Here’s the latest news today out of Pennsylvania:
A new TV ad from Democrat Josh Shapiro’s gubernatorial campaign labels his GOP opponent, state Sen. Doug Mastriano, as “extreme and way too risky for Pennsylvania.”
The minute-long spot from Shapiro, the state’s attorney general, highlight’s Mastriano’s far-right positions, including his support for abortion bans without exceptions; rolling back the legalization of gay marriage; his comments that climate change is “fake science;” and his assertion that, as governor, he could decertify voting machines.
The ad also highlights Mastriano’s presence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, showing footage of the attack and an image of Mastriano passing through breached barricades (Mastriano has said he left before the riot).
Here’s the current state of the race:
Democrats John Fetterman and Josh Shapiro were the top choices for U.S. Senator and governor, respectively, in a survey conducted by AARP Pennsylvania.
In a poll conducted between June 12-19, Fetterman holds a six-point advantage (50-44) over Mehmet Oz in the race to become the Keystone State’s next senator. The lieutenant governor has a narrow three-point lead (49-46) among voters 50 and older. Fetterman (+10) has a 46 percent favorable rate with 36 percent looking on him unfavorably. Oz is underwater (-33) at 30 percent favorable and 63 percent unfavorable. Democrats are +80 on the former mayor of Braddock, while Republicans are just +15 on the celebrity doctor.
Shapiro has a slim three-point edge (49-46) over Doug Mastriano in the contest to become the next governor, although that advantage is within the poll’s +/-4.4% margin of error. The race is even narrower when only looking at voters over 50 with Shapiro in front by a single point. The Pennsylvania attorney general has a +13 favorable rating, while the GOP state senator is minus-7.
Here’s another poll that shows the race tight:
In that same poll, Fetterman beat Oz by nine points but that’s also because Oz is a more high profile name people know and really don’t like. Mastriano, on the other hand, is a lesser known State Senator from a small, deep red county who has only made headlines this past year for his role in the Insurrection and trying to overturn the 2020 election. Here’s some more context:
The governor's race is much closer with Democrat Josh Shapiro with a four-point lead over Republican Doug Mastriano. That's within the margin of error, making this a jump ball between the two.
"The fact that it's a four-point lead is somewhat surprising," Ceisler said.
"The assumption was that Mastriano would be a candidate that would be an easy walk-over, and this poll is telling us that's not the case," Paleologos said.
What's giving Shapiro the lead at this point is strong support from women, who outnumber men in Pennsylvania. While Mastriano is leading among males (46% to 39%), Shapiro has a 16-point lead among women (50% to 34%).
While Mastriano's unfavorable rating is much higher than Shapiro's, he's still not very well-known to Pennsylvanians.
"Mastriano, of course, has done no media. And Mastriano hasn't even reached out to his opponents in the primary to say, 'Hey, will you endorse me?' He just marches to a different drummer," Ceisler said.
With most Republicans voting Republican and Democrats voting Democratic in both races, it could come down to the state's nearly one million independent voters.
Right now, independents back Fetterman over Oz by 20 points, 44% to 24%, while independents back Shapiro over Mastriano by just five points, 37% to 32%.
Mastriano would like to keep his profile low all the way until Election Day:
State Sen. Doug Mastriano is the first candidate for Pennsylvania governor to largely shun traditional news media, from newspapers to TV news.
The Franklin County Republican won a crowded GOP primary last month relying almost solely on social media, especially frequent video posts on Facebook Live, and appearances on selective right wing cable shows, including Fox News but also many smaller outlets appealing to the most conservative parts of the electorate.
Mastriano is facing a better known and Democratic candidate who’s been preparing for this campaign for years, state Attorney General Josh Shapiro.
By the day of the May 17 primary, Shapiro had amassed an $18 million campaign war chest that dwarfed the shoestring budget that powered Mastriano’s campaign.
But money clearly wasn’t the key to Mastriano’s victory. His leading opponents – such as former U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain, Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman and millionaire businessman Dave White – heavily outspent Mastriano. Besides Facebook and conservative TV and radio, Mastriano tirelessly traveled the state starting early last year to introduce himself to grassroots conservatives, many of whom were mobilized for the first time by Donald Trump.
“I’ve never seen a major candidate for office eschew mainstream media in lieu of social media, ever, at any level.,” said Alison Dagnes, a political science professor at Shippensburg University who studies right-wing media.
Avoiding mainstream media in the general election is a risk, she said.
“Going social means you are relying on micro targeted ads and then spread by people who think alike,” Dagnes said.
“But that doesn’t expand the reach. It only reaches the people who like you in the first place,” she added..
It may be a play by Mastriano aimed solely at turning out the same GOP base that helped Trump carry the state in 2016 and lose narrowly in 2020.
“Maybe that’s enough, it’s about turnout,” Dagnes said. Mastriano is using social media to get “his followers and like-minded Republicans to the polls.”
We saw an early sign of Mastriano avoiding the press from the primary:
For nearly two hours Saturday, members of the media were denied entry to a routine campaign event featuring the GOP front-runners for governor and U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, by a security team who wouldn’t say who had sent them.
“I know my rights,” said a man in a tricorne hat and white knee socks, when pressed for answers about why he was preventing the media from entering.
“We’re just following orders,” another security man said.
The decision to ban reporters from a joint rally for Doug Mastriano, the gubernatorial candidate, and Kathy Barnette, the Senate candidate, turned a normal campaign stop at an office-park event space into a protracted confrontation between reporters and the campaigns of two far-right candidates.
The back-and-forth was emblematic of the relationship between the GOP and mainstream media over the last decade — primarily because it was so ridiculous.
The man in the colonial outfit was enforcing the ban in a parking lot with several other men dressed in modern clothing who wouldn’t engage with reporters and who stopped the journalists from getting close to the building where Barnette, Mastriano and Donald Trump’s former legal adviser Jenna Ellis were hosting a pre-election rally. At one point, the police were called. Even guests had to prove they had pre-registered online or couldn’t enter.
Eventually, the security team produced a letter from the owner of The Fuge, “the most unique event space in Bucks County,” explaining the situation.
“This letter states that the security team for Friends of Doug Mastriano has the sole authority to accept or refuse any person entry as they fit onto the grounds of the property. The Fuge is the host venue and will not interfere with the security team in any way,” a member of the security team read aloud.
Later, The Fuge’s owner, Samuel Cravero, came out and spoke with reporters. “I rented a space to a private event, and it’s their decision not to have you in here,” he said.
Mastriano believes that his MAGA Christian Nationalist cult and social media targeting is enough for him to win the general election:
“It’s Christian nationalism, that’s what it is,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who has extensively studied the intersection of race, class and partisanship in America. “And he’s not the only one. This is a movement. Republican events are increasingly looking like church revivals. … You’re seeing large crosses showing up at Republican events now. The [separation] between evangelical Christianity, white identity and American nationalism is basically gone. They’re merging into the same thing.”
A big part of that is still about the 2020 election. Polling by the Public Religion Research Institute last fall found white evangelical Protestants are more likely than other groups to believe it was stolen. But it also surfaces in grievances about woke-ism, vaccine mandates and critical race theory, among other flashpoints.
Madrid, who was a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said, “It’s all framed in apocalyptic terms. … It’s an attack on modernity, it’s an attack on social change.” (A Shapiro adviser said that Mastriano “has so much that’s just beyond the pale,” and that the campaign plans to use his rhetoric to depict him as extreme.)
At his election night party, where a ballroom full of supporters pumped their fists and hoisted signs that read, “Walk as Free People,” Mastriano quoted from Corinthians. He declared that “God is good.”
“They like to call people who stand on the Constitution far right and extreme,” he said. “I repudiate that. That is crap.”
Repeatedly — both that night and in the days since — he has depicted Christians as persecuted by the media, invoking Pennsylvania’s founder, the religious thinker (and Quaker) William Penn, and asking his supporters to “keep us in prayer.”
“The media today, they’re OK mocking people’s sincerely held beliefs,” Mastriano said. “And I don’t stand for it. And I come against them.”
He is not coming alone. Lowman Henry, president of the Pennsylvania Leadership Council, which puts on gatherings of conservative activists (think CPAC, but for Pennsylvania) knew that Mastriano had a following that was not yet apparent elsewhere when, during a virtual conference in 2020, the camera turned to Mastriano.
“When he started speaking, the tech guy looked at me and said, ‘Look how many people are watching online,” Henry said.
There were more than 10,000 viewers, for a conference he said usually draws fewer than 1,000 people.
Repeatedly in Pennsylvania, I ran into supporters of Mastriano who said they were unaware of him until they came across him in their Facebook feeds — or at the recommendation of their more online friends or family members.
But here’s a sign that voters are paying attention more to who Mastriano really is:
Pennsylvania is at the center of the political universe this year, with open seat races for governor and U.S. Senate. So maybe it was only a matter of time until a political boycott came to the Keystone State.
Federal Donuts, the Philadelphia-based doughnut and fried chicken store, said this week that it was cutting ties with the supplier of its chicken sandwich buns, Chambersburg-based Martin’s Famous Pastry Shoppe Inc.
One of Martin’s owners has contributed more than $100,000 to Republican gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano, and Federal Donuts had faced pressure from customers and others. Federal Donuts’ new vendor is Baltimore-based Schmidt Baking Company, according to Billy Penn.
Mastriano has attracted national attention over his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Pennsylvania and his presence outside the U.S. Capitol on the day of Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Scholars say he embodies the rise of a resurgent Christian nationalist movement whose followers believe America has a divine mission.
By the way, I want to dispel this narrative about Shapiro boosting Mastriano in the primary:
As Audrey Fahlberg of The Dispatch reported last week, "Democrats are deploying similar tactics across the country and down the ballot."
"Take Pennsylvania," Fahlberg noted, "where Democratic gubernatorial candidate and state Attorney General Josh Shapiro spent $1.7 million on TV ads boosting the conservative credentials of gubernatorial candidate and state Sen. Doug Mastriano, a far-right candidate who bussed rally-goers to the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and who was subpoenaed by the House Select Committee investigating the events of that day."
"That single ad buy," according to Fahlberg, "amounted to more money than Mastriano's campaign spent during the entire primary."
SpotlightPA rightly points out that Shapiro is not to blame for his ad bashing Mastriano a week before the primary boosting his win. It was the GOP establishment’s failure to take Mastriano seriously:
Unofficial election results show Mastriano, a far-right state senator from Franklin County, with 43% of the vote as of Tuesday at 10 p.m. The Associated Press called the race with an estimated 50% of the votes counted.
In November, Mastriano will face Democrat Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s current attorney general who faced no opposition from members of his party.
Mastriano emerged from a crowded GOP field of nine candidates who have spent the past several months crisscrossing the state to rally support among party elites and the rank-and-file alike.
In the leadup to May 17, establishment Republicans attempted to stop Mastriano from winning, fearful that his rhetoric would drive away moderates in the general election. Two candidates dropped out and endorsed former U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta (R., Pa.), who often placed second in the polls. Other top contenders, such as former U.S. prosecutor Bill McSwain and Delaware County business owner Dave White, resisted calls to back down.
It was also clear since April that Mastriano was on his way to winning the nominee:
Shapiro saw Mastriano’s primary win coming because the Pennsylvania GOP underestimated him and Trump’s endorsement before the primary helped seal the deal:
During the Republican primary in Pennsylvania, Mr. Shapiro, the state’s attorney general, ran an ad that called State Senator Doug Mastriano “one of Donald Trump’s strongest supporters.” The ad went on to say that Mr. Mastriano “wants to end vote by mail. He led the fight to audit the 2020 election. If Mastriano wins, it’s a win for what Donald Trump stands for.”
Mr. Mastriano was a central figure in Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election results and, if he wins in November, he could be in a position to overturn the results of the state’s election in 2024.
On Sunday, the CNN host Dana Bash asked Mr. Shapiro if it was “irresponsible” to boost a candidate like Mr. Mastriano “because you think you can beat him.”
It was not, Mr. Shapiro said. For weeks, Mr. Mastriano led the crowded Republican field, according to public and private polling, and Mr. Shapiro, who was uncontested for the Democratic nomination, said he was eager to have voters understand the choice they would soon face.
“What we did was start the general election campaign and demonstrate the clear contrast, the stark differences between he and I,” Mr. Shapiro said.
The truth is Shapiro knows Mastriano is extremely dangerous and the electorate needs to know who he truly is while Mastriano resorts to hiding from the press and sticking with appealing to the extremist MAGA base:
In the wake of the election, Shapiro used his perch as
Pennsylvania attorney general to fight efforts in the commonwealth to overturn the election, becoming a staple on cable television and one of the national faces of the Democratic fight against election lies. And now, with Republicans making election denier state Sen.
Doug Mastriano their gubernatorial nominee, Shapiro is making what the January 6 insurrection says about the future of Pennsylvania a central tenet of his gubernatorial campaign.
At a time when some Democratic candidates across the country are turning away from focusing on Republican efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, Shapiro has done the opposite, using them as a core argument right alongside the economy, education and other political issues.
The reason is clear: His general election opponent is
Mastriano, a prolific purveyor of the baseless belief that the 2020 election was stolen from
President Donald Trump.
"When I launched my campaign for governor in October, long before we knew who I would be facing, I said that voting rights and democracy would be on the ballot here in Pennsylvania," Shapiro said in a recent interview with CNN. "It's still on the ballot. There's just such a clear contrast between me and my opponent on this issue."
He added: "I was in court defending our free and fair, safe and secure elections while he was siding with the insurrectionists at the Capitol on January 6. The issue remains the same, but the contrast couldn't be clearer."
A Mastriano aide did not respond to a request for comment.
With Democrats expecting November's elections to be difficult for the party, a range of elected officials and operatives have publicly and privately advised candidates to focus more on economic issues -- what the party is doing to combat inflation and what Congress has done to create good-paying jobs --
than last year's violent insurrection and election denial.
"Most everyday people are worried about their kids getting a good education, worried about getting paid for, making sure their roads are fixed, being able to connect to high-speed internet," North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, the chair of the Democratic Governors Association, said in December. "The political process issues, I've never been a real fan of making them a central part of messaging."
Shapiro derided Democrats who worry about this topic -- "I really don't care what the DC pundits say. They're typically wrong" -- and said candidates, like voters, can focus on more than one issue at a time.
"What I hear from people is kind of all of the above and that is, they're worried about their kids' schools, they're worried about public safety, they're worried about the economy. And I spend a great deal of time talking about that," he said. "But they also kind of instinctively understand that the foundation for the work we need to do on all of that rests with making sure we've got a free election, where when you pick candidate A or candidate B, your vote actually counts."
We cannot allow Mastriano get away with it.
Health and Democracy are on the ballot this year and we need to get ready to keep Pennsylvania Blue. Click below to donate and get involved with Fetterman, Shapiro and these Pennsylvania Democrats campaigns:
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Austin Davis
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Congress:
Summer Lee for Congress
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Matt Cartwright
Susan Wild
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Madeleine Dean
Dwight Evans
Mary Gay Scanlon