time,” she said, noting it makes it hard for people to focus on the future. “So housing, the cost of just everything, the cost of living, and then they have these fears, this apprehension about where will our nation go next? What will become of our nation in this era?”
Lee has been spending the weeks ahead of the election in her district, after House Speaker Mike Johnson recessed the chamber earlier than planned. She’s heard concerns from residents about data centers, with communities “afraid that they're about to get the same raw deal over and over and over again.”
She’s also concerned about ongoing conditions at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center, an ICE detention facility in Clearfield County. Lee and Rep. Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania’s 17th District made an unannounced visit to the facility in May following numerous reports of how detainees were being treated and conditions there, including three deaths last year.
The two members of Congress were given only limited access to detainees, and were not permitted to have an interpreter with them, Lee said, making it difficult to communicate with those being held.
“The problem is the policy itself,” Lee told The Caucus. “It's the culture of terrorism that the Trump administration is inflicting upon our immigrant community, on our communities in the United States… and one of the symptoms of that is the fact that Congress members cannot do oversight in the ways that we need.”
Clearfield County commissioners voted last month to extend the Moshannon contract with ICE.
If Democrats are able to retake control of the House and possibly the Senate for the remainder of Trump’s second term, Lee said she doesn’t want to see the party focus only on fixing things that the president broke. While that has to be done, those aren’t necessarily things that will impact day-to-day life for many Americans, she added.
“The thing that we have to do when we win, if we are able to earn gavels, is make a strong balance,” she said. “We can do that work while also still putting forth strong proposals to actually impact the material conditions of people's lives. People are suffering right now. They are struggling right now, and they need to know that the Democratic Party's allegiance is to them and not to our donors, not to the donor class, not to the corporate class.”
For example: it’s one thing to talk about how the Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credit expired, Lee said. “But we can also talk about the fact that that should have never been something that so many people needed to survive in the first place. What is our better ACA?”
“I think people want to see boldness, bravery,” Lee said, “that we’ll show that we're willing to fight as hard as these Republicans have been willing to fight to destroy. We're willing to fight to build.”
(Photo: Congresswoman Summer Lee, via Rep. Summer Lee Facebook)