PA GOV 2022: Stick a fork in it

[wbrocks67]

There is no way Shapiro will, or should, go for this (imagine the quacks that Mastriano's team will have as the "moderator") so I imagine Mastriano just won't end up debating.

(fun fact: Alex Trebek actually moderated the 2018 debate between Wolf and Wagner!)

https://twitter.com/StephenJ_Caruso/status/1559636597754183682

[wbrocks67]

....and that was quick!

https://twitter.com/TomLehmanWGAL/status/1559629400395714563

[wbrocks67]

Yikes!

https://twitter.com/PoliticsPA/status/1559666851860434945

[wbrocks67]

Yeah, Mastriano is definitely not doing debates

https://twitter.com/jjabbott/status/1560027660125880321

[wbrocks67]

I was camping up in NEPA last weekend; saw far too many Hometown Heroes banners, spent too damn much on gas myself navigating Pennsyltucky backroads, hiked too many miles from camp to a grocery store, and drew existential dread from connecting it back to the party registration trends for future closed primaries. The good news is a plurality Trump-voter electorate isn't a death knell; Fetterman and Shapiro maintain good enough relations w/their respective trade bases to feasibly run well in SWPA/NEPA. Likewise Fetterman's decent enough on student loans to where the Philly burbs' (and increasingly inner Pittsburgh metro's) evergreen, environmentally-conscious yuppies can overlook his fracking equivocations. Abortion agitates both bases, can't easily tell the ultimate benefactor.


My only fear is Mastriano put out ads hitting Shapiro for being DA while Philly's crime rate skyrockets. Shapiro can and must point to his success arresting crazy kenzo drug dealers. He also needs to rally PA's numerous AFT chapters lest Mast "changes PA into Florida". PA's flavor of municipal empowerment contains many drawbacks, however MY school district being decent remains a rare positive. Mast wants to shrink the government to the size of the bathtub and neglect all our students in the process.

It's funny you mention this because the only anti-Shapiro ad to run on TV has been the CLF ad for Mastriano and it was the anti-biden/anti-shaprio ad. But the way they represent it is so... overdramatic. "SHAPIRO WON'T PROSECUTE ANY GUN CRIMES!" ... It's the same thing as the Oz ad where he says Fetterman wants to release 1/3 of all prisoners. It's clearly designed to fear monger, but the way they present it is so ridiculous that you have to laugh because you know both those things are not true at all and have been misconstrued. Like, not even for a political hack like me, but you're average person would see it and even be like.. yeah that even sounds overdramatic to me and does not sound real.

[wbrocks67]

Meanwhile, on Mastriano's social media...

https://twitter.com/dougmastriano/status/1559478904099946499

[wbrocks67]

Mastriano wants to be Trump so badly but it comes off so flat. He has zero charisma and the audience was sporadically into what he was saying, but didn't really seem that engaged

It's also kind of laughable that he goes after Shapiro's record when objectively, Shapiro has quite a bit of solid nonpartisan achievements during his tenure as AG (especially the catholic church one)

https://twitter.com/TPostMillennial/status/1560734256032354306

https://twitter.com/TPostMillennial/status/1560733011536187393

[wbrocks67]

If Trump were still President, Shapiro would be on track to winning by a bigger margin than Wolf did in 2018.

Yep. Mastriano is an even worse candidate than Wagner, which is certainly saying something.

[wbrocks67]

If Trump were still President, Shapiro would be on track to winning by a bigger margin than Wolf did in 2018.

Indeed. Fetterman would also be on track to win by a bigger margin than Casey in 2018, and Shamaine Daniels would have a chance to be elected a congresswoman.

2020 was a poisoned chalice for the GOP. Hell, the Dems gaining a trifecta might have been the ideal outcome for them. A Trump six year itch midterm, especially if Dobbs still happened in June 2022, would make 2006 look like 1998.

Toomey would not have retired though

IIRC, he announced his retirement in October 2020.

oof

It'd honestly be intersting to see where this race would stand if Toomey stayed. Toomey was pretty good about staying on the download and coming across as relatively moderate without taking votes that piss off a significant chunk of his base. Just look at his overperformance of Clinton in many stereotypically high-education well do to suburbs around Philly. This arguably was the difference for him in 2016 as he had a pretty consistent underperformance of Trump in most rural areas (due to downballot lag, McGinty really didn't have any specific appeal).

He most recently had a -7 net approval rating.

Yeah, I'd have major doubts on Toomey's chances now. It's the same thing as with Rubio, Johnson, etc. Toomey would not have been the same candidate he was in 2016 basically pre-Trump era. Democrats who voted for him clearly soured on him and he was bogged down with negative favorables and approvals basically 2016 onwards. He's not a whackjob like Johnson, but his appeal (or fake appeal tbh) pre-2016 did not hold up after Trump got elected.

[wbrocks67]

Instructive, and not surprising. Mastriano's completely extremist abortion views are turning him off even to some voters who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020.

And as suspected, likely politically toxic in the suburbs.

https://twitter.com/jjabbott/status/1561663269009489922

[wbrocks67]

https://twitter.com/PhillyInquirer/status/1561816049393319938

[wbrocks67]

Has anyone read about]Mastriano’s  plan for education….it’s horrible and Shapiro should be hammering about it on the airwaves.  https://pennlive.com/opinion/2022/07/doug-mastriano-wants-to-cut-school-funding-by-billions-opinion.html Here’s an article, it’s an opinion piece about it being bad but lists some details.

That would be extremely effective. It worked against Tom Corbett that's for sure

Not sure this works post-COVID. The public education cat is not going back in the bag now that parents have witnessed how poor public school is. Charter schooling (effectively privatization, as the unions rightly argue) polls over 60%.

Mastriano's plan would literally cut $12B from the public school budget. It's insane.

https://patch.com/pennsylvania/harrisburg/teachers-decry-extreme-12-billion-cuts-mastriano-education-plan

[wbrocks67]

I understand what you're saying but this would only work in theory in urban areas. Rural counties don't have that many school districts, this would cripple them. Where i live our area is struggling for teachers and now you risk cutting more jobs.

I'm not making the argument that this is good policy. This is a reason that charters are less popular with whites (who skew rural, particularly in Pennsylvania), but that doesn't stop them from being very popular generally. My only point is that 2014 lines of attack will not work in 2022.

Once again, Mastriano's plan would quickly obliterate public education, and considering more PA students are in public education than private/charter schools, that's a massive line of attack against him.

[wbrocks67]

Yeah, you can definitely tell that the campaign apparatus for Mastriano is severely lacking in numerous departments. Not surprising though. Their campaign imagery also looks like something from the 90s, but that's also a very GOP thing

[wbrocks67]

https://twitter.com/HenryJGomez/status/1565097252338671616

[wbrocks67]

Wondering if Susquehanna is going to release their PA-GOV poll... they said on Monday that SEN and GOV were coming Tue/Wed, we got SEN on Tuesday, and yet Thursday, still nothing on GOV front...

[wbrocks67]

https://twitter.com/PhillyInquirer/status/1565469082119331841

[wbrocks67]

Wondering if Susquehanna is going to release their PA-GOV poll... they said on Monday that SEN and GOV were coming Tue/Wed, we got SEN on Tuesday, and yet Thursday, still nothing on GOV front...

I guess they shelved it...

[wbrocks67]

https://twitter.com/gill_mcgoldrick/status/1567143772223406083

[wbrocks67]

It's literally like a new oppo dump every week at this point...

[wbrocks67]

Of note:

"There’s a discrepancy among political operatives about exactly how close the Shapiro-Mastriano race is. An Emerson College survey in late August found Shapiro with a narrow 3-point advantage, but one Republican operative familiar with private data said he’s seen evidence of the Democrat ahead by as many as a dozen points."

https://twitter.com/davecatanese/status/1568262312305246210

[wbrocks67]

If Mastriano doesn't book air time soon, there very well could be none left for him. TV ad space is not limitless and candidates in the past all over the country have learned this the hard way.

What do you think about the point that GOP operatives have reportedly seen internals showing Shapiro up by as much as a dozen points? Is the RGA thinking of triaging it?

Republican pollsters (and public pollsters) have been very slow to implement the same adjustments that Democratic pollsters have to counter non-response bias among non-college voters (of all races) and overrepresentation of the highly engaged among both party bases. I'm not surprised to hear that Republican internals are showing massive Democratic advantages in the rust belt (where the non-response bias issue is by far the most problematic) and if they cut Mastriano off because of it, music to my ears.

I of course defer to you because you're an expert, but don't you think there is possibly just as much of an issue with pollsters likewise weighting to either or extreme? It certainly feels like on the other end of the spectrum, there are pollsters that are weighting this to a typically "red wave" year who may be missing the type of movement we've seen in all of the specials so far. Like, if you're modeling towards an R+3 environment because you think that's what it will be, versus say, a D+1 environment where it is now in the GCB.

[wbrocks67]

I just...

https://twitter.com/PoliticsPA/status/1568319716602658816

[wbrocks67]

I don't want to jinx anything, and of course just having an R next to his name is probably enough for most GOP voters, but if Shapiro does end up overperforming in November, there will be many things we can think back to to understand why very simply and easily

https://twitter.com/jjabbott/status/1568953981648490498

[wbrocks67]

I of course defer to you because you're an expert, but don't you think there is possibly just as much of an issue with pollsters likewise weighting to either or extreme? It certainly feels like on the other end of the spectrum, there are pollsters that are weighting this to a typically "red wave" year who may be missing the type of movement we've seen in all of the specials so far. Like, if you're modeling towards an R+3 environment because you think that's what it will be, versus say, a D+1 environment where it is now in the GCB.

Very good question - you have your order of operations backwards, though. Most serious pollsters weight only on variables that are independent and trackable metrics like gender, age, race, region, and vote history (sometime we weight to party registration in states that have it since that is an independent and trackable metric as well) and then let the partisan metrics fall where they may, which is why nonresponse bias is such a serious problem. The only decisive/non-marginal guesswork most pollsters (well, Democratic pollsters) do is on education since the census doesn't track that and voter file services have no way to provide it (though many have started trying to model it). Many of us have started weighting to vote recall ("who did you vote for in the 20xx election?") to correct for nonresponse bias though this requires guesswork as well, and it is always risky to rely on self-reported metrics like this since people lie, misremember, and a healthy number will refuse to answer (vote recall questions also often show a bias where people are more likely to say they voted for the winner).

This is a good writeup (my firm didn't participate, but I'm friends with a few of the people who did).

Thank you for this - I just want to make sure I add every time that I (and I'm sure a lot of other people on this forum) are very appreciative of your insights and perspectives.