The GOP in its wisdom has evidently decided to stop giving Pennsylvania voters competent statewide candidates to support.
Pennsylvania should be one of America’s premier swing states. Long after helping to prove my own long and dearly held thesis about the Republican Party’s most likely path to an electoral majority correct in 2016 (albeit not in the way I’d have preferred), the state has remained a reliable bellwether of the GOP’s overall chances in the post-Obama era, reacting to “normal” Republican candidates in a way that tracks Republican fortunes nationally (and particularly in the Rust Belt).
Which is why it’s a shame that the Republican Party decided somewhere along the line to stop giving Pennsylvania voters competent statewide candidates to support. The party could be forgiven for punting the 2018 governor’s race against blandly uncontroversial Democratic incumbent Tom Wolf. And the 2020 presidential race between Biden and Trump was a 1 percent squeaker, something that surprised most observers (yet that also tracked with the race’s closeness in other swing states). But the aftermath of January 6 saw Trump-backed candidates finding spectacular new ways to flame out across the nation — Michigan, New Hampshire, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin: Jesus wept — and Pennsylvania proudly led the way in 2022.
It did so in the form of a hydra-headed pairing of Trump-backed failure, two candidates running statewide courting the same pool of voters whose demeanors and politics couldn’t be more different, and who were joined at the neck solely by sharing Donald Trump’s endorsement in the primaries. Political cipher Mehmet Oz, a television doctor of no certain principle, best known for hawking miracle cures on Oprah before conveniently moving from New Jersey to Pennsylvania to run as Trump’s handpicked Senate candidate (one presumes his political analysis ran no deeper than “I’ve seen him a lot on TV, the women will like him”), eked out a win by less than 1 percent over businessman Dave McCormick in the primary. He proceeded to lose his Senate race in a Republican-leaning year to a man whose catastrophic stroke had rendered him unable to functionally speak in coherent sentences.
State senator Doug Mastriano, on the other hand, romped to victory in his primary for the open gubernatorial seat on a ticket of 100 percent pure unfiltered MAGA “stolen election” revanchism. While Oz’s campaign was merely sluggish and tone-deaf, Mastriano’s was actively toxic. An ultra-conservative in a swing state, he was most known for speaking at a QAnon-friendly “Patriot” conference and attending the January 6 protests outside the U.S. Capitol, and for then doubling down on his belief that the 2020 election was stolen and that he, as governor, would intervene in future elections to prevent that from happening.
And how did that message play out in the 2022 general election, during what by all accounts should have been a Republican wave year? It was good for a 15 percent blowout by Democrat Josh Shapiro. (The money Shapiro spent boosting Mastriano in his Republican primary was a canny investment, albeit a devastatingly cynical one.) Dr. Oz himself lost by an only comparatively less humiliating 5 percent. It was reasonable to hope that these losses would be the last we’d ever have to hear about either one of them as far as Republican statewide politics was concerned.
Oh no, not so, alas. Mastriano has decided to take another hack at it. According to the Washington Post, he is set to announce his entry into the 2024 Pennsylvania Senate race against three-term incumbent Bob Casey Jr. Casey, once a nominally “pro-life” Catholic Democrat like his well-respected father, has long since shed that inconvenient encumbrance to renomination and will have no difficulty running against Dobbs and Trump (and Mastriano, as Trump’s avatar). The calculation, perhaps, is that if Trump is as competitive statewide as he was in 2016 and 2020, then Mastriano himself will also have a puncher’s chance.
The differential between Oz’s and Mastriano’s results in 2022 should be enough to disabuse any sober person of that notion. Trump couldn’t get across the finish line in Pennsylvania in 2020; if voter reaction to Trump’s “stolen election” act and the candidates who ran on or associated themselves with it in 2022 is any indication, a 2024 campaign run with that as a central bone of contention will be a great deal less successful. But MAGA enthusiasm among the Trumpist base is apparently enough to convince Dave McCormick that it’s not worth entering another primary and once again being defeated by an opponent whose sole qualification is Trump’s capricious and often poisonous seal of approval.
One might have hoped that after the public humiliation of the 2022 elections — and the undeniable story they told about the mood of swing voters with respect to Trump and the sorts of politicians who adopted the Trump brand — people like Mastriano (or Blake Masters, or Tudor Dixon, or Don Bolduc, or . . .) would have the decency to retire from political life as Kari Lake has. (Wait.) But right now, 2024 is threatening to be little better than a wan replay of the mistakes of the 2022 cycle.