As he announced that he was withdrawing from the Republican gubernatorial race and backing former US envoy Lou Barletta, U.S. Senate Pro Tempore President Jake Corman called the open governor’s seat an “opportunity.”
“The only way to fail in the fall is to nominate someone who can’t win,” he said.
This comment was directed at the alleged favorite for the Republican nomination, State Senator Doug Mastriano. The clearest sign of Mastriano’s alleged dominance in the primary election came on Saturday, when he received last-minute approval from former President Donald Trump. Mastriano is one of Pennsylvania’s leading traders in Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.
“He has exposed fraud, corruption and outright theft in the 2020 presidential election and will do something about it,” Trump said in a statement Saturday, adding that Mastriano was a fighter like few others and had been right with me since beginning and now I have an obligation to be with him. “
But Corman’s remarks showed what was a concern among Republicans – that Mastriano could be too extreme to win a general election on the battlefield.
Voters in the densely populated suburbs of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh proved decisive in previous elections – a voting bloc that Senate Republican leader Kim Ward said Republicans should win – and may not be won by Mastriano.
“Senator Mastriano has an appeal to the base Republicans, but I’m afraid Democrats will destroy him with different voters,” Ward wrote in a Facebook post this week, announcing his support for former Delaware County Councilman Dan White as governor. “The goal is not to win the primary. Winning the primary and losing the general team because the candidate can’t get the votes in the middle is not a victory. We need a candidate who can win in November.”
Democrats, eager to pounce on Mastriano’s growing status in the crowded Republican field, have launched political advertising across the country in the final days of the campaign.
“This is Republican Sen. Doug Magriano,” the ad began. It explains that Mastriano wants to ban abortions and end postal voting and is a strong supporter of Trump – all the powers that Mastiano wants his base to know, but those that Democrats believe will eventually harm if he is a Republican candidate in November.
The ad was paid for by the campaign of Josh Shapiro, the attorney general, who is running without resistance for a Democratic nominee for governor.
“I think it’s pretty clear he’s going to be their candidate,” Shapiro told CNN.
This is a strategy that campaigns across the country have used before – strengthening the candidate, who the opposing side believes will be the weakest opponent in the general election.
However, in the last days before the primary election in Pennsylvania, Mastriano stood in front of supporters in Western Pennsylvania and proudly declared that he was “the most conservative candidate” fighting for the Republican gubernatorial nomination.
Mastriano’s campaign has rejected multiple requests for interviews or access to campaign events.
Mastriano, a retired U.S. Army colonel who has served in the State Senate since 2019, rose to national prominence in 2020, raising unreasonable doubts about the outcome of the Pennsylvania presidential election. Although the vote count shows that Trump lost more than 80,000 votes and there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud, Mastriano tried, but failed, to launch an Arizona-style guerrilla audit of the 2020 ballots. .
Mastriano was also photographed outside the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, the day of the uprising there. In a statement, he said he left before the rebels stormed the Capitol.
Emphasis on the right to vote and abortion
On the part of the Democrats, Shapiro managed to clear the field of any significant competition with strong party support.
Like Mastriano, the two-term Attorney General also rose to national prominence in 2020, defending the outcome of the Pennsylvania presidential election. Shapiro has faced the campaign of Trump and her allies dozens of times in court, winning almost every lawsuit filed against the state.
“The next governor here in Pennsylvania, the final swing state, the epicenter of the battle to defend our democracy, will have a lot to say about the future of democracy,” Shapiro told CNN, noting that the governor will appoint a top community election official.
In the closing remarks of his campaign, Shapiro emphasized not only the right to vote, but also the right to abortion. This is an issue that Democrats believe will lead to the very hesitant voters that Republicans are worried about if Mastriano becomes their suburban women candidate after the US Supreme Court’s expired draft opinion.
In Philadelphia earlier this month, Shapiro met with proponents of access to abortion, describing Mastriano as an “extremist.”
“I am facing a group of extremists on the other side who want to take away Pennsylvania’s fundamental freedoms, and I will oppose that,” Shapiro said in an interview with CNN.
Then he stopped at Mastriano
“I am someone who wants to protect a woman’s right to choose. He will ban abortion. I am someone who wants to expand the right to vote in Pennsylvania. He wants to limit them,” Shapiro said. “We think it’s important for the people of Pennsylvania … to know that there is a clear contrast between him and me.
This is the contrast that Mastriano proudly announced at his rally in Uniontown, Pennsylvania.
“This is someone else’s body,” Mastriano said before the crowd waved signs with his name. “And this someone, boy or girl, deserves every right to live like everyone else in this room here.”
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