In 2022, Pennsylvania Is Bizarro Georgia

I f you’ve been following this year’s elections in Pennsylvania and Georgia, you might be feeling a bit of whiplash. Time and again, each party is making arguments in one state while being on the opposite side of similar arguments in the other state. The two have become bizarre mirror images of one another.

The most obvious similarities are between Herschel Walker, the embattled Republican Senate nominee in Georgia, and John Fetterman, the embattled Democratic Senate nominee in Pennsylvania. Each man represents a sort of celebrity hope for outreach: Republicans running a black sports hero, Democrats running a hulking, tattooed small-town mayor who dresses like he’s working-class.

Regarding both candidates, a fundamental concern has been their fitness for the office. For Walker, the issue is that he’s an athlete and businessman with no political experience, and his public appearances give little reason to think that he knows very much beyond talking points about public issues. For Fetterman, experience in politics isn’t the question; it’s his visibly halting recovery from a life-threatening stroke suffered just before the Democratic primary. In both cases, their defenders and supporters make the argument that it’s unfair to pick on their man and, privately, the calculation that nothing really matters in a senator more than his willingness to vote the right way.

Criticism of the two has focused on their hesitancy to meet their smooth-talking opponents on the debate stage — something Walker did with some success on Friday night, and which Fetterman will do on October 25. Each party, in one state, has slammed the opposing candidate’s reluctance as a sign of unfitness; in the other state, conversely, each party has downplayed the importance of debates. Everybody, switch sides!

Walker’s and Fetterman’s opponents, the Reverend Raphael Warnock and Dr. Mehmet Oz, are authority figures (a preacher and a doctor) but political amateurs. Warnock was elected to the Senate two years ago in his first campaign for office, and Oz is running his first. Warnock is the first black senator from his Deep South state; Oz would be the first Muslim elected to the Senate. Both are dogged by their own questions of character and authenticity. In Oz’s case, these questions center on his New Jersey residence, Turkish citizenship, high-class tastes, and hawking of dubious medical quackery on TV. In Warnock’s, the man of the cloth faces allegations by his ex-wife that he ran over her foot in a heated domestic dispute and is failing to pay child support in a divorce and custody dispute so messy that Warnock has convinced the judge to bar the media from covering it. Added to that are new charges that Warnock is threatening to evict low-income tenants over paltry sums of rent arrears.

Then, there’s the governor’s race. Pennsylvania Republicans are running Doug Mastriano, a state senator who has touted Donald Trump’s stolen-election lies and conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election. Georgia Democrats are running Stacey Abrams, a former state-house-minority leader who has spent years trumpeting her own stolen-election lies and conspiracy theories about the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election. Mastriano has been roasted by the same media that turned Abrams into a secular saint for the same sort of thing, but in the end both of them carry that baggage in an election where voters would rather hear about the present and the future.

There is, however, one aspect of these races where the mirror image breaks down: when the comparison is attempted between Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and Pennsylvania’s Democrat attorney general and gubernatorial candidate, Josh Shapiro. Kemp has proven himself a genuine hero of election integrity: He not only stood up to Abrams’s election lies when it was in his political interests to do so, he also stood strong against Trump’s lies when it threatened to cost him his career.

Shapiro is another story. He and his allies poured $840,000 into the Republican primary to help Mastriano win the nomination, more than twice what Mastriano spent on his own ads. That sent an unambiguous signal: If Shapiro genuinely believed that Mastriano is a threat to democracy, he would not have helped him get one step closer to the governorship just to improve Shapiro’s own odds of winning a two-way race he isn’t guaranteed to win. (Just ask Fetterman about how fate can intervene before Election Day.) Shapiro treated Mastriano’s approach to elections as just how the partisan game is played — suggesting that Shapiro might see no problem with doing the same thing if their places were reversed.

In fact, Shapiro played his own role in the corrosion of the integrity of the 2020 election. During the August 2020 high tide of Democratic conspiracy theories about Trump’s supposedly using the U.S. Postal Service to steal the election, Pennsylvania Democrats were front and center, and Shapiro used his platform as attorney general to stoke fears that Trump was “trying to undermine the vote for some” citizens through the postal service. He even filed a lawsuit claiming that the postal service was plotting to “undermine the States’ residents’ confidence in the reliability and security of voting by mail,” and accused the postmaster general of lying to the public. Shapiro also supported the Pennsylvania Democratic Party lawsuit in which a partisan Democratic majority on the Pennsylvania supreme court voted to throw out the mail-in-ballot deadline enacted by the legislature, flouting the legislature’s constitutional authority to make the rules for presidential and congressional elections. Shapiro submitted a filing in the U.S. Supreme Court to convince it that it was too late for the Court to fix the problem before the election.

In the funhouse of the Georgia and Pennsylvania elections, the only candidate whose voters can look themselves in the mirror with confidence is Brian Kemp.