Trump-Backed Candidate For Pennsylvania Governor Held Rally With Only 60 People, Has Less Than $400K in the Bank
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Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano, reportedly spoke to a crowd on Saturday comprised of a whopping sixty people at a campaign event in the key battleground state.
New York Times reporter Reid J. Epstein followed Mastriano’s campaign around over the weekend and offered a bleak dispatch on the state of the controversial Trump-backed candidacy.
“After speaking to about 60 people on Saturday — days before, his running mate, Carrie Lewis DelRosso, had urged supporters to attend “the big rally” — Mr. Mastriano hustled to a waiting S.U.V. while avoiding questions from reporters,” wrote Epstein on Monday.
“A Pennsylvania state trooper shoved a local newspaper reporter out of the way as he tried asking Mr. Mastriano if he would accept the result of the November election,” the Times added.
Mastriano worked as a state senator to try and overturn the 2020 election results and has been a prominent supporter of former President Donald Trump’s allegations that the 2020 election was stolen.
Since becoming a candidate, Mastriano has also found himself in hot water over his ties to far-right social media platform Gab, which is a haven for white supremacy. The Republican hopeful also sparked controversy after Reuters revealed he chose to dress as a Confederate soldier in a faculty photo.
As the negative headlines have added up, Mastriano has struggled to raise his poll numbers or keep up with his Democratic opponent’s fundraising. “The most recent campaign finance reports show that Mr. Mastriano’s campaign account had just $397,319, compared with $13.5 million for Mr. Shapiro,” notes Epstein.
Josh Shapiro, who is the sitting attorney general, spent some $400,000 in ads to boost Mastriano in the GOP primary with the hope he would be the easier general election candidate to defeat.
Epstein notes that one of Mastriano’s many challenges when it comes to fundraising is the candidate’s insistence that the campaign avoid both local and national media outlets.
“Mr. Mastriano has resisted private entreaties from supporters to engage more with the news media — if only to spread his message to potential small-dollar donors,” Epstein notes, concluding:
Mr. Mastriano, who this year spent $5,000 trying to recruit supporters on the far-right social media platform Gab, never built an army of small donors of the sort that have powered anti-establishment candidates elsewhere — including Mr. Trump.
