Political Malpractice in PA Governor’s Race

Courtesy: AP

“We the people are pissed off,” Pennsylvania GOP gubernatorial candidate state Sen. Doug Mastriano said at a sparsely attended Saturday rally on the state Capitol steps. The rally was similar to most of his campaign events, which relive the “darkness” of the state government’s COVID-19 policies and present the upcoming election as more of an opportunity for ideological vengeance than a chance to improve Pennsylvanians’ quality of life.

With a mere 42 days left until Election Day, Mastriano trails Democratic nominee Josh Shapiro by 6.7% in the RealClearPolitics polling average. To win, he’d have to manufacture a historic October surge that, given his campaign style, seems nearly impossible.

That’s not to say that such a late comeback is completely impossible in American politics. With 43 days left before the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election, Republican Glenn Youngkin trailed Democrat Terry McAuliffe by 5.2% in RealClearPolitics’ polling average. Youngkin would then surge in October – aided by suburban voters’ reaction to McAuliffe’s infamous education gaffe – and win in a state that President Joe Biden carried a year earlier by 10% (Biden won Pennsylvania by only 1.2%).

Axiom Strategies Founder and CEO Jeff Roe says that the 2021 Youngkin campaign, which his firm helped manage, exemplified how to win over swing, suburban voters.

“In Virginia we talked about issues that people faced every day,” he said in an interview. The campaign avoided national, anger-inducing mêlées, capitalized on both education and economic issues, and garnered the attention of ample local media along the way.

Republicans, he said, “can talk about inflation, jobs, the economy, crime, and education, and be talking to a broad swath of the electorate in a way that the Democrats simply can’t” because of their low approval ratings on those issues. “To focus on anything else is political malpractice.”

That strategy helped Youngkin both earn ample rural support and gain ground in suburban areas like Chesterfield County, where former President Donald Trump was the first Republican to lose in 72 years in 2020. Chesterfield County encompasses the suburbs southwest of Richmond. In recent years, its population increasingly consists of upper-middle class, college-educated folks who tend to vote for Democrats in major elections.

Like the Northern Virginia counties outside of Washington, D.C., that Youngkin also improved in over Trump, Chesterfield County’s population is similar to suburban counties in Pennsylvania like Bucks County, northwest of Philadelphia. In 2020, Biden ran up the score in the vote-rich Bucks County, winning it by 4.4% compared to Hillary Clinton’s 0.6% victory there in 2016.

“Trump’s loss in 2020 shows you can’t win by maxing out in the rural parts of the state and the exurbs and get crushed in the suburbs,” said Christopher Nicholas, principal of Eagle Consulting Group in Harrisburg. Nicholas also noted that the Pennsylvania GOP candidates for state auditor general and treasurer in 2020 and U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey in 2016 all ran ahead of Trump because they “did less poorly” in the suburbs while holding a similar level of the rural vote.

“As long as you’re not viewed as an extremist, then these voters will hear your argument,” Roe said.

Unfortunately for Pennsylvania Republicans, that’s exactly how Mastriano will likely be viewed.

While shunning local media in favor of outlets like Newsmax – which almost no swing voters will ever watch – Mastriano faces an endless glut of negative local news. Incidents like being shown wearing a confederate uniform in an Army War College faculty photo, and ads by Shapiro calling Mastriano “dangerous” and “too extreme” go virtually unchallenged thanks to Mastriano’s tepid fundraising. Any ideas Mastriano has about everyday issues are heard only by the crowds at his closed-off events held primarily in rural strongholds. Even then, though, his messaging is often stark, moralistic, and vague.

Meanwhile, Shapiro also appears to have astutely boxed Mastriano out of claiming the education mantle by, compared to McAuliffe, keeping teachers’ unions at arms length and endorsing school choice.

“What I admire about Shapiro is that he is running in every single county,” said Rebecca McNichol, Pennsylvania executive director of progressive candidate training firm Emerge. “That’s why he has a track record of getting more votes than any other statewide candidate when he’s on the ballot.”

Some Republican operatives and pollsters such as Trafalgar Group Senior Strategist Robert Cahaly believe that turnout of “submerged” Republicans will far exceed expectations, proving most polls wrong, and sweep in Republican candidates in November. If such a trend were to come to fruition in Pennsylvania, it would have to be of historic magnitude to overcome the political malpractice of the Mastriano campaign.