PA GOV 2022: Stick a fork in it

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Glad to see Sims’s delusions come to an end.

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Anyone think the Philadelphia mask mandate will affect the race?

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https://www.cityandstatepa.com/politics/2022/04/new-poll-shows-doug-mastriano-14-point-lead-pennsylvania-gop-primary-governor/366333/

Third poll in April that shows Lou Barletta in third behind Mastriano and McSwain. Barletta continues to slide, Mastriano rockets ahead and McSwain seems to be holding steady despite Trump's anti-endorsement. Does Mastriano have this race sealed up? What chance does Lou have at winning at this point? How is McSwain managing to tread water despite Trump's attacks? Curious to hear some thoughts.

On McSwain, Trump-critical or -skeptical candidates are going to have a solid floor of around 15–30%, depending on the state, and a very low ceiling. None of them can win head-to-head races, but they have a shot in pile-ups. See also Dolan in Ohio.

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McSwain literally worked for Trump lol and he claimed Bill Barr prevented him making allegations of voter fraud in 2020. I mean, yes Trump attacked him but it's not like he's a Dolan type

Anyways, I know McSwain was a US Attorney and one of his top issues is being tough on crime, I think that's very appealing in this current climate

I should cast a broader net but can't think of a proper term for a candidate who is clearly opposed by Trump, even if it's not mutual. The same effect is at play regardless. McSwain will gain from the anti-endorsement in the short term and be hamstrung by it in the long term.

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Reckon I'll be the rare Mastriano/Fetterman voter, but I'm open to persuasion on both.

This would probably be my ticket if I were in PA and McCormick holds out. I could hold my nose for Oz since his transgressions are pretty minor and seem less sincere.

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When are Atlas posters going to realize “election denialism” is a mainstream view?

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I feel like people should look into the Northampton County Executive race from last fall. Reminder that this is a critical swing county located in this very state.

Republican candidate Steve Lynch was a Stop the Steal believer who was at the rally on January 6 and wanted to send armed men to intimidate school boards. Pretty similar to Mastriano.

The incumbent Democrat, Lamont McClure, was reelected by over 12 points in the same county that Biden carried by less than 1. On the same night that Terry McAuliffe and Phil Murphy underperformed Biden's 2020 performance in their states by double digits.

I normally wouldn't read too much into something like this, but again, this is one of the swingiest counties in the exact same state.

Lynch also ran a fairly absurd campaign. Mastriano could do the same, but Democrats automatically assuming he will are wishcasting.

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Not sure I can support Mastriano given his implied criticism of McCarthy.

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I will say this, with Mastriano not polling as horribly as we thought, it is obvious this race would be likely R with any normal republican.

Shapiro is a uniquely strong candidate. He has received more votes than any other statewide candidate in PA history in any race, including POTUS.
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By this you mean he very slightly outperformed the Democratic ticket in a high-turnout race after years of population growth. He won by under 5 points (edit: as an incumbent) against a no-name. Let's not waste breath pretending he's Bob Casey Sr. or John Heinz or something.

The race will be decided by statewide partisan trends.

(edit: It's also true to note that Shapiro ran behind both Torsella and DePasquale, in terms of both margin and trend, in 2016. The Shapiro mythos has gotten ridiculous.)

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I am becoming increasingly convinced that we should implement a forum-wide ban on people not from PA commenting on PA races. It is clear that none of you have any idea what you're talking about.

The sheer ignorance of the 2020 stuff really gets me. I'm like, y'all want to say Heidelbaugh was a nobody but Stacy Garrity (who people like me even had no idea who she was) wasn't? Like come on now. Let's be real.

Yeah, I'm not sure how much better an AG candidate can do than the candidate for President in a state like PA, but it appears users wouldn't be impressed unless Shapiro ran 5-6 points ahead of Biden.

I frankly wouldn’t be impressed in any way that affected my perception of this race unless it was more like 10-15. Slight variations in a single cycle tell me nothing about another higher-profile open race four years later. Shapiro is well-liked but not Casey Sr. or Charlie Baker (both incumbents).

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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%.

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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.

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That second clip is literally Alex Jones’ argument against abortion. He calls it eugenics and invokes Sanger all the time. Doug def is/was an Infowars listener.

This has been a primary counter-argument against abortion since before Alex Jones was born. When Roe was decided, it was primarily debated as an issue of population control. Seriously, look up editorials from the 1960s and 1970s. Almost every person favoring abortion cited allegedly uncontrollable population growth.

Take that a step further and you get Ginsburg’s quote about controlling the number of “populations we don’t want too many of,” a view which has been somewhat inaccurately attributed to the late Justice herself but which definitely captured the zeitgeist of 1973.

edit: Consider some responses to Nixon's rejection ("I consider abortion an unacceptable form of population control.") of the 1969 Rockefeller Commission on Population and the American Future and its recommendations favoring abortion:

From Max Lerner: "Within the antinatalist camp itself there is a shift going on. In the old Margaret Sanger days the argument for birth control used to be that too many children... were hell for the mother and the family. True enough. But now the argument is that too many people are hell for the society, because of crowding, pollution, and the using up of resources. The arguments are linked, and the beauty of it is that you can use one or the other depending on your mood. The old emphasis was on the right not to breed unless you chose to. The new emphasis is on the duty to breed less."

A letter to the editor: "When [Nixon] says that abortion should not be used for population control he is, in a sense, telling us that we should not have population control. Ruling out abortions would rule out the hopes for a strong program of population limitation and for intelligent birth control in general."

A letter to the editor: "Mr. Nixon is willing to blow billions of dollars to make a poor undeveloped country more miserable. Can any end justify such means?... God grant that the American people have more wisdom than their President!"

A letter to the editor: "Let me try to answer [another editorialist's] concluding question as to 'how many [abortions are] enough': this question can be stated in the international language of elementary arithmetic, and a satisfactory answer is 'no more than two offspring per couple.'"

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Mastriano has just absolutely no campaign. No network in the state, no friends in the party, no donors. Potentially a worse campaign than Wagner's. If he wins, it will be a minor miracle and he'll be set up very poorly to govern in 2023.

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Probably one of his sounder moves this year.

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Entirely random but I don’t think it was brought up

Mastriano confederate flag supporting is ridiculous, but even more so that he is literally the state senator for GETTYSBURG

As someone who lives in south-central PA, I can assure you, there have always been a lot more Confederate flags around here than you would expect. More around like 2015 when the anti-Obama hate was at its most extreme, but you still see a fair number of them.

South Central PA also tended to have a lot of a Copperhead sentiment back in the Civil War and afterwards and its population was more Southern oriented.

Where such would be really depressing, would be in the Northern Part of the state.

It's like when I visit north-central Jersey and see confederate flags. 

You're in freaking Monmouth County, my dude. 

I’ve never actually seen a Confederate flag in Monmouth, but NJ was probably the most pro-Southern or pro-Copperhead region of the entire North. It didn’t even have a real Republican Party until the 1870s. The ironic part is that the most Republican sections within the state are the most likely to express Southern culture today.

But the general story there is pretty straightforward: in the 1970s, figures like Jimmy Carter, the Allman Brothers, the Dukes of Hazzard, and Lynyrd Skynyrd made culturally “Southern” symbols more broadly representative of rural whites, and they still are today.

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I think most people would be shocked how rampant academic fraud is; it only ever gets revealed when the person enters the public eye but should have far harsher consequences.