PA GOV 2022: Stick a fork in it

[Penn_Quaker_Girl]

Shapiro continues to out-smart the competition

https://twitter.com/JacobRubashkin/status/1522220393406373888

Are we gonna all ignore the real question here? What DOES happen to pets in a divorce?!

[Penn_Quaker_Girl]

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.

Democrats aren't capable of neutrality anymore.  

Nobody* is capable of neutrality ever, especially in today's political environment.  And I'd argue that apathy is different from neutrality. 

Even on this very thread, we have posters who claim to be in-the-middle, yet their posts still clearly lean one way.  Hell, I'm probably one of them. 

[Penn_Quaker_Girl]

I'm almost tempted to go to one of Mastriano's rallies just to see how much of a Qanon-fueled cult meeting it is.

I just don't know that I have enough of a poker face to pull off hiding my internal revulsion for the entire time I am there.

Now I just have this very funny mental image of a crowd shot where everybody is smiling except for ONE guy scowling hard with pure disgust.  

[Penn_Quaker_Girl]

With about a month to go, I haven't seen ONE single anti-Shapiro ad.  Not on TV, not on YouTube -- absolutely zero.  I can't ever recall a similar major statewide race here in that sense.  

Actually, come to think of it, I've stopped seeing pro-Shapiro ads too. 

[Penn_Quaker_Girl]

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. 

[Penn_Quaker_Girl]

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.

That is an excellent point, but it's hardly limited to rural whites. There is a putz in my town-suburban upper middle class Bergen County, mind you-who has a Confederate flag hanging from his front porch. He also has a Humvee in his driveway, so that should tell you a lot. These kinds of people exist elsewhere for whatever reason too.

I briefly (and I mean BRIEFLY) dated one, but at least he was in suburban Texas. 

[Penn_Quaker_Girl]

Oh my God.  The drought is over.  

It finally happened.  

I FINALLY saw a pro-Mastriano ad.  Granted, it was only fifteen seconds long and didn't actually feature Mastriano himself (it was just DelRosso -- our Republican Lt. Gov. candidate -- saying "Doug Mastriano will make a great governor"), but we finally have at least one pro-Mastriano ad floating out there.  

[Penn_Quaker_Girl]

Oh my God.  The drought is over.  

It finally happened.  

I FINALLY saw a pro-Mastriano ad.  Granted, it was only fifteen seconds long and didn't actually feature Mastriano himself (it was just DelRosso -- our Republican Lt. Gov. candidate -- saying "Doug Mastriano will make a great governor"), but we finally have at least one pro-Mastriano ad floating out there.  

Right, Likely R.

Yup, I'm convinced.  That fifteen seconds was absolute gold even though he wasn't in the ad and it didn't actually say what he'd do as governor.  

I'm Team Doug all the way! Let's Make Pennsylvania Great Again!

[Penn_Quaker_Girl]

OMG guys we have another pro-Mastriano ad sighting! This one was a pre-Youtube-roll ad that I saw as I was getting ready to do my module during a rare intern-from-home week. It's the second one I've seen overall and the first one that features Mastriano himself.  

It was his usual brand of "keeping girls out of the boys' bathrooms" and resisting draconian mask mandates, but a week before election day: he finally did the thing.  Only thing missing from the bingo card is an anti-Shapiro ad.  Have not seen a single one of those.  

[Penn_Quaker_Girl]

I'm also not sure about a guy who apparently runs a campaign to absolve Joe Paterno of any wrongdoing during the Penn State scandal.