More Primary Examples: the PA GOP Governor’s Race
An ongoing series of observations.
To link up with several recent posts, it seems to me that the race for the GOP nomination to contest the governor’s race is yet another good example of how a relatively small number of people can shape both the direction of a party and, potentially, who sits in office.
The winner of the GOP nomination for governor is Doug Mastriano, who is aptly described by a NYT headline as follows: Doug Mastriano, a far-right 2020 election denier, is Pennsylvania Republicans’ choice for governor. Amanda Carpenter at The Bulwark is even more direct, starting her piece with the following sentence: “Doug Mastriano is an insurrectionist, period.” And the headline of her piece asks Are Republicans Now Going to Endorse Doug Mastriano?
I will note that my guess is that the answer to that question is basically “yes” (although, as always, it depends on who the Republicans are in that sentence).
Like I have recently, let me note the numbers. Mastriano is set to win a large plurality of the vote (44.3% based on 480,000ish votes as of this writing). For context, there are roughly 9.8 million voting-eligible voters in Pennsylvania.
Now, unlike what we saw in Kentucky’s Senate race, the primary outcomes are not a direct pipeline to office, as the state is competitive at the general election level. Indeed, it seems plausible to argue that Mastriano is a weak nominee and that his extremist views will be a boon to the Democrat’s nominee, Josh Shapiro.
Now, my point is not that voters are not responsible for the ballot they cast, within the primary nor in the general. Nor am I suggesting that the broader Republican Party is off the hook for candidates like this.
But, I am pointing out several key facts.
First, the PA Republican Party is directly shaped by this outcome, despite the selection being made by a plurality of a relatively small number of voters. And, significantly, that shape is deeply towards the pro-insurrection, pro-big lie, anti-democracy wing of the party (not that Mastriano’s chief opponent was great on this count). This will push other PA GOP candidates deeper in that direction, because like it or not, winning is going to trump anything else for most politicians and their supporters. Winning begets support and copy-cats.
Second, Mastriano just guaranteed himself a huge chunk of general election votes, because (as everyone is tired of me noting) most people vote based on party identification.
The general election campaign will be interesting because it seems that Shapiro will attack Mastriano over his big lie/insurrectionist stances. We can only hope that Shapiro wins big (see the last sentence of point #1), not because he is a Democrat, but because he is the only democrat who has a shot at winning the governor’s mansion in Pennsylvania.
So everyone is parsing Trump’s influence or not. Looking at just numbers, Mastriano, the Trump endorsed candidate got about 44% of the Republican votes. Oz is getting about 31%. Is this any indication of Trump support or not? Overall, the Republicans got 1.5M to vote for Governor vs. 1..2M for Democrats. But no competition for Shapiro. PA is a closed primary.
Lots of ambiguity for the pundits! They’re happy, at least.
Barletta is also a pro-Trump, anti-democracy radical. Barletta was one of the earliest Trumpers. It’s not a relatively small number of voters orienting the Republican Party towards extremism: a very large majority of Republicans support and enable Trump his bigotry, his dishonesty, and his amorality.
Plenty of Alabama Republicans chose not to not to vote for Roy Moore in 2017, handing an Alabama senate seat to Democrat Doug Jones. So Republican voters have proven they are fully capable of declining to cast general election votes for scumbags. “But the primary” and “but party identification” do not absolve those who make the different, better choice.
Note also: people who refuse to participate are also making a choice that shapes outcomes. Not voting — when so much is at stake — is an implied vote. Every eligible voter is helping to shape partisan and political outcomes, whether or not they actually cast a ballot.
Do you think the majority of PA Republicans are actually against the Big Lie narrative? I don’t. It’s like the great replacement and Tucker Carlson and talk radio and fake Evangelical Jesus-speak. This stuff is being pumped out there 24/7, and the baseline for the Republicans is that all of the propaganda makes some sort of sense. A little racism here, a little insurrection there and it will all work itself out in the end.
@Modulo Myself: This.
Which Pennsylvania Republican candidates repudiated Trump’s fascist attacks on democracy and what percentage of the vote did they get? Mastriano? No. Barletta? No. Oz, McCormick, Barnette? No. They’re all lying Trump trash.
Radical extremists don’t represent a mere plurality of Republicans anymore. Some are more in-your-face and others are more polished, but it’s now almost always same crap different toilet. The Tom Rices are few and far between, and not winning very much.
@DK: Well, all we need to know is “some Republicans are bad” and that solved the problem, right? đ
Not that many. And that really is a sui generis situation, as much as I might like it to be otherwise.
May I remind readers of the following from the OP: “Now, my point is not that voters are not responsible for the ballot they cast, within the primary nor in the general. Nor am I suggesting that the broader Republican Party is off the hook for candidates like this.”
Well, in Pennsylvania the governor seats the Secretary of State who will oversee elections and PA is a swing state, so if Mastriano wins in the general then in 2024 weâll more than likely get that constitutional crisis Dr. Taylor has surmised would be necessary to catalyze the electoral reform we need in the US.
So we have that to look forward to, amirite?
Let me try this: the main gateway for the road we are one was the primary process for nominations (Trump in 2016). This then led to copy-cats in 2018, 2020, 2022 (and likely in 2024).
While primaries do not create such candidates, they allow them to enter the political bloodstream, and the infection is then amplified by partisan ID in the population.
If we don’t understand how and why we are where we are, we will never fix it.
@Scott F.: Indeed. Sigh.
@Scott:
Tom Sullivan at Digby’s place has a post saying this is the usual, stupid horse race reporting, but focusing on the jockey, not the horse. This is by way of introduction to quoting Dan Pfeiffer at length on how Trump didn’t invent MAGA, he discovered MAGA,
As I may have said here once or twice before – It Ain’t Just Trump.
Pfeiffer uses the usual, “There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them.” He describes it as apocryphal and usually attributed to some French politician. I thought it was apocryphal and usually attributed to Gandhi.
Does it actually matter who won the GOP primary? There may be minor differences in electability and competence, but they’re basically all the same. The effect of the primary system, at least on the GOP side, is not so much to select the most extreme candidate as to drive a race to the bottom in which they all become extreme.
DK:
Karl Rove said years ago that they’re all turnout elections now. Biden won in 2020 because Trump drove D turnout more effectively than he drove R turnout. And Trump isn’t running this year. I sort of hope he does run in ’24.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Let me try this: the main gateway for the road we are one was the primary process for nominations (Trump in 2016). This then led to copy-cats in 2018, 2020, 2022 (and likely in 2024).
And that’s what people are disputing. The GOP is the main gateway, and it has been since Nixon and Wallace. Focusing on the 2016 primaries is like Whack-A-Mole.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I’ll just add that by your logic McCain and Romney should have pushed the GOP to the center on immigration and health care. And yet the opposite happened. McCain ended up picking Palin as VP and Romney ran against Romneycare.
@gVOR08:
This is the mistake that a lot of people made in 2016. Yes, it matters. There is a lot wrong with Ted Cruz, but he wouldn’t have been talking about bombing Mexico and then denying it, or thinking that China had a hurricane gun, or whatever.
And it matters if you get someone is willing to mouth the big lie v. someone who is actually willing to send an alternative slate of electors.
Cancer is bad, but I’d rather have skin cancer than pancreatic.
One more thing–there’s a genuine cluelessness amongst even moderate Republicans and conservatives. Like, they just don’t see the train coming. The writing on the wall is missed. Every cliche is just over their head. I’m just reading about this Princeton prof who is about to get fired and the impression you get from outraged is that their doing this because of wokeness. As if Princeton, which can afford one or two good lawyers, is revoking a guy’s tenure and firing him because he hurt some woke students’ feelings. No, he’s a giant red flag of absolutely bad behavior towards female students, and they’re firing him because their lawyers are saying this mofo needs to go.
But the story for these dummies will be–until the truth comes out–cancel culture strikes again. And then when the truth comes out, it will go away until it’s replaced by a similar story. More rage, then the truth. Then another story, then the rage, then the truth. It’s utterly predictable. And the people babbling about Princeton aren’t dumb voters in rural hamlets with 54 guns in a trailer. They’re suburban professionals who find their lives mirrored, somehow, in these stories.
The bottom line is that you can do what you want with people who respond in a certain way to these stories. Admit nothing, deny everything. If something to happens to you, power has been abused. If you do it, power has been exercised and everyone else is a whiner. It’s just a higher level of the Big Lie–more refined, with aspirations and memories of the old days, but just the same stuff.
@Modulo Myself:
They lost.
They did not gain the presidency.
They did not become the leader of the party.
They lost.
If Trump had lost in 2016, we would be in a different world right now as it pertains to GOP behavior.
They lost.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Pray, what problem has “the primary structure does not always lead to ideal outcomes” solved?
And, BTW, the initial response to the 2012 loss was the famous GOP “autopsy” that pointed to moderating on immigration. Even Sean Hannity was talking that way at the time.
@DK:
Not my point. I guess I better work harder on an explanation.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Really? The GOP would still be comprised of too many people who are perpetrators or enablers of white supremacy, as it has been for 50 years.
If Trump didn’t win is moot. Trump won. Because millions of voters freely chose to ignore or embrace his many disastrous traits. And now GOP behavior is catering to hate and extremism. We need to talk about and deal with that reality.
@DK: I have no trouble stating that George W. Bush was one of the worse presidents in my lifetime, if not of all American history. And yet he was clearly better than Trump, and by a wide margin.
If you can’t see the difference, then I am not sure what else there is to say.
As such, yes, it matters who is nominated and who wins.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Then perhaps a discussion of how so many people minimized, downplayed, and ignored warnings about the Republican Party’s five decade slide into bigotry and extremism — culminating in Trumpism, the orgy of irrational anti-Hillary hate, and the whitelash to Obama — warrants its own discussion.
Rather than just another throwaway disclaimer in a post about how the Pennsylvania primary structure got an extremist far-right winger nominated over a slightly less extremist far-right winger.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Did George W. Bush cut an ad endorsimg Hillary and Biden? Did George W. Bush use his platform to stick his neck out for American democracy against Trumpism and tell Republicans that voting for Trump is unacceptable?
I see the difference. I also see the similarities. Do you?
Bush and Republicans like him also see the similarities. That’s why they can’t be counted on to stick up and speak up for America against Trump’s fascism.
@gVOR08:
Because they’re catering to a group of voters who have spent half a century becoming more and more extreme. There’s a reason these people were boo-ing Trump on vaccines.
They would have booed Ted Cruz on vaccines, Bush on vaccines, Romney on vaccines. Republican voters are extreme, and they are the problem. They found their guy in Trump, and without him they would have found someone else, sooner or later.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Romney couldn’t even run on his record as governor after he won the primary. He would not have moved the party in any other direction other than the one it went. If this jamoke loses in PA, do you think the GOP is going to abandon MAGA? If Trump loses in 2024 and somehow doesn’t end up in power anyway, do you think that there’s going to a change? I don’t. You seem to think the race to the bottom is an artifact of the primary system when it’s what the GOP has been doing from Nixon to Reagan to Pat Buchanan to Trump. You’re trying to explain politics as a product of a rigid operating system. It’s like Marx, but without capitalism, the class struggle, and Hegel. It’s just pure form.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I wouldn’t be so sure history will record Trump as worse than W. Trump is a worse human being by far but he wasn’t interested in converting the world. Bush invaded Iraq on total BS. Millions displaced, hundreds of thousands dead. I is entirely fair to say that Bush destroyed that country for generations, and Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. As much as Trump disgusts there is nothing comparable to that monstrosity on his record. Yeah, it can all be chalked up to his accountant’s soul, not far-seeing statesmanship, but so what? Yeah, if somehow it had become plain to Trump that some form of military action would enhance his personal lot such would’ve happened. However, it didn’t.
A case to be filed under “Good Intentions/Paths To Hell”, I suppose.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Fine. Ted Cruz isn’t going to talk about bombing Mexico or hurricane guns, but only because he’s not a complete idiot.
I’m not as sanguine about Ted Cruz not sending an alternative slate of electors as you seem to be though. Again, because I agree he’s not a complete idiot. And I’m not sure that the “strike at the King/better not miss” rule applies here. Even if he misses, he’ll get away with it for the same reason FG is getting away with it now: no supermajority in Congress to convict him with and the strong desire among all the stakeholders to “avoid a Constitutional crisis.”
Pay no attention to what is happening behind the curtain.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: And frankly, at my age, I’m as likely to root for pancreatic cancer as skin cancer, but I can accept my mortality in ways that many others can’t. Also, I’m not a nation.
I always find it so charming, Steven L. Taylor, when you have to put this “damnit guys” reminder in after just a few posts. You may attempt to insulate your opinions as much as you want, but some people just have some ideas they need to talk about.
OK Steven, you donât like the candidate chosen. But, as per your oft expressed wishes, the voters had a whole bunch of candidates to chose from. And despite that wide selection, voila, they chose one you (and I) donât like. You seem to be implying that some kind of structural change would have a) been more fair and b) resulted in a better candidate. What is that structural change and how would it have resulted in a better nominee?
@MarkedMan: I think that Dr. Taylor has been pretty clear on BOTH what kinds of structural changes would result in better choices AND that such structural changes are not likely to occur at any foreseeable near-future time because of the inertia of the populace and the vested anti-change interests of the current elected governmental stakeholders.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: I know he has made some general recommendations in the past, but he is using this primary as an example. Essentially, he is contending that in this specific primary, which saw a significant number of candidates, a different system such as ranked choice voting would have resulted in a âbetterâcandidate and I just donât see it. All the top vote getters were trumpers to a large degree. Perhaps some systemic change could have altered which one of those it was, but there is no fair system change that would have put any non-trumper forward as the nominee.
Perhaps he is trying to argue there is a silent majority of self identified Republicans that would have overwhelmed the motivated voters who did turn out, had they all informed themselves better and turned out to vote. But thatâs not how any large organization has ever worked. The core, motivated contingent has outsized power. To change that, you would have to somehow fundamentally change human nature.
@MarkedMan:
Two things come to mind.
1. Eliminate primaries and have party elites choose nominees. They would almost certainly have chosen someone more appealing to swing voters.
2. Less radically, require a majority to vote for a candidate via a runoff (preferably instant). In this case, the outcome may well have been the same but often thatâs not the case.
You guys are talking about our governor candidate and we still may end with Dr Oz as our senate candidate. It would be downright embarrassing to have him represent our state.
Steve
@James Joyner:
I agree that eliminating primaries or going back to a weak primary system with party officials having a significant say would result in better candidates.
FWIW, I donât think the Republican Party can be reformed in that way. By the time the Republican Party embraced the primary as the sole means of selection it was already corrupted beyond redemption. I donât believe that unwinding that decision, even if it were possible, would change anything fundamental. But, of course, that is just opinion.
@MarkedMan: I realized I wasn’t clear on what I was saying above. While I agree with Steven and James that our overall system could be reformed in many ways, I think the Republican Party itself has gone down the Southern Strategy rat-hole too long and too completely to be reformed. I think system wide reforms will end up pushing the Republican Party further to irrelevancy, and give voters a wider choice of Dems to choose from. Eventually that wider choice will cause persistant factions to grow in the Dems, resulting in a splintering and creation of what is effectively a new party that will take the place of the function the Republicans served in, say, the 50’s through 70’s.
So, bottom line, I wasn’t arguing against reforms in general. I was arguing that in this specific race, none of those reforms would have made a difference. The motivated Republican voters chose from a wide selection of candidates and the top vote getters were all trumpers. That’s who the PA Republican Party is today.
I think y’all are chasing the wrong dragon here, trying to connect Trumpism to some continuity that includes Nixon, Reagan, Gingrich and the Queen of England. There is no continuity between what’s going on now and the “Southern Strategy” nor is the GOP comprised entirely of unrepentant racist monsters.
What has changed in the last twenty years is a rising politicized evangelical strain within the party. A group of people convinced that America is literally going to hell. Trump latched onto that, became it (although worth noting, he never had majority support until the end). The base of his support is religious, not political or racial. This makes it more dangerous in many ways.
The GOP used to have idea. Say what you want about the Contract with America, but it was policy-based. Say what you want about Reagan or Nixon, but they had actual policies. The GOP used to be about small government, deregulation, building alliance, opposing Communism, etc. I know; I was there. Now they have no ideas other than banning abortion. It’s a series of twitches, a group of nihilistic responses to Democratic policies. Trump doesn’t have any policies, just opposition to Democrats. DeSantis had policies at one point but his admin has descended to pure anti-Dem twitch (Punish Disney! Ban books! Ban tenure! Ban protests! Ban Twitter bans!)
There are still people within the party who have the old school conservatism — one of the reason I hope McCormick beats Oz. But the religous-right nihilistic base is the loudest and most powerful plurality within the GOP.