One week until Primary day in PA, and the Dem nominees appear to be pretty set. Fetterman who was the Lt Governor during the 2022 election will be the Senate nominee, and Josh Shapiro who was Attorney General will be the nominee for Governor. Both were instrumental in defending election integrity and beating back the Trump claims of a "rigged election"...
The GOP is a totally different scenario with 9 candidates for the Gubernatorial nomination and 5 for the Senate seat...The front runner for Governor would appear to be the State Senator Doug Mastriano, who basically led the attempts by the GOP to overturn the 2020 election. So obviously a Shapiro/Mastriano battle for Governor is going to involve a re-litigation of the 2020 election, and that should prove interesting...
Now unlike other battleground states and races, this Governor's race is not getting a lot of outside attention. For some reason, Mastriano has sought to keep away from the press and restricted the press from covering some of his events. So when he held an event outside at a motel complex recently and banned CNN, they outfoxed him by renting a room as a guest and being able to provide coverage from that vantage point. The video is pretty interesting, depending on what side of various political divides you fall on...
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Not sure why he did not want press coverage of those proceedings... However as we look at the Senate race (which is widely believed to be a 2 man slugfest between Oz and McCormick) it turns out that Mastriano may end up having a broader influence on that race than conventional wisdom would suggest. More on that later...
First off Oz's unbelievably (and unintentionally) ridiculous latest ad...Not sure how anyone could see this as anything short of pathetic...The comments are brutal, and the video has less than 500 likes from close to 300,000 views. Imagine if you tube still had the "dislike" option...
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Then there's McCormick attacking Oz as a RINO, despite the endorsement of people like Trump, and Ted Nugent... What no Kid Rock? I've seen ads from McCormick hinting at Oz's Turkish background, trying to xenophobically paint him as an outsider, who voted in Turkish elections in 2018, but not in any US races. The reality is if OZ had voted in New Jersey in 2018 he'd have likely voted for Dem candidates- his MAGA conversion seems to have coincided with his decision to run for office. But I digress...
No doubt the "I love guns" ad is a sad attempt from Oz to counter McCormick's portraying him as an out of touch RINO who lives in New Jersey and has no relevance to PA culture. Might be even more convincing an argument for McCormick if McCormick hadn't quit his job as a hedge fund manager IN Connecticut and moved to PA to run for Senate there. Don't ever let facts spoil a narrative...So here are the two carpetbaggers having at it on stage together a couple of weeks ago...
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The interesting thing is that at that point it appeared that a heavy underdog (like Bartos) might benefit and pick up the undecided vote. But while the prediction that a back in the pack candidate might catch fire and possibly benefit from the large undecided vote was on point, the pundits missed on which underdog candidate it was likely to be. It wasn't Bartos, but rather (if polling is accurate) it is the woman in the red dress next to McCormick in the debate video that seems to be gaining steam. She is Kathy Barnette, she describes herself as "ultra-MGA" and is allied with Mastriano, and just like him all tied in on the "Big Lie". I admit I thought this was a two something race, and it still might be. But this video from (Canadian) youtuber David Doel and the politico article he summarized was pretty eye opening. And after the Derby- who knows. Right?
Private polling conducted by both Republicans and Democrats confirms Kathy Barnette's momentum in the Senate GOP primary.
www.politico.com
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