Scott Perry's Haunted House in the 10th District

As Halloween approaches, U.S. Rep. Scott Perry has decided that south-central Pennsylvania needs another haunted attraction. Forget the corn mazes and haunted hayrides. The Republican congressman wants voters trembling at the thought of Janelle Stelson, a former local television anchor whose most frightening quality may be her ability to defeat him.

Or so goes Perry’s campaign messaging as Election Day looms, which might as well be called the Scarecrow Strategy: stuff an empty argument into a vaguely human shape and hope it frightens somebody. Exhibit A is an appalling 30-second spot dropped on October 19th and opens with a narrator saying, “Janelle Stelson has been exposed — literally.” It accuses the Democratic candidate of “exposing herself totally naked to a neighborhood child” as the camera zooms in on highlighted lines from a document stamped "AFFIDAVIT" that read “naked in the public sphere,” and “plain sight of my minor.”

Why would Perry build a scarecrow of Stelson out of unsubstantiated gossip? Because he has precious little else to put on the lawn. He’s a seven-term incumbent, a former Freedom Caucus chairman, and a man who hitched himself to Donald Trump so tightly that the FBI once seized his phone over the president’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Last week, Reuters/Ipsos put Trump’s approval at 31%, the lowest of either term, with 68% disapproving of his handling of the economy. The Iran war that Trump launched in February has pushed gas past $4 a gallon at Wawa and Sheetz, and Perry voted six times to back the president’s authority to wage it. The economy is the top issue for 10th District voters, according to a recent Franklin & Marshall poll, and it’s a losing issue for Perry.

So with the polls essentially tied with a week left, apparently the thinking goes: what else is there to do but push the scare-tactic button?

Certainly, Perry isn’t the only one reaching for it. In Ohio, GOP gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy cut an ad featuring his Democratic opponent Amy Acton’s estranged mother, calling her a liar. This is the same mother who, Acton’s campaign says, protected the stepfather charged in 1978 with raping Acton as a child. Even Republicans are divided on these low-blow ads.

Back in the 10th District, the trouble is that the real Janelle Stelson is about as frightening as a fun-size Milky Way. This summer, she ran an ad boasting that she’d support Trump-backed tax cuts on tips and overtime. She backs many of the administration's border measures and says she wants violent undocumented immigrants deported. On data centers, PennLive concluded there’s probably little daylight between her and Perry. She’s largely a centrist Democrat from central casting. Nobody is checking under the bed for her.

On Saturday, the kids of the Susquehanna Valley will go door to door dressed as ghosts and witches, and everyone will play along, because that’s the deal. On Tuesday, the grown-ups get to decide whether they’ll play along with Scott Perry’s campaign games. I suspect most of them will care less about what Stelson is wearing at home than about the exorbitant cost of Halloween candy, and just about everything else these days.

Sorry, Scott, the cost of living is the real horror show this fall.

Ryan Zickgraf is a writer based in Harrisburg. He is a columnist at UnHerd. Follow him on X at @ryan_zickgraf.