If you’re looking for good news this week – and who isn’t? – how about this recent headline in The New York Times:
“Mastriano’s Sputtering Campaign: No TV Ads, Tiny Crowds, Little Money”
And the subhead below that:
“As he runs for governor of Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano is being heavily outspent by his Democratic rival and trails badly in polling. National Republicans show little desire to help him.”
The Times piece tells us that no one is coming to Mastriano’s rallies, no one is giving him money and no one is giving him a snowball’s chance on a hot skillet of beating Josh Shapiro in November. Polls show Mastriano down by double digits.
Perhaps you’re thinking, what can you expect from those libs at The Times? (Mastriano won’t talk to The Times, nor to any other mainstream news organization. My dad would call this cutting off your nose to spite your face.)
So let’s see what George Will has to say about the Republican Party’s nominee for governor of Pennsylvania. Will has been a leading voice among American conservatives since the invention of the bowtie. As such, I’m no fan, despite our shared addiction to baseball.
But unlike Donald Trump and the jellyfish that cling to him, Will has actual beliefs. When he saw that Trump’s flights of nincompoopery were at odds with those beliefs, he broke ranks. (He has called Trump “a suppurating wound on American life.” Too kind.)
Noting that Mastriano counts himself among those who refuse to accept that the American people really and most sincerely booted Trump’s saggy bottom back to Mar-a-Lago in November 2020, Will wrote in his Washington Post column that Mastriano “has the scary sincerity of the unhinged whose delusions armor them against evidence.”
The Mastriano-Shapiro race is getting all this national attention because of its potential national implications. Like Trump, Mastriano thinks you win elections the same way you win at Scrabble if you’re a sorehead with a rack full of vowels: Hide some consonants up your sleeve, accuse your opponent of same, and if those gambits don’t work, “accidentally” flip the board and scatter the tiles.
If elected, Mastriano says, he’ll appoint a secretary state who he’ll give the power to “make the corrections to elections.”
So imagine this scenario. The 2024 presidential election is another barn burner. Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes, which ties it with Illinois for the fifth-most behind California, Texas, Florida and New York, are going to be the difference maker, just as they were in 2020. And Gov. Mastriano has his thumb on the scale.
Some other things one needs to know about the Republican nominee:
- Famously, he brought a busload of supporters to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 to start the steal.
- He has called global warming “fake science.”
- Though he’s against government mandating masks (“child abuse”) and vaccines (“the government’s poison”), he’s for government making pregnant women have babies and telling people whom they can and cannot marry. Note the inconsistency.
- His solution to the mass murder of children? Turn schools into forts: “I have called for a $20 million funding increase in this year’s budget that may be used for armed resource officers, metal detectors, door fortifications, emergency response training, security cameras, door-locking technology, and increasingly innovative solutions that will provide more security than taking guns away from law-abiding citizens.”
- Among people involved in his campaign are a couple of self-described prophets, one of whom says that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi drinks the blood of children. (Not true! What Madame Speaker actually did was drink Bloody Marys as a child.)
- And here he is outlining his busy, busy first day in office, should he get elected: “On day one ‘woke’ is broke. On day one critical race theory will no longer be taught in Pennsylvania schools. On day one no more boys on the girls’ team…On day one, no more boys in the girls’ bathroom…On day one — we’re blessed Pennsylvania, we’re blessed — on day one we’re gonna withdraw from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. We’re going to open up our state lands and rollback regulations, and we’re going to drill and dig like never before.”
A whopping 50 attendees heard about these plans at Mastriano’s rally at the state capitol a couple of weeks ago. That’s what you get when you counter-schedule against Penn State vs. Central Michigan. Not to mention the Irish Fall Festival on the Jersey Shore, which had to have been way more fun.
Those of you who are terrified at the thought of this guy becoming the commonwealth’s chief executive probably aren’t comforted by the poll numbers. You shouldn’t be. Trump wasn’t supposed to win in 2016 either.
As ever, it may come down to turnout. When Tom Wolf was reelected in 2018, 58 percent of eligible voters went to the polls. When Wolf defeated Tom Corbett in 2014, turnout was 43 percent.
Both numbers are pathetic. If ever there was a year when sane people needed to vote for sanity, it’s this one.
