Last Monday afternoon, in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, Conor Lamb, the Democratic candidate for Congress in a special election, was going door to door, looking for undecided voters. “You guys know which way you’re leaning?” he stopped to ask one woman, a teacher’s aide whose husband worked at the nearby prison. “As of right now, we’re voting for you,” she said. Waynesburg, a town of around four thousand residents near the West Virginia border, was a must-win, and this household was typical of the town. In Alabama, it was African-American women who turned out to defeat Roy Moore, Lamb said; in Western Pennsylvania, Lamb was counting on robust support from the unions.

Some people took a while to open their doors. Lamb is a thirty-three-year-old marine and former federal prosecutor. He is so wholesome-looking that he is frequently mistaken for a Jehovah’s Witness. “One man called out, ‘I’m a Roman Catholic!’ ” Lamb told me. He’d replied, “So am I.” He grew up in the northern part of the PA-18 district, in the more affluent suburb of Mount Lebanon, and was shaped by years at Central Catholic, a high school run by Christian Brothers, an order within the Catholic Church that takes a vow of poverty. “They really make an effort to go out and be with people on the margins,” he told me.

As Lamb made his way through Waynesburg, a member of his team—a fellow-marine with a buzz cut and a puffy coat—walked ahead, calling out the residents’ names from a clipboard. “It’s going to be a turnout battle,” Lamb said. He knocked on the screen door of a modest house, reminding the woman who stood at the door of the election on Tuesday to replace the Republican representative, Tim Murphy. Murphy stepped down last October, after the news broke that he reportedly urged a mistress to have an abortion, despite his pro-life platform.

In 2016, Trump won PA-18 by nineteen points, and so it might seem surprising that Lamb holds a slim lead over the Republican state representative Rick Saccone, who is best known for his legislative effort to have the motto “In God We Trust” featured more visibly in Pennsylvania’s public schools. More surprising, polls last Monday showed that Lamb was neck-and-neck with Saccone in two rural counties, Washington and Greene, which had voted for Donald Trump by a margin of at least twenty-five points. Outsiders like to see Lamb’s success as the beginning of rural, white America’s referendum on Trump, which, many hope, will continue the pushback that began in Alabama and Virginia, and which will sweep the nation in November. Yet up close the special election in PA-18 looks more complicated. Many of the people who will vote for Lamb are Trump voters who still support the President. Lamb, in his conversations on doorsteps, assiduously avoids talking about national politics. “I don’t ask them what they think of the leadership of my party,” he said. “I just say, usually, ‘Look, I’m a Democrat because my grandfather was a Democrat, and he was because F.D.R. was.’ ”

Lamb has benefitted from a ready army of volunteers from the network of pop-up resistance groups that formed after Trump’s election. Mykie Reidy, who previously organized protests outside Murphy’s office, now leads Progress 18, a group with about six hundred active members who support Lamb—with reservations. “I don’t agree with him on a number of issues, but I like him anyway,” Reidy told me on the phone. In the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, she and Lamb’s other liberal supporters, most of whom live in the Pittsburgh suburbs to the north of the district, wanted to hear him call for a ban on bump stocks, or an increase in the minimum age to buy assault rifles, or a ban on AR-15s. Lamb has done none of this. Similarly, his support of the district’s dwindling coal industry, and of shale gas, is troubling to those who believe that the United States should move away from fossil fuels. “Do I agree with him about fracking? I do not,” Reidy said.

For the past seven years, I’ve reported from Washington County, an area hit hard by the collapse of the steel industry and more recently by the slow death of coal. In the wake of these industries, deep drilling for natural gas has created revenue that has helped to keep hotels and diners and chainsaw-repair shops, among many other small businesses, afloat. The influx of money has also further divided the residents of small, rural communities, separating the larger landowners who are earning money from gas operations from those who see little benefit.

If elected, Lamb will have to reconcile the local realities of a district that stretches from Appalachia in the south to wealthy liberal Pittsburgh suburbs in the north, as well as navigate a polarized national landscape that will put pressure on his conservative views about energy and guns. Last week, however, he was focussed solely on winning. It made sense for Pam Snyder, a Democratic state representative in southwestern Pennsylvania, whose family is the fifth generation to live on their farm in a nearby county, to join in his campaign; like Lamb, she is pro-Second Amendment, and has a pragmatic stance on coal and natural gas. When she was first elected, five and a half years ago, she was one of nine Democrats in the state chamber from this part of the state. In 2016, she was the only one to win reëlection.

In Lamb, Snyder said, she saw the next generation of Democratic leaders. “You gotta bring it to the middle,” she said. “The gridlock, people are sick of it.”

But Lamb’s ability to find common ground has also left him vulnerable to Republicans who call him “two-faced.” A devout Catholic, Lamb is personally pro-life but politically pro-choice. A Marine Captain who served as a prosecutor in Okinawa, he is ardently pro-Second Amendment—one of his campaign videos features a clip of him firing an AR-15—and yet, as a former federal prosecutor who has dealt with the mayhem caused by armed criminals, he’s campaigning to strengthen background checks. More superficially, he’s a vocal advocate for the coal industry and for natural gas who has a worm farm in his kitchen and grows potatoes in his garden.

In 2013, Lamb returned to Pittsburgh to work as a federal prosecutor after clerking for a federal judge in New York. The region lay at the center of the opioid crisis, and Lamb, who was assigned to the violent crimes unit, saw its ravages firsthand. “This is a place where people work with their hands, in coal mines and steel mills and natural-gas fields, and they get hurt on the job,” he told me of Washington County. “A lot of people play high-school football.” He stressed the role of the federal government in paying for enough beds in ninety-day treatment centers to keep people alive. “For us that’s an intellectual position, yes,” he said, about the lack of beds. “But if you sit across from a parent who’s lost a son, it’s an injustice.” Lamb particularly resists the notion that drug abuse is a result of immigration. In his second debate against Saccone, in response to a question about Trump’s proposed border wall, Lamb reminded his audience that, in the U.S., “the No. 1 entry point for fentanyl is J.F.K. Airport.”