PA Headlines 5/11/22
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — With six days until Pennsylvania’s primary, Republicans are openly worrying that a leading candidate in the crowded GOP field for governor is unelectable in the fall general election and will fumble away an opportunity for the party to take over the battleground state’s executive suite. Doug Mastriano, 58, a state senator since 2019 and a retired U.S. Army colonel, is running to the right of the nine-person Republican field and against the party’s establishment in a state still roiled by former President Donald Trump’s baseless conspiracy theories that Democrats stole the 2020 election there.
Mastriano is a prominent peddler of the unsubstantiated claims that widespread fraud marred the 2020 election and that Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf was responsible for thousands of COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes. During the pandemic, he belittled efforts to contain the virus and spread conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 vaccine. That has long made Republican Party officials and movement conservatives uncomfortable that Mastriano will be unable to win a fall general election matchup against Democrat Josh Shapiro, and they are becoming more vocal about it. On Monday, the state Senate’s Republican floor leader, Kim Ward, endorsed a rival candidate, Dave White, and singled out Mastriano as unable to attract the moderate voters necessary to win a general election in Pennsylvania.
Mastriano “has appeal to base Republicans, but I fear the Democrats will destroy him with swing voters,” Ward wrote on her personal Facebook page. She added that “winning the primary and losing the general because the candidate is unable to get the voters in the middle, isn’t a win.” Mike McMonagle, president of the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Coalition, said Mastriano gets a top rating from his organization because he supports a complete ban on abortion, no exceptions. But the organization is endorsing White at least in part because Mastriano “in our judgment would get clobbered by Shapiro in a general election.” Republicans have been shut out of the governor’s office in Pennsylvania since 2014 under Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, who is barred by term limits from running again.
Losing the contest again this year would mean that Republicans squander their turn: the party has won back the office in every election when a term-limited Democrat is leaving since the state’s constitution changed in 1968 to allow governors to serve two terms. But Republicans worry that Mastriano is too toxic to win moderate Republican voters and swing voters in the heavily populated suburbs of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh while endangering down-ballot GOP candidates with a lackluster top-of-the-ticket turnout. Mastriano came from nowhere in 2020 to become a rising force in right-wing politics.
He led anti-shutdown rallies during the start of the pandemic, livestreaming daily chats on Facebook and playing to conspiracy theorists. He became a key figure in the effort by Trump to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss — earning Mastriano a subpoena by the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Democrats have begun to pay more attention to Mastriano, portraying him as an extremist in a bid to weaken him ahead of the general election. In recent days, Democrats launched digital ads and flyers attacking Mastriano while Shapiro is airing a statewide TV ad portraying Mastriano as extreme because of his support for a ban on abortion, vow to repeal mail-in voting and conspiracy-driven attempts to investigate the 2020 election.
Their closing line is if Mastriano wins, “it’s a win for what Donald Trump stands for.” “Doug Mastriano will drag our commonwealth backwards with an extreme agenda; he belongs nowhere near the governorship,” Shapiro’s campaign said in a statement. In a phone interview with the Lancaster-based LNP news organization, Mastriano said Shapiro’s attack will “absolutely” help him win the primary. “I’m going to have to send him a thank you card,” Mastriano told LNP. He added that Shapiro has underestimated him and that the Republican establishment “is in a panic mode” at the prospect that he will be the party’s nominee.
Neither Trump not the state Republican Party have endorsed in the primary race, leaving it that much more wide open. And Mastriano — once thought of as a fringe candidate — has outperformed expectations in a field where some candidates began with far more money or name recognition. A recent Franklin and Marshall College poll showed 20% of GOP primary voters saying they support Doug Mastriano. Bill McSwain and Lou Barletta trailed slightly, with 12% and 11%, respectively. Still, a large group of voters, or one-third, said they were undecided and, even among those who said they were backing a candidate, about half said they may change their minds.
Mastriano first gained a following by leading anti-shutdown rallies during the early months of the pandemic, then became among Trump’s most dedicated supporters during the 2020 campaign. He worked with Trump to overturn the result and organized bus trips to the U.S. Capitol for Trump’s Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally, where he was later seen in footage with his wife passing through breached barricades set up by Capitol Police. Last May, he claimed on a radio show that Trump “ asked me ” to run for governor. In the weeks after that, he attempted to launch an Arizona-style partisan “audit” of the 2020 election — only to be stripped of his committee chairmanship by state Senate GOP leadership in clash over financing and hiring contractors.
Mastriano has bragged that he is more conservative than his rivals, that he draws bigger crowds and is not a politician, a class he derides as corrupt. He often campaigns with key figures in Trump’s circle who have spread denialism about the 2020 election, including Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and lawyer Jenna Ellis. And he campaigns with strong Christian themes, working prayers into his campaign events, peppering his speech with quotes from the Bible and calling for a fast for the final 21 days of the primary. “So let’s stand strong together, take our state back, and when Pennsylvania is restored I believe there’s going to be a revival here like we’ve never seen before,” Mastriano told an audience Monday in Somerset on his weeklong bus tour. “And it’s going to bring our nation back to where it needs to be, in God.”
A general election cycle will bring new challenges for Mastriano. He has largely avoided speaking to independent media outlets, including The Associated Press, and barred reporters from his campaign events. Last week, he went on the conservative Delaware Valley Journal podcast before having what the organization called a “meltdown” and hanging up after 20 minutes. What set off Mastriano were questions about him speaking to an audience of QAnon adherents recently, his election fraud claims and his activities at the Capitol on Jan. 6. The subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee came up at the only live televised primary debate Mastriano attended. He insisted he has no “legal issues.”
Meanwhile, Shapiro has unified the Democratic Party and its allies. Dave Ball, the chairman of the Washington County Republican Party, said many Republicans are concerned that Mastriano’s appeal is narrow. But, he said, Republicans will need Mastriano and his voters, and vice versa, to beat Shapiro, regardless of who wins the primary. “The whole Republican party better be behind whoever the winner is,” Ball said, “because Josh Shapiro is still there.”
HARRISBURG – Triblive is reporting… HANOVER TOWNSHIP — Standing before a wall-sized American flag at an American Legion hall here in Northeastern Pennsylvania, David McCormick talked up his background in the Army, called himself a “happy warrior,” and ticked through the reasons he wants to be Pennsylvania’s next senator: Inflation, the border, the “humiliation” of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. “What about election integrity?” a woman interrupted from the back. “And CRT!” a man yelled, referring to “critical race theory,” a GOP culture-war hobgoblin. Suddenly off balance, the cheery McCormick, stocky and with thick, wavy hair, said he’d support voter ID laws and is concerned “parents aren’t involved” in school decisions. But he quickly turned back to the economy and national defense.
The moment late last month illustrated the challenge for Republicans trying to straddle the remnants of the traditional GOP and the attitudes driving the party today, especially for someone like McCormick. A West Point graduate who earned a Bronze Star in the first Gulf War, got a doctorate from Princeton, held a jet-setting Treasury job in the George W. Bush administration and, until recently, led the world’s largest hedge fund, McCormick has a brilliant political resume — at least for the version of the party that nominated Mitt Romney for president a decade ago. But his Senate campaign is testing how someone who has long traveled with the political and financial elite fits into a populist GOP electorate remade by former President Donald Trump.
McCormick has spent four months and at least $11 million of his own money advertising himself as an “America First” conservative. He aggressively sought Trump’s endorsement, courting the former president’s allies and hiring Trump aides to vaguely defined positions. Trump didn’t buy it. Instead he endorsed McCormick’s chief GOP rival, celebrity surgeon Mehmet Oz, and lacerated McCormick at a rally Friday in Southwestern Pennsylvania, undercutting the candidate’s core message less than two weeks before the crucial May 17 primary. “Dr. Oz is running against the liberal Wall Street Republican named David McCormick,” Trump told the crowd in Greensburg. “He may be a nice guy, but he’s not MAGA.”
Lumping in McCormick with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., Trump called him, “absolutely the candidate of special interests and globalists and the Washington establishment.” Trump’s rejection crystallized the eye rolls from McCormick’s rivals, who for months have scoffed at a makeover driven by an army of consultants and more than $33 million in spending by McCormick and his wealthy allies. Beneath it all, they argue, has been a campaign grown in a political lab and grafted onto an impressive resume and huge bank account. “You have not spent the last 20 years pushing America First,” GOP rival Kathy Barnette said at a debate last month.
Now McCormick enters the final days of a close race carrying the anvil Trump just dropped on him, unable to break away from the pack despite vastly outspending his opponents. His allies point out that whatever criticism McCormick has absorbed, he’s still in a position to win, running toward the front of the pack with Oz and Barnette, a conservative commentator. Even after Trump’s smackdown, McCormick lauded the president and claimed to be the champion of his priorities. “I’m running on President Trump’s great America First agenda,” McCormick said Monday on Fox Business. “President Trump did a great job for Pennsylvania, and I’m running as the person who’s battle tested and Pennsylvania true and can actually win this primary, win this race.”
And he launched an ad featuring an abbreviated, undated, and grainy video of Trump, apparently on speaker phone in the Oval Office, saying: “Dave, I want to congratulate you, you’ve served our country well in so many different ways.” But if McCormick falls short, he could become a cautionary tale about what happens to establishment figures who supplicate themselves before Trump, leaving their campaign identity in the hands of a mercurial leader. In Hanover Township, McCormick brought a room of 150 to a hush. He had arrived at the centerpiece of his stump speech, a story about a mother he met on the campaign trail and her son, Michael. Michael had enlisted after 9/11 and served in Afghanistan, but felt adrift when he returned home. He died by suicide. As McCormick tells the story, he reaches into a pocket of his khakis and produces a gold star coin the mother gave him. It inevitably draws gasps, or tears.
McCormick says he wants to go to the Senate to ensure other families like Michael’s “aren’t left behind.” “America First means to me that there’s all sorts of people across Pennsylvania that have been forgotten,” he said in Hanover. The story shows both McCormick’s way of tapping into the frustrations Trump identified, and what supporters see as some of McCormick’s best qualities. Despite living for more than a decade in Connecticut, he grew up in Central Pennsylvania — he was a well-known high school wrestler in Bloomsburg — and is usually a smiling presence who appears more comfortable with heartfelt messages about service than cultural grievances.
“He’s got real roots in the state, is a farmer, is a business owner, and a wrestling champion,” said R.J. Scouton, 39, of Wyoming County, who’s seen McCormick speak several times. “He’s genuine. He’s real. He’s not a TV personality.” “There’s so much integrity. You can just see it,” said Judith Lapinksi, 71, of Shickshinny, about 25 miles east of Bloomsburg. She delighted in McCormick’s recitation of the small towns, including hers, that he remembered from his high school days. “He has experience in D.C. He’s the whole package.” Those evident strengths left some who know McCormick even more baffled when he so aggressively tried to contort himself into a Trump-style politician.
McCormick served Bush, promoting free trade and high-skilled immigration as boons to American businesses. He was an early fund-raiser for Jeb Bush in 2016, traveled to Davos, served on the board of the Aspen Institute, and owns multimillion dollar homes on New York’s Upper East Side and outside Aspen, Colo. Under his watch, the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates last year raised more than $1 billion for investments in China (McCormick earned $22.5 million from Bridgewater last year; he says those investments in China were just 2% of the firm’s portfolio). After the 2020 police murder of George Floyd, McCormick penned an open letter to the firm calling for “denouncing and eradicating structural bigotry around us.”
And while McCormick had praised Trump for tapping into the disillusionment afflicting many Americans, he also said Trump “had a lot of responsibility” for the divisiveness that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. But as a candidate, McCormick bet big on Trump. On the first day of his campaign, he embraced an endorsement from Sean Parnell, the Trump-backed candidate who dropped out of the race amid accusations of domestic abuse. He flew in former Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to wow GOP activists at the state party’s convention. McCormick’s ads and speeches deride “wokeness.” He backed away from his Jan. 6 criticism and raised concerns about “irregularities” in the 2020 election. And he flew to Mar-a-Lago for an audience with the former president, while his wife, former Trump national security adviser Dina Powell McCormick, was reportedly relentless in seeking Trump’s support.
McCormick touts any connection to Trump, including his stint on a board that advised Pentagon leaders during the former president’s tenure. Unmentioned is that McCormick was later one of several members removed in what was widely seen as a purge of establishment figures. “I don’t know why they don’t just let Dave be Dave,” said one Pennsylvania Republican insider who knew McCormick’s father and supports a rival candidate. The attempts to build a Trump image around McCormick have at times left him looking like a supporting actor in his own carefully stage-managed production. His public events often hinged on bigger names campaigning with him, including former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who shares one of the same consulting firms. When the campaign went after Oz over his Turkish dual citizenship, it was Pompeo who addressed reporters, not McCormick.
And when McCormick ran a Super Bowl ad featuring the “Let’s Go Brandon!” chant that serves as Republican code for “(Expletive) Joe Biden,” it landed him a splashy Fox News headline. But McCormick himself didn’t speak or even appear in the spot. McCormick’s staff has declined to make him available for interviews with The Inquirer during the campaign, encouraging reporters to talk to friends and supporters — often aligned with Trump — who could vouch for him instead. When reporters attended three of McCormick’s campaign events last week, he was cordial, but wouldn’t answer questions for this story. McCormick is surrounded by a vast team, and at early events often showed up with more than a dozen aides in tow.
His advisers include some with ties to Cruz, others who have worked for the fiscally conservative Pennsylvania incumbent Pat Toomey (who isn’t running for reelection), longtime Pennsylvania GOP insiders and lobbyists, and Trump aides — seemingly covering every possible base with his expansive checkbook. “If anybody was within 200 miles of me, he hired them,” Trump said at a rally on Friday. Oz has faced his own authenticity questions. He has only loose ties to Pennsylvania, having lived in New Jersey for decades before deciding to run for Senate (he attended medical and business school in Philadelphia, and his wife’s family is from the suburbs). He has a long trail of breaking with conservative orthodoxy on issues like abortion and gun laws, only to take hard-right positions now.
Even as Trump rallied for Oz, some in the crowd booed the doctor. After the Trump rally, McCormick’s team launched a closing ad arguing that Trump made a mistake in his endorsement. Some Pennsylvania Republicans unaligned with any candidate say McCormick’s campaign, and the professional advice he has taken on, show a measure of intelligence and humility, by trusting professionals to make him a top contender. Yet despite spending tens of millions of dollars, McCormick is going down to the wire in a close contest. He didn’t hide from the razor-thin margins at a recent Saturday event in Delaware County.
Speaking to around 40 people at a restaurant, McCormick described his formative years growing up in Bloomsburg and in the military. He said that time “defines who I am” and taught him “those values of duty, honor, country, and the Christian values that I grew up with.” McCormick spent close to an hour talking to people one-on-one, with a joke for many and a cackling laugh for others, leaving many charmed. “You’re much more handsome in person,” one woman told him. “Where’s my wife?!” McCormick shouted, turning to look for her. “I want you to hear this!” State Rep. Craig Williams, who endorsed McCormick that day, said he immediately bonded with a fellow Desert Storm veteran.
“The first conversation was just easy,” Williams said “I felt like I found a true friend.” In a suburb where a relatively moderate brand of Republicanism still holds, McCormick supporters talked up his military and professional backgrounds. Few mentioned the pro-Trump platform McCormick has spent so much time promoting. “I just relate to Dave more than the other candidates,” said another Desert Storm veteran, Dan Van Wyk, 66. He said Trump’s endorsement didn’t weigh on his decision. But it clearly weighed on McCormick.
HARRISBURG – The Philadelphia Inquirer is reporting… Pennsylvania Republican insiders are making a last-ditch effort to rally behind a single candidate in the gubernatorial primary – and defeat the front-runner, Doug Mastriano. Republican leaders are trying to corral Mastriano’s four leading rivals to urge all but one of them to drop out – and endorse the one with the best poll numbers. One version of the proposal calls for rallying behind former U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta, who was well-liked by former President Donald Trump and polling in second place in the latest public survey. It’s a longshot ploy a week before the primary that many Republicans believe is likely to fail.
But it reflects the panic in some quarters over the likelihood Mastriano, a far-right state senator from Franklin County, will lead the GOP ticket this fall. “Everyone is coming to the realization we should have come to two months ago,” said a source close to one of the campaigns: That Mastriano would lose a general election by double digits to the State Attorney General Josh Shapiro, and there needs to be a single alternative. Hoping to head off that possibility, a number of party insiders and representatives of the campaigns chasing Mastriano met this week to discuss coalescing around just one of the alternatives for governor – Barletta, Jake Corman, Bill McSwain, or Dave White. None have been able to catch Mastriano, but organizers of the effort hope that by uniting, they might stop a candidate who has a strong floor of support, but perhaps a limited ceiling given some of his views.
Corman has not gained nearly as much traction as the others, and some insiders are reluctant to rally behind McSwain because Trump specifically urged primary voters not to back him. Trump last month called McSwain a “coward” for not prosecuting baseless claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. Yet no deal was struck, with several sources saying White, a Delaware County businessman, refused to drop out because he thinks he still has a chance to win. But two of the sources are still optimistic a deal could be reached as early as Wednesday, when the results of an independent, private poll are expected to come in. The Republican sources spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide details of private discussions.
Any agreement would face huge hurdles. The rival candidates would have to trust one another to keep their words. They’d have to agree to elevate one of them at the expense of the rest. And the campaigns would have to somehow communicate their move to voters – in less than a week, and with all of their names already printed on ballots. About 74,000 registered Republicans have already returned mail ballots to county election offices, according to the data provided by the Pennsylvania Department of State, which oversees elections. The move in the governor’s race also comes as a Mastriano ally, Kathy Barnette, is rising in the Republican Senate primary, now within striking distance of the lead in that race, according to Republicans familiar with internal polling, creating similar fears that her views might endanger a critical Senate seat.
A Fox News poll released Tuesday reflected the insiders’ dilemma, and their seemingly weakening grip on the party. Mastriano had 29% support among Republican primary voters, with Barletta, his closest competitor, at 17%. GOP insiders have long feared Mastriano could win in a fractured field, despite winning a relatively small portion of the primary vote. Barnette, meanwhile, is running roughly even with the big-spending Mehmet Oz and David McCormick in the Senate race, according to the Fox Poll and recent private surveys described to The Inquirer. Mastriano says he’s running to “restore our families, our economy, and to make us the greatest state in the nation.”
“The lockdowns assaulted our freedoms, masking our children, closing our businesses, and confining the elderly,” Mastriano says in a TV ad. “We stood together through those dark times protecting medical freedom, reopening our economy and our schools.” Meanwhile, some Republican leaders are making late endorsements in a public bid to cut off Mastriano. Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward (R., Westmoreland) threw her support behind White on Monday. “Senator Mastriano has appeal to base republicans but I fear the Democrats will destroy him with swing voters,” she wrote on Facebook. “I will be supporting whoever wins the primary for sure, but the best candidate to win the general is Dave White.”
And Barletta’s campaign said he would be joined Wednesday by former Gov. Mark Schweiker and former Lt. Gov. Jim Cawley for a “major campaign announcement.” Mastriano has held significant leads in virtually every public poll of the governor’s race, but many party insiders believe his views will be toxic in the general election and could cost the GOP the governor’s office in what is shaping up as an historically strong election environment for Republicans. Mastriano brought buses to the Jan. 6, 2021, rally that led to the Capitol attack and was a prominent figure in Trump’s effort to overturn the election. Congressional investigators have subpoenaed him in connection with the riot.
Among the GOP insiders involved in the effort to stop Mastriano are said to be Andy Reilly, the Republican national committeeman; Matt Brouillette, the head of a well-funded conservative political group; and Corman, himself a candidate for governor who almost got out of the race last month. If Mastriano and Barnette prevail, despite being vastly outspent by their rivals, it would reflect the growing populist power of GOP base voters – and the decreasing influence of traditional party leaders, who have largely backed other options. The establishment Republican worries over Mastriano in some ways mirror the fear that rippled through the party when Donald Trump won the party’s presidential nomination in 2016, over the objections of nearly all of the GOP establishment. But the party couldn’t rally around an alternative then – and Trump proved to be more successful politically than most in either party ever anticipated.
One data point that has GOP insiders worried: An Osage Research survey of 600 general election swing voters showed that while they generally preferred a Republican governor over a Democrat by 3 percentage points – 42%-39% – Shapiro led Mastriano among this cohort 49% to 41%. “This includes Mastriano losing an astounding 23% of the swing Republicans to Shapiro,” said a May 8 memo accompanying the poll, which was commissioned by a Pennsylvania GOP insider. “This is an unsustainable number for a general election nominee for a party.”
