PA GOV 2022: Stick a fork in it

[Tekken_Guy]

Mastriano would be a disaster for the PA GOP. He'd lose to Shapiro badly and probably drag down the Senate nominee with him.

[Tekken_Guy]

Mastriano winning was definitely the best Shapiro could've asked for. I'm still not ready to move the race out of toss-up though. If there ends up being a couple of high quality polls that show Shapiro up 4-5 consistently, then I could justify myself moving to Lean D.

Mastriano is going to get virtually zero crossover support from Biden voters and will lose badly with establishment oriented Trump voters. He is going to be running far behind the Senate nominee for sure.

[Tekken_Guy]

This forum is really going to delude itself with this race. I will enjoy your conventional wisdom punditry getting smashed to pieces in November.

Why so? Do you think candidate candidate is totally irrelevant here and the red wave is just big enough to carry any far-right lunatic over the finishline in a state that Biden won?

PA already elected a Dem gov in D-midterm as recent as eight years ago.

I'm not saying Mastriano will win. But this idea that he's a "far-right lunatic" as you describe him is entirely subjective, and candidate quality is being decided by partisan liberals such as yourself thinking you can neutrally analyze candidates. And this is why you guys keep getting elections so wrong.

This guy is an outspoken election denialist, helped organize the January 6th protest against the counting of the electoral college, and there’s literal footage of him crossing the police barricades after they were breached by the protestors. Do you think if a Democrat wins this state in 2024, he’s going to be fine with sending Democratic electors to the convening of the electoral college? Do you think he’s not going to try to passing laws that make it harder for would-be democratic voters to vote? This guy is a real threat to the very threads that hold our democracy together.

I say that as someone who thinks that he’s favored to win this race by at least a couple of points. Yes, Democrats have used January 6 to motivate their voters and many have (wrongly) associated those who participated in the riot with the broader Republican electorate. But the republican establishment has refused to expel or at the very least condemn politicians like Mastriano, who have no hesitation to use election denialism to their political advantage. And the Republican electorate, much like the democratic one, still takes cues from their respective establishment. As a result, someone like Mastriano is now a perfectly acceptable, standard Republican candidate. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t a radical.

The Republican establishment is pretty clearly against Mastriano and were clearly trying to stop him. And all reliable sources indicate that Mastriano loses badly to Shapiro and underperform other Republicans significantly.

[Tekken_Guy]

It's too bad all state senate seats weren't up this time. I think we may have had a chance at that chamber as well?

There are like three pick-up opportunities for the Dems in 2024. There's the new Harrisburg seat which is a safe flip, and the Erie and south Allegheny seats which will be highly competitive. Meanwhile defense for Dems comes down to the east Allegheny and Reading seats.

Winning the southwest Bucks, north Montgomery, and Monroe County seats, or even the Lehigh-Bucks seat would have made lives way easier for them in 2024.