As Pennsylvanians prepare to vote for their next governor, it is no exaggeration to say the future of American democracy is at stake.
Doug Mastriano, a retired army colonel who has enthusiastically indulged Donald Trump’s fantasy that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, is the Republican candidate. If he wins, he plans to deregister every single one of Pennsylvania’s 8.7 million voters. In future elections, Mastriano would choose who certifies – or doesn’t – the state’s election results.
With Pennsylvania one of the few swing states in presidential elections, Mastriano could effectively have the power to decide the next president. But in a midterm election season defined by Republicans who seem to oppose democracy, there is some evidence that Mastriano, a retired army colonel, could be too fringe even for the Republican party.
Mastriano is, by most measures, an extremist.
As a state senator in Pennsylvania, he said women who violated a proposed six-week abortion ban should be charged with murder. Mastriano frequently attacks trans people, and has said gay marriage should be illegal, and that same-sex couples should not be allowed to adopt children.
At an event this summer, organized by a pair of self-described prophets, Mastriano told his supporters: “We have the power of God with us.” He added that Jesus Christ was “guiding and directing our steps”. While working at the Army War College, an academy for military members, Mastriano posed for a faculty photo wearing a Confederate uniform.
And as a key schemer in Trump’s bid to overturn the presidential election, Mastriano spent thousands of dollars chartering buses to Washington DC on January 6, where images showed him close to the violence as Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol.
None of this stopped Mastriano, who was endorsed by Trump, from winning the Republican nomination for governor in May.
He won by appealing to the kind of far-right Trump Republicans who have come to define the modern Republican party – voters who believe children are being exposed to pornography in schools, that trans people have too many rights, that being asked to wear a face mask is at odds with the US constitution, and that the election was stolen. Mastriano was also helped by Democrats, who ran ads boosting the Republican, hoping he would be easier to defeat in November.
While that remains to be seen, one thing is certain: if anyone thought Mastriano would soften his various stances once he won the nomination, they were wrong. At rallies in west Pennsylvania in mid-October, Mastriano rallied against a spurious list of things Democrats allegedly stand for, promising that under him, things would be different.
“On day one, all masking and jab for job requirements are over forever. On day one, woke is broke. It’s over,” he told a crowd of about 150 people in Butler county.
“On day one, critical race theory is banned from our schools. On day one, no more secularization of our kids and no more pronoun games in elementary education. On day one, no more graphic porn – and I’ve seen it – in our elementary schools.
“On day one, no more boys on the girls’ team.”
There was no detail on how Mastriano would tackle income inequality, or crime – something he claims has “nearly doubled” in the five and a half years Josh Shapiro, his Democratic opponent, has been Pennsylvania attorney general.
Instead, there were the soundbites, and the ones about his plan to strip trans people of their rights got the biggest cheer. LGBTQ rights, and the rights of trans people in particular, were something Mastriano would return to repeatedly.
His obsession with these identity issues, beyond their appeal to Trump Republicans, is perhaps unsurprising for a man who has embraced Christian nationalism – the idea that America was founded as, and should remain, a Christian nation.
Mastriano, whose campaign did not respond to requests for comment, has also claimed Islam is “not compatible” with the US constitution, and his faith has a lot of appeal at his rallies.
“He’s a good honest man – he’s the ideal family man,” said a woman wearing a straw hat with the name “Trump” wrapped around it. She would only give her name as Mary.
“I also admire the fact that you can see how he’s such a strong Christian man. When he speaks you can just tell he’s a good man. [Christians are] good examples for everyone. They’re leaders, they believe in what’s best for the people. They have their whole heart in everything and they get things done,” Mary said.
The Guardian pointed out that Joe Biden is a noted Christian.
“Well,” Mary said. “There’s weak Christians and strong Christians. I believe [Biden] is a weak Christian and I believe he is a perpetual liar.”
But while his religion may appeal to some, others have been turned off by Mastriano’s positions on elections and democracy which, like his stance on minority rights, are deeply problematic.
In the weeks following the November election, Mastriano used his position as a state senator to promote conspiracy theories about election fraud and introduced a bill which would have rejected certification of Pennsylvania’s vote.
Based on his own baseless claims that Democrats conspired to steal the election, Mastriano called for Kathy Boockvar, who as Pennsylvania’s secretary of state was responsible for overseeing the state’s election processes, to resign, and spent $3,000 of his campaign money to bus protesters to what became an insurrection in DC. As a result of his actions, earlier this year Mastriano was subpoenaed by the committee investigating the insurrection.
As governor, Mastriano would appoint Pennsylvania’s next secretary of state. Given his track record, that appointment would seem unlikely to be committed to protecting the vote. But election denial has plenty of appeal.
“I’m pretty sure they stole it,” Alan Book, a Mastriano supporter, told the Guardian in Butler county.
“When [Trump is] up pretty near a million votes, then at 3 or 4 in the morning, loses the advantage, I don’t believe that. When you get 100,000 votes and not one for Trump.”
Trump had been ahead in the vote in Pennsylvania before mail-in ballots were counted. A majority of mail-in ballots were in favor of Biden, who eventually carried the state by more than 80,000 votes, but numerous conspiracy theories have spread – and been debunked – relating to the count.
If Mastriano’s determination to undermine the results of both the last presidential election and any future ones is a clue to his opposition to democracy, so too is his approach to a free press.
At the Butler county event, held in a medium-sized aircraft hangar, journalists were restricted to a tiny press area, marked out by white chain fence, located on the back wall. Reporters were not allowed to approach attendees before the event, and there was no opportunity to interview Mastriano.
The next night, at a rally in Springdale, 15 miles north-east of Pittsburgh, things were even more restrictive. The Guardian was assigned a minder – a Mastriano campaign volunteer. The minder took their role very seriously, even following this journalist outside when he went to make a phone call. Inside, the Guardian was forbidden from leaving a “press area” that amounted to a collapsable table.
When Mastriano supporters lined up in front of the table, waiting to have their picture taken with the candidate, a bizarre silencing event took place where a Mastriano campaign volunteer went down the line, speaking to every individual. It is impossible to know what the volunteer was saying, but as she talked to the supporters they looked over at the Guardian, and when they filed past the press area every individual huffily refused to speak.
The hostility to the media is something Mastriano seems to have copied from Trump, and like the former president, Mastriano also has a tenuous relationship with the truth.
At both events Mastriano claimed that Shapiro had refused to debate him, which would have come as a surprise to anyone who had followed events as they actually happened: it was actually Mastriano who declined to participate in a debate hosted by the Pennsylvania Chamber of Commerce – which has hosted the debates for decades – because he was unhappy with the proposed moderators.
Mastriano also refused to participate in a “fireside chat”, arranged by the Chamber of Commerce instead of the debate. Shapiro did.
None of that mattered in Springdale, though, where Mastriano criticized Democrats for “calling us names” and appealed for civility between campaigns before describing Shapiro as a “weakling”, a “bigot”, and a “failure”.
In a theoretical debate, Mastriano said of Shapiro: “I’ll mock him. I’ll smoke him like a bad cigar.”
At his campaign events Mastriano seemed to have adopted Trump’s tactic of outright lying – he has also borrowed hyperbolic language like calling things “huge” and talking of “fantastic movements” – and frequently he seemed to be living in an alternate universe.
In Springdale, he touted good news from a Trafalgar poll that had dropped that day. The poll, Mastriano said, had him “dead heat” with Shapiro. But in reality the poll showed Shapiro winning 52.8% of the vote, with Mastriano at 43.5%.
Indeed, all recent polling has Shapiro in the lead, the Democrat seems likely to prevail on 8 November.
If that would come as a relief for Americans who believe in the value of their vote, there is a warning too.
Mastriano, extremist, conspiracy theorist, would-be thwarter of democracy, has managed to claw his way to within reach of one of the most important positions in the country. Even if he loses, his ideas will not go away.