Trust me.
Those two words represent the core of Republican Doug Mastriano’s campaign message in the governor’s race against Democrat Josh Shapiro. Running a subterranean campaign, he has ducked, dodged or simply refused to answer tough questions from the public and mainstream media.
Mastriano, 58, a state senator from Franklin County, became the Republican nominee by using Facebook Live sessions, similar to fireside chats, that framed his campaign as a righteous crusade against evil. A retired U.S. Army colonel, Mastriano projected a commanding but low-key and friendly persona during these sessions that belied his extremist views.
His campaign rhetoric paints his opponents as not just mistaken but evil. He attended the Jan. 6, 2021, “Stop the Steal” rally at the U.S. Capitol that turned into an insurrection, and advanced the lie, without any credible supporting evidence, that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election.
All politics aside, Mastriano's attempts to overturn the results of a credible democratic election would have, if successful, imperiled the nation.
Echo chamber campaign
Mastriano’s messianic campaign includes few detailed policy proposals. Voters are, presumably, supposed to trust him to fill in the blanks after the elections.
He has proposed eliminating property taxes, comparing them to “paying rent to the government for land you own.”
Eliminating property taxes, which pay for public schools, might be a good idea, but the state would have to fill a multibillion-dollar budget hole with new taxes or tough and unpopular budget cuts. When a member of the Post-Gazette Editorial Board requested an interview with Mastriano, including a question about how he would replace property tax revenues, his campaign designated the question off-limits.
What little voters know about Mastriano’s policies is even more troubling than what they don’t know. Mastriano has proposed a total, or near-total, ban on abortion, without exceptions for rape or incest. In a radio interview in 2019, he suggested any woman who violated those restrictions should be prosecuted for murder.
Even the manner in which Mastriano has conducted his campaign, an echo-chamber confined to people who look and think like him, has shown he is unfit for statewide leadership. He has associated with anti-Semites and white nationalists, such as Gab founder Andrew Torba, whom Mastriano praised and paid consulting fees.
When pressed about the matter, Mastriano said he rejected antisemitism, but he refused to denounce Torba’s antisemitic remarks. That cowardly and equivocating response suggests Mastriano is more of a politician than he pretends to be.
A record of competence
Shapiro, a boyish 49, has run a far more conventional campaign, answering questions from the media and public and rolling out numerous policy proposals. Among them: eliminating four-year degree requirements for thousands of state jobs, reducing the influence of standardized testing, putting mental health counselors in schools, appointing at least two parents to the state Board of Education, and promoting economic development by reducing taxes, streamlining the permitting process, and making robotics, biosciences and energy priorities. He has said he would sign a bill abolishing Pennsylvania’s inhumane, expensive and ineffective death-penalty law.
Shapiro, a former state representative in his second term as state attorney general, is no firebrand. He might not blow voters away with charisma. But he is competent, polished, smart and effective.
As AG, Shapiro negotiated an agreement between Highmark and UPMC that protected health care for nearly 2 million people in Western Pennsylvania. He led a bipartisan group of attorneys general to take on the pharmaceutical industry, delivering more than $1 billion to Pennsylvania to fight opioid addiction. In a landmark prevailing-wage case, he charged one of the state’s largest construction companies, Hawbaker Inc., with wage theft and returned $20 million to workers.
We respect Mastriano’s service to his country. We trust him to keep his word, pay his taxes and buckle his seat belt. But we don’t trust him to lead a state of nearly 13 million people, with all of its complexity and diversity.
Shapiro won’t revolutionize the state government or burn it to the ground. He will, however, incrementally make it work better for all people. His opponent is too dangerous and too extreme. We urge voters to make Josh Shapiro the 48th governor of Pennsylvania.
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