Congressman Scott Perry is eating chocolate ice cream in the shadow of Newt Gingrich’s childhood home in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania, during a street festival on a warm late-summer weekend, when his mood turns sour. “Now, I think it’s pretty rich that they will go and say that President Trump tried to steal the election, and President Trump is subverting democracy, and Republicans are against democracy,” he says stridently of Democrats dumping Joe Biden for Kamala Harris. “They just disavowed every single one of their votes and installed someone that got zero votes. So please don’t preach to me about that.”
The topic of subverting democracy is a touchy one. The former chair of the House Freedom Caucus, Perry was one of Donald Trump’s key congressional allies in the efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election — federal investigators even seized his phone. He has long insisted he did nothing wrong and compared his efforts to ensure “election integrity” were like a murder investigation where “we have got to find out who did it,” which he says is different from “trying to resurrect the body.”
Perry is the only member of the Freedom Caucus to represent a swing district and, despite that, he has not changed his political views an iota even though the swath of central Pennsylvania he’s represented for six terms has become more moderate. A traditionally Republican-leaning area that includes the state capital, Harrisburg, the district has recently moved thanks to the mid-Atlantic transplants filling subdivisions over what used to be farmland. It is almost a stereotypical middle ground: In the war of sports fandom that divides the state, loyalties are split between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh teams, and there is a salient of Baltimore fans that juts north of the city, propelled there by white flight across the Mason-Dixon Line.........