HARRISBURG, PA — Just two weeks after he was first elected to Congress in the fall of 2012, Scott Perry was already thinking about his legacy.
“I just hope that if I was to be remembered as anybody or anything, it was to be a principled person that was polite,” he said during an interview with the assistant chief clerk of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, where he had served the last six years.
His focus on the purse strings and limiting the footprint of the federal government is familiar to anyone who has spoken to Perry for more than two minutes.
But that’s about where the similarities between the Perry of 2012 and the Perry of 2024 end. “Polite” may be one of the last words associated with Perry, a former Freedom Caucus chairman who’s gone after Democrats and Republicans with sharp rhetoric and was a major part of Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Perry first ran for the statehouse as a 43-year-old on a crusade for reform and term limits. He’s now running for his seventh congressional term, at 62, on a crusade to bolster the conservative political establishment.
The meek backbencher, the “members’ member” that former colleagues in the Pennsylvania statehouse described to NOTUS, is gone. So is the grassroots campaigner, who spent every waking moment going door-to-door. Or the agreeable Republican looking to work with Democrats.
What’s left is a well-established congressman who rarely sees virtue in the middle.
“He’s very focused on the big battles, really, the battle between good and evil, the theme of political opposition, political opponents,” said Jeff Coleman, a former state lawmaker and Republican strategist based in Harrisburg. “You do see in him that, that he believes that we’re in a race against time to preserve Western civilization, and out of that comes the way that he approaches the job.”
NOTUS reached out to 20 of Perry’s former colleagues and staffers in Pennsylvania and reviewed hundreds of records and articles on Perry spanning back to the early 1980s.
The Perry of 2024 is just as principled and focused on fiscal conservatism, just as firm in his convictions as the Perry of 2006. But the Republican Party has transformed, and Perry has transformed with it. As he’s moved further to the right over the years, his district has moved further to the left.
Those two forces are now coming to a head in one of the most competitive congressional races in the country, where national Democrats have pinned their hopes on and pushed millions of dollars toward ousting Perry. Local Democrats told NOTUS they had never seen the national party take the race this seriously. The polling shows why.
For months, internal numbers from Perry’s opponent, Janelle Stelson, have shown her either leading or within striking distance. She’s been significantly outraising and outspending Perry all year, too, with more ads on the airwaves and significantly more events.
It’s all translated into a major pickup opportunity for Democrats in the traditionally Republican stronghold of central Pennsylvania. A poll from Susquehanna published on Wednesday put Stelson well above Perry, 48-39.
But Perry is now receiving national support of his own. He’s getting fundraising dollars from the House GOP leaders he has frequently battled with, and he’s getting political support. House Speaker Mike Johnson is making a campaign stop for Perry on Friday.
***
To understand Scott Perry the congressman, you have to understand Scott Perry the man. And before you can do that, you have to understand Scott Perry the boy.
In Perry’s telling, he lived an isolated childhood. He was poor into his 20s, and that experience fundamentally shaped his political views.
Born in San Diego, his mother, Cecile, settled in Dillsburg, Pennsylvania, with him and his older brother. Perry had no relationship with his father, and his relationship with his stepfather, Daniel Chimel, wasn’t much better.
“He was chronically unemployed, and my mom worked a lot, so there was lot’s of fighting over paying the bills and not working,” Perry told The Patriot-News in 2018.
“We didn’t have what I guess you would call a very caring family relationship,” he said.
His mother worked at a wholesale food company, bringing home expired foods for dinner. Perry started working at 13 picking fruit and never stopped working.
“I was not a great student. I had a lot of distractions and not a lot of guidance. I just didn’t have a lot of good role models around me, and so I was kind of like a weed out there growing on my own,” Perry said in his Pennsylvania House of Representatives exit interview.
He graduated from high school in Dillsburg in 1980 and didn’t plan to go to college. He decided to join the National Guard, while also pumping gas and fixing cars. By the time he enrolled at the Harrisburg Area Community College, Perry was spending most of his time flying helicopters with the Guard while flipping through his calculus book.
It took Perry 11 years to graduate college, and it was only at the very end that he fell, almost accidentally, into politics. He’d been “politically aware” of the world around him, noting his early love for Richard Nixon at six years old. (“Maybe I just liked the way Richard Nixon combed his hair back.”)
But he wasn’t politically active until he took a political science class.
“I was smitten. I realized what my passion was,” Perry said. “I wanted my degree in business and I still wanted to be in business, but I knew what I wanted to do the rest of my life at that moment.”
If there’s one person who understands Perry’s early years, it’s David Brinton, his right-hand man for most of his early political life.
The two came up through the York County Young Republicans and volunteered together for the state representative Perry would later replace. They served together as chairman and executive director of the Pennsylvania Young Republicans, and when Perry ran for the statehouse, Brinton ran his campaign and was his chief of staff all six years.
It was also Brinton who penned the two political monikers you’ll find on every piece of Perry material: “Patriots for Perry” and “Businessman, Soldier and Leader.”
“Those three words really encapsulate the life of Scott Perry,” Brinton told NOTUS.
***
Despite Perry’s Republican credentials, it was a grassroots campaign from the beginning when he first ran for the statehouse.
“While I am very excited about his candidacy, I am concerned because I know that political campaigns can get nasty,” Perry’s mother, Cecile Coble, wrote in a letter to the York Dispatch in 2006. “I know my son pretty well. I know his character. He will not get in the gutter with his opponents.”
Perry entered Harrisburg with a historically large freshman class eager to reform the system. Earlier that year, lawmakers approved a hefty raise for themselves in the dead of night, with no debate or public scrutiny. Bruce Smith, who had held the seat for 25 years, stepped down partially over the pay raise controversy, and Perry was eager to set himself apart.
Lawmakers had “lost their way and are drifting aimlessly,” Perry told the York Dispatch when he entered the race. “I believe my government and my party have become out of touch with what is important to ‘We, the People.’”
He didn’t waste much time getting started.
“His work ethic — my word — he had slippers under his desk. He would be there 2, 3 o’clock in the morning,” said Jodi Parry, Perry’s legislative aide.
“The one thing that he said to me back when we first began that always stuck with me that I was always impressed by, he said, ‘Jodi, if you see me changing or doing something that you don’t agree with or you know is wrong, let me know. Tell me.’”
She said she never had to.
“Most people would say that he was just an earnest, sincere, good constituent-driven legislator,” Coleman recalled. “He wasn’t the leader of the conservatives in the statehouse, for example. He was not looking for leadership on major cultural or economic policy questions.”
Perry has cited Stan Saylor as a key mentor of his during those years. Saylor told NOTUS he remembered Perry as a family man who tried to find agreement with his colleagues.
“Our friendship was about just being good friends and respecting each other. And that’s one of the problems in Washington and even Harrisburg nowadays, is that new groups that have come in are more about insulting each other,” Saylor said.
“That’s where Scott’s a lot different. He will criticize, but he will not be obnoxiously mean about it,” he added.
Steve Barrar served in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives for 23 years and chaired the veterans committee where Perry was assigned. He said Perry was always reaching out to him to find consensus, even when they disagreed.
“I always looked at him as a very dedicated, hardworking state representative,” Barrar said.
Even on an issue like abortion, Perry tried to take a more pragmatic approach. In 2012, while still in the state Legislature, Perry distanced himself from Republican colleagues who were trying to require all women to receive an ultrasound before having an abortion.
“Well, listen, I don’t know that I’m against it,” Perry told the York Daily Record at the time. “But I’m not sure it needs to be mandated. A, I’m not a doctor. And B, I’m not a woman.”
Years later in Congress, Perry would go on to sponsor the Life at Conception Act, which would ban abortion nationwide.
***
It didn’t come as a surprise to those close to Perry that his ambitions were greater than the Pennsylvania state Legislature. Todd Platts, the moderate Republican who represented the congressional district, announced he was stepping aside at the end of 2012. Two days later, Perry was in the race.
He emerged from a seven-way primary as the GOP nominee, beating out a candidate who had more than twice as much money. But just as he had six years before, Perry focused on the grassroots. He knocked on as many doors as he could to make up the difference.
“You’ll never outwork Scott Perry on a campaign,” Brinton said.
After being elected, Perry said in his statehouse exit interview that he didn’t expect to have much influence in Washington. “I don’t think I’ll have quite that loud of a voice,” he said.
“I’m going to choose my words very carefully, and I know that there’s a larger constituency to represent and I have to represent both sides,” he said.
In his first year in Congress, Perry joined the Problem Solvers Caucus, a bipartisan group that includes some of the most moderate House members.
“Being part of this coalition isn’t about any particular ideology, but rather a philosophy. It’s a willingness to search for common ground rather than exploiting areas of conflict,” Perry wrote.
He was also an early supporter of the bipartisan Senate immigration bill in 2013. And he drew further ire from the right when he pushed to legalize medical marijuana.
As his years in Congress passed by, however, Perry expanded his message. Where he previously focused on solving fiscal problems in a bipartisan nature, he pivoted toward some bizarre personal issues. He accused a Pakistani American staffer working for Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of “massive” data transfers that amounted to “a substantial security threat.” (Prosecutors later cleared the staffer.)
In 2018, Perry told Tucker Carlson he suspected a possible Islamic State connection to the mass shooting in Las Vegas, a theory consistently debunked by law enforcement. In 2020, he questioned systemic racism, claiming that racism only exists in isolated incidents. (For those comments, the former York County GOP chair withdrew his support.)
If there is one year signifying a turning point for Perry, it’s 2015. That was the year the House Freedom Caucus formed, and it’s the year Trump glided down a golden escalator and declared his candidacy for president. Perry didn’t endorse Trump until mid-2016, when he had all but secured the nomination, but those two events would go on to largely define Perry’s legacy in the House.
In most cases, Perry and Trump were aligned. In the instances where they weren’t — like fiscal responsibility and foreign policy — Perry didn’t make a big show of his disagreements. Like most of the Freedom Caucus, Perry took his cues from Trump and tried to influence the GOP standard-bearer on the margins.
After first being cagey about whether he was even in the Freedom Caucus in 2015, Perry was elected chairman of the HFC in 2021, tasked with holding the group together during a period when Democrats suddenly controlled the House, Senate and White House.
Meanwhile, Perry was dealing with some legal troubles over his role to overturn the 2020 election results.
***
If 2015 was a defining year for Perry, Jan. 6, 2021, is the defining date.
Perry’s communications with the executive branch ahead of Jan. 6 were “proactive, persistent and protracted,” according to Judge Beryl Howell, who reviewed Perry’s phone records.
Perry, alongside fellow Freedom Caucus member Jim Jordan, was involved in discussions with White House officials about Vice President Mike Pence’s role on Jan. 6 as early as November 2020, according to the House Jan. 6 Committee.
Perry not only introduced Jeffrey Clark to Trump, but he repeatedly pushed for Clark to be promoted to acting attorney general. Perry was also in frequent contact with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows — a close friend who also once served as Freedom Caucus chair when he was in the House — pushing baseless conspiracy theories about voter fraud. And he was central in efforts to challenge the electoral results in Pennsylvania.
“11 days to 1/6… We gotta get going!” one text to Meadows read, according to the committee.
Perry also texted with then-incoming Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who complained about “incompetence here in Georgia.”
Perry responded: “Nothing can beat effective cheating.”
Perry also reached out to the White House about a presidential pardon following Jan. 6, according to Cassidy Hutchinson, the former assistant to Meadows.
Five days after Jan. 6, Perry issued a press release in response to local calls for him to resign from office.
“No,” the statement read in its entirety.
Perry has spent at least $300,000 in campaign funds on legal fees this cycle.
***
Just as Perry has had to defend himself against accusations that he acted outside the appropriate scope after the 2020 election, he’s found himself in a far more competitive and disapproving district than the one that first sent him to Washington.
With Pennsylvania congressional redistricting in 2018, suddenly his deep red district lost its most conservative areas and picked up Dauphin County. The 20-point margin Trump enjoyed in Perry’s district in 2016 shrunk to 9 points in 2020. It would be 5 points after the 2020 election.
Despite now representing a more politically moderate district, Perry is the most conservative federal lawmaker from Pennsylvania. He is the only member of the Pennsylvania delegation to vote against funding for Ukraine and Israel. He is one of 20 in the House to vote against a bill to protect firefighters from toxic chemicals. He is one of 10 to vote against a bill to help get housing for homeless veterans.
“It’d be easier for him just to go along to get along, but he doesn’t do that,” Saylor said.
Despite the local furor and national attention over Perry’s role in attempting to overturn the election results, Perry still sailed to a relatively quiet victory in 2022, winning by 8 points over Democrat Shamaine Daniels. But the district split that year, voting for Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro by 12 points, while narrowly going in favor of Republican Senate candidate Mehmet Oz.
Democratic operatives and local leaders who spoke to NOTUS said Daniels was a weaker candidate and that little national resources and attention were put toward the race compared to this year. This cycle, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has put $1.3 million into the race, and House Majority PAC has another $2.3 million reserved.
When asked about the 2020 election during a congressional debate on Tuesday, Perry argued that he was representing the interests of his constituents, not his own. He said he got “literally thousands of phone calls, emails, texts” from people wanting an investigation into the election.
“It’s your job as a representative to be their voice, even sometimes if you don’t agree with what they’re asking you,” he said.
Walter Cohen, the former GOP state attorney general, is on the board of Republicans Against Perry. He sees Perry’s role in the lead-up to Jan. 6 as a deciding factor for Republicans who have soured on Trump but still voted down ballot for Perry in past elections.
“His support of Trump and his feeling that the 2020 election was stolen and Trump actually won, that’s absurd for a government official to take that position. It’s wrong. And I know that other Republicans here feel the way I do about that,” Cohen said.
“He has shifted more to the right over time. I mean, you can’t get further to the right than where he is now,” he said.
To Brinton, Perry is navigating a completely different political environment than the one he was elected to Congress in, both because of redistricting and because of new Democratic enthusiasm in more conservative areas of his community.
“Today’s Republican Party, in many ways, is a whole lot different than the one that Scott and I came up through the system with. The dynamics of it has really changed over the last decade or so,” he said.
“Politics is such a timing business,” Brinton said, recalling Perry’s first run for state office back in 2006.
“If Bruce Smith doesn’t look vulnerable, does Scott Perry run for office? I don’t know, I mean, you’d have to ask Scott that. But under those conditions, Scott felt compelled to run,” he said.
“It was the same way when he ran for Congress,” Brinton added. “You have to be at the right place at the right time, with the right issues happening, and for Scott, that’s what happened.”
Now, on his seventh campaign for Congress, approaching the start of his third decade in public office, Perry is facing what is shaping up to be the closest political race of his career.
The only question now is whether, in 2024, Perry will once again find himself in the right place at the right time.
—
Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
Correction: This story has been updated to show Todd Platts stepped aside in 2012.