Lake and Mastriano are the two Trumpiest gubernatorial candidates running in swing states?
But Lake is in good position while Mastriano is not, what's wrong?
Mastriano is a Kobach-ite
statist religious nationalist who is actually way outside the GOP mainstream. (Note that everyone is willing to tolerate
non-statist religious nationalists, who are basically an integral part of the coalition, but Mastriano is actually something quite different from what a typical hard-right Republican would be somewhere like rural Idaho or whatever). He won the nomination by a weird streak of luck, where there was a large number of undecideds because of the wide-open race and Trump simply endorsed the person running in first to try to notch a 'win' rather than examining what Mastriano was. Note that he was polling around 15-20% in the primary before the Trump endorsement, and note that -- perhaps counterintuitively -- this percentage is one that would be
smaller outside the Northeast.
Lake is a basically normal anti-immigration populist, down to being a celebrity (which anti-immigration populists like). Her campaign has been very clearly inspired by and modeled after Trump 2016, which was successful nationally. They're actually quite different.
(Also, a marginal effect here but still needs to be said, Hobbs has been running a very weak campaign and Shapiro a very strong one. But the important differences here are between the Republican candidates).
