Republican ‘Chaos’ in Pennsylvania Threatens to Upend the Midterms
The G.O.P. thought it had 2022 all figured out. Then along came Kathy Barnette and Doug Mastriano.To a degree surpassing any other contest in the 2022 midterms so far, Donald Trump has poured his personal prestige into Pennsylvania’s Republican Senate primary race, which is going through a final spasm of uncertainty as Kathy Barnette, an insurgent candidate with a sparse résumé, gives a last-minute scare to Trump’s pick, Dr. Mehmet Oz.The outcome of that election, as well as the G.O.P. contest for governor, is threatening to implode the state’s Republican Party — with a blast radius that might be felt in states as far away as Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina over the coming weeks and months.The turbulence also has major implications for Trump’s hold on the party, which is growing more alarmed that the former president’s involvement in primaries could scupper Republicans’ chances of reclaiming the Senate despite President Biden’s unpopularity.Trump endorsed Oz, a celebrity physician, over the advice of many Republicans inside and outside Pennsylvania. The bill is coming due, those Republicans now say.Many of Trump’s own voters have expressed skepticism of Oz, who has fended off millions of dollars in negative advertising highlighting his past Republican heterodoxies on issues as varied as abortion and gun rights. As of Monday, Oz is leading by nearly three percentage points in the RealClearPolitics average of polls in the primary, which roughly matches the Oz campaign’s latest daily tracking poll, I’m told.It’s not clear how late-deciding Republicans will ultimately vote, although a new poll by Susquehanna University found that 45 percent of respondents who had made up their minds “in the last few days” were backing Barnette.A late endorsementOn Saturday, Trump finally endorsed Doug Mastriano, a conspiracy-theory-minded retired military officer who leads polls in the governor’s race, in an apparent attempt to hedge his bets.“He’s clearly upset that it’s not going his way,” said David Urban, a political operative and early Trump backer who led the former president’s efforts to win Pennsylvania in the 2016 election.Urban is supporting Dave McCormick, a fellow West Point graduate, in the Senate race, and said he had not spoken to Trump recently about the primary.The McCormick camp is hoping the fireworks between Barnette and Oz will earn him a second look from voters, who seem to be wavering between the three leading contenders.Understand the Pennsylvania Primary ElectionThe crucial swing state will hold its primary on May 17, with key races for a U.S. Senate seat and the governorship.Hard-Liners Gain: Republican voters appear to be rallying behind far-right candidates in two pivotal races, worrying both parties about what that could mean in November.G.O.P. Senate Race: Kathy Barnette, a conservative commentator, is making a surprise late surge against big-spending rivals, Dr. Mehmet Oz and David McCormick.Democratic Senate Race: Representative Conor Lamb had all the makings of a front-runner, but John Fetterman, the state’s shorts-wearing lieutenant governor, is resonating with voters.Abortion Battleground: Pennsylvania is one of a handful of states where abortion access hangs in the balance with midterm elections this year.Electability Concerns: Starting with Pennsylvania, the coming weeks will offer a window into the mood of Democratic voters who are deeply worried about a challenging midterm campaign environment.Not everyone’s buying it.One veteran Republican operative in Pennsylvania who is not aligned with any Senate campaign likened McCormick to Hans Gruber, the villain in the movie “Die Hard,” who tries to fire upward at Bruce Willis’s character even as he is falling from the top of Nakatomi Plaza.Barnette has endorsed Mastriano and vice versa, and the two have held events together — almost as if they are running together as a kind of super-MAGA ticket. She has fended off questions about her background in recent days, including about her military service and her past Islamophobic comments.Kathy Barnette speaking at a campaign rally for Doug Mastriano, left.Michael M. Santiago/Getty ImagesOz, who if elected would become America’s first Muslim senator, called those comments “disqualifying” and “reprehensible” in an interview on Saturday with The Associated Press.In the governor’s race, Republicans aligned with the party establishment are desperate to stop Mastriano from winning the nomination, and have urged other candidates to unite around former Representative Lou Barletta, who is running for governor with the help of several former top Trump campaign aides.One of the first members of Congress to embrace Trump, former Representative Tom Marino of Pennsylvania, blasted the former president at a news conference this weekend for what he said was a lack of “loyalty” to Barletta.In a follow-up interview, Marino said he hadn’t been planning to endorse anyone in the race, but decided to back Barletta because he felt that Barletta had earned Trump’s support by risking his career to throw his lot in with Trump early in the 2016 campaign.“I did what I did because I was just so outraged” over Trump’s endorsement of Mastriano, Marino said. “Loyalty is important to me.”The wider fallout for 2022Watching the events in Pennsylvania, which included the leading candidate in the Democratic race for Senate, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, suffering a stroke on Friday, plugged-in observers in both parties used words like “gobsmacked” and “stunned.”“It’s just bang-bang crazy here,” said Christopher Nicholas, a Republican consultant based in Harrisburg.Recriminations are flying over why the Pennsylvania Republican Party failed to appreciate the rise of Barnette and Mastriano until it was too late to arrest their momentum. Ballots have already been printed, fueling despair among party insiders that the efforts to unify the party against one or both outsider candidates might ultimately prove futile.“The press paid very little attention to Barnette until the last two weeks,” said G. Terry Madonna, an expert on Pennsylvania politics who ran polling at Franklin and Marshall College for many years.National Democrats are watching the events in Pennsylvania closely, and many predicted that the results of Tuesday’s contests would affect other Republican primaries for Senate in the weeks to come.And while the public’s anger over inflation and supply-chain disruptions is weighing in the G.O.P.’s favor, Democrats hope to compete in the fall against candidates they perceive as easier to defeat, like Barnette.The greatest impact of Trump’s meddling might be felt in Arizona, where he has yet to issue an endorsement. Trump has slammed the establishment candidate, Attorney General Mark Brnovich, for failing to overturn Biden’s victory there in 2020, but has not yet chosen an alternative.David Bergstein, the communications director at the Democratic Senate campaign committee, said that Trump’s meddling in G.O.P. primaries was having an even greater effect on the Republican Party than many Democrats had anticipated. “Chaos begets chaos,” he said.What to readNicholas Confessore and Karen Yourish explain the origins of “replacement theory,” a once-fringe ideology that was espoused by the suspect in the Buffalo massacre on Saturday.Democrats are making a mockery of campaign finance laws through the use of “little red boxes,” Shane Goldmacher reports. And it’s all happening in plain sight.In North Carolina, Representative Ted Budd is proving the political potency of pairing endorsements from Donald Trump and the Club for Growth, Jazmine Ulloa and Michael Bender report.Jazmine just returned from North Carolina’s mountainous west, where she found strong opinions about Madison Cawthorn, the troubled first-term congressman facing a primary challenge. In Idaho, a feud between the state’s governor and its lieutenant governor is coloring the Republican Party as the far right seeks to take over the state. Mike Baker was there.Follow all of our live daily political coverage here.how they runFormer Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina is trailing in the polls as he seeks the Republican nomination for Senate in his state.Travis Long/The News & Observer, via Associated PressA new day for Pat McCrory When Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina signed legislation that critics called the “bathroom bill” in 2016, it set off a firestorm.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More