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Mastriano's money woes prompt his advisor to call for harassment of GOP Governor's Association [1]
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Date: 2022-09-24
As reported by William Bender and Julia Terruso, writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer (behind paywall): the article is also available here on Microsoft Start.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. And if you’re Jenna Ellis — legal adviser to Doug Mastriano, social-media maven, and election-denier extraordinaire — they include siccing your 890,000 Twitter followers on the Republican Governors Association to demand money for your candidate’s campaign.
Assuming half of Jenna Ellis’ “twitter followers” are simply Russian bots, that still meant providing almost a half million of Trump’s rabid QAnon-worshipping base with the phone number for the RGA’s general counsel, Jessica Furst Johnson.
Ellis, in a Tuesday tweet, shared a phone number and email address for the RGA and instructed her followers to “tell them DOUG FOR GOV!!” “The Republican Governors Association would rather see an insane extremist Democrat win in Pennsylvania than have a Republican they can’t control,” she tweeted, referring to Democrat Josh Shapiro. “Doug Mastriano’s race is MORE CRITICAL THAN EVER for freedom from BOTH SIDES!”
Because goading an abusive gaggle of Trump supporters to harass an organization dedicated to doling out much-coveted funding for Republican candidates nationwide seemed like the thing to do, particularly when your candidate has, as the Inquirer article points out, already expressed his disdain for the Republican establishment. This flight of inspiration on Ellis’ part lasted only for a short time, apparently, as she quickly deleted her Tweet. There’s no telling how much — or what— the poor little RGA had to tolerate, since they refused to comment for Bender and Terruso’s story.
But as Doug Ducey, the RGA’s chair and current governor of Arizona, explained last week, it’s really only about the candidate’s ability to move his numbers and thus far, that just hasn’t happened enough to justify those kinds of outlays for Mastriano.
“We’re watching Pennsylvania very closely,” Ducey said last week during a forum hosted by the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service. He added that while he sees the contest as a “pickup opportunity,” his group generally does not fund “lost causes” or “landslides.
Meanwhile, as the Inquirer article’s authors observe, Mastriano continued to bemoan his lack of financial support from “national level Republican organizations,” appearing on Steve Bannon’s war room podcast (in which he bragged again about appointing someone who could refuse to certify a Democrat in the 2024 presidential election) and posting a rather morose and depressing appeal on Facebook:
x Doug is very sad. He needs cash now.
Does he not know he can call JG Wentworth?? #PAGOV pic.twitter.com/0hxHjUE3MU — J.J. Abbott 📮 (@jjabbott) September 22, 2022
As Mastriano himself points out, there are still seven weeks for the Republican establishment to decide to spend their money on a candidate that even George Will describes as “unhinged.” And as Will himself notes, there’s no arguing with the fact that what happens here in Pennsylvania — where our democracy was born — will have huge implications for the rest of the nation. As Will states, “This fall ... the state will matter more than any other as its voters’ choice of governor will either imperil or reassure the nation that began here.”
You can donate to Josh Shapiro’s campaign here.
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