Doug Mastriano Would Probably Lose PA Gov Race Even If He Weren’t From New Jersey

Is the Pennsylvania GOP part of the #Resistance? Are they trying to lose this election? And why do they keep stealing the weirdest dudes in New Jersey?

We’ve known for months about Dr. Mehmet Oz’s New Jersey problem — by which we mean that he’s from there and not Pennsylvania. But it turns out that Doug Mastriano, the GOP’s gubernatorial candidate, also has deep roots in the Garden State, and was even registered to vote there up through 2021.

The New Jersey Globe examined the state’s voter rolls and found that Mastriano cast his ballot in New Jersey from 1982 through 2010. When his mother died last year, his sample ballot was returned to the registrar with a note saying he’d moved to Pennsylvania, after which he was finally removed from the New Jersey voter list.

Like his fellow Republican candidate Mehmet Oz, Mastriano is a veteran. Unlike Oz, though, he served in the American military, retiring from the US Army in 2017. Because he was so often overseas, he regularly cast absentee ballots. Nonetheless, Mastriano has embraced bogus theories of electoral fraud, and was called the “point person” on the ground for Donald Trump’s fake electors scheme. And in his former position as a state senator, he tried to ratfuck three of the state’s largest counties’ electoral tallies to steal the state from Joe Biden. Mastriano even attended Trump’s January 6, 2021, speech on the Ellipse, and was captured on video on the grounds of the Capitol after the barricades had been breached.

He’s also bedded down with a rogue’s gallery of white supremacists, Nazis, and QAnon weirdos. Plus there’s this Heil Hitler shit from his rally this weekend.

None of this is helping him in his race against Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a not-insane person who outran Biden statewide by three points in 2020. FiveThirtyEight has Mastriano down by more than 10 points — and that’s with a GOP-funded Trafalgar poll in there showing Shapiro up by just two percent. And maybe if Mastriano wasn’t such a wacko (or if he had a better sugar daddy) he could go to the normal Republican funders and scare up some cash for his own crap polls to make it look like he was still in the mix. But he’s not. Which is why he has less than a million dollars cash on hand, while Shapiro is sitting on $20 million.

Hence he was reduced to retweeting fake polls posted as a prank by a high school student last month, since that’s the only good news for his campaign. Well, that and Don Jr. shilling for him last week.

So, good luck, jagoff! And if the voters don’t see fit to send you and the missus to the governor’s mansion, yinz can always stop at Sheetz for a hoagie on your way back to Jersey.

OPEN THREAD.

[New Jersey Globe]

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