A Republican congressional primary contest is underway in southeastern Pennsylvania between party-endorsed candidate Christian Nascimento and outsider Dan Burton.
Pennsylvania’s 4th Congressional District, in which the two are competing for the nomination to challenge incumbent Democratic Rep. Madeleine Dean, comprises most of Montgomery County and parts of southern Berks County. The Montgomery County-born Nascimento lives in Lower Providence Township, which is within the district, while Burton lives in Adamstown, Lancaster County, slightly outside the district.
On Wednesday evening, Nascimento received the endorsement of the Montgomery County Republican Committee (MCRC), an organization to which he has belonged for four years. He has served as the chair of the Lower Providence Republican Committee for most of that time. Before that the husband and father of three, who works as vice president of product management at Comcast, served as a Methacton School Board member and president.
“I’ve always felt a sense of service,” he told The Pennsylvania Daily Star. “And I just think that there are so many things that are happening now that are just getting us to a point where, for the first time ever, people are concerned that their children aren’t going to have it better than they do. So I personally couldn’t sit back and just complain about things without trying to do something about it.”
MCRC Chair Liz Preate Havey spoke highly of him.
“Having spent his entire life living in the district, Christian understands the issues that are important to voters,” she said. “Christian was the first person in his family to go to college and is now an executive at a top company because of his hard work. He can relate to all walks of life and not just the progressive elites like Madeleine Dean. I’m excited that our committee overwhelmingly endorsed him and believe he is our best chance to win in November.”
Top issues on which Nascimento said he is focused include expanding school choice, strengthening cybersecurity and reining in what he sees as excesses of globalization, which he believes has largely failed to generate meaningful economic gains for lower- and middle-income Americans. He said he would therefore favor new tax incentives for business that manufacture products domestically.
“What we’ve seen is these manufacturing jobs move over to places like China, China then uses those profits to fund [global infrastructure projects] … to further their [international] objectives, and the real people that suffer because of that are the middle and working class in the United States,” he lamented.
Burton, generally an unknown to Montgomery County Republican activists but a former GOP committeeman in Lancaster County, has touted his background as a Marine Corps veteran and a small insurance-business owner. Running on an economically and socially conservative platform, he has emphasized his faith as having impelled him to join domestic and international policy battles which, in his estimation, often amount to “good versus evil.”
“I feel called to be the warrior I was created to be,” he said. “Right now we see the evil that is running rampant in our world and country, and as a person who loves America, a person who served this great country, who swore an oath to it, for me to be silent in the face of evil is just as bad, so I refuse to be silent. I feel called to step up and fight for this country.”
Burton also weighed in on the Russia-Ukraine war, insisting that President Joe Biden would be well advised to proclaim decisively that Ukraine will never be a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a declaration which he said would help to de-escalate the conflict.
Both Nascimento and Burton have rebuked Dean’s consistent adherence to liberal policy aims since she first took office in 2019. An analysis by the statistics website FiveThirtyEight shows she has voted in favor of Biden’s preferred position on each of the 55 pieces of legislation tracked by the site.
“She is focused on being in lockstep with the Biden administration and liberal Democrats in Congress,” Nascimento said. “I think Montgomery and Berks counties deserve a representative who’s going to be independent — who’s going to think about the issues from all angles, try and build some consensus and not just go and try to make points on cable television.”
While neither candidate attacked the other’s agenda or character, Nascimento did say his opponent’s decision to run in a district in which he does not reside is not one he would have made himself. Burton ascribed his choice to run in the 4th district rather than the 11th — in which he lives — to the fact that the latter is represented by conservative Republican Lloyd Smucker, a lawmaker with whose record he has no major problem, in contrast to Dean’s.
Burton furthermore accused MCRC of “shenanigans” regarding the organization’s endorsement rules. At its convention in Blue Bell, the county party took a voice vote in which the vast majority of members affirmed support for Nascimento. Burton said the rules require a balloted vote, though he added he is not contesting the proceedings.
Havey noted that there is significant precedent for voice votes in both county and state GOP endorsement and that no one raised an objection to the proceedings on Wednesday.
Pennsylvania will hold its primary election on Tuesday, May 17.
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Bradley Vasoli is managing editor of The Pennsylvania Daily Star. Follow Brad on Twitter at @BVasoli. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Christian Nascimento (Left)” by Christian Nascimento. Photo “Daniel Burton (Right)” by Daniel Burton.
