Tuesday primaries show Trumpism has metastasized
What matters most about Tuesday’s Republican primaries is not the scoresheet of how well candidates endorsed by former president Donald Trump did. What counts is how far to the right the GOP’s electorate has veered. This should scare everyone who lives outside the fever swamps.
The most important and frightening outcome is the decision of Pennsylvania’s Republicans — by a big margin — to make extremist state Sen. Doug Mastriano their party’s nominee for governor.
Mastriano is the fringe of the fringe. He is an ardent 2020 election denier — “insurrectionist,” my Washington Post colleague Greg Sargent argues, is not too strong a word — who attended Trump’s rally that preceded the Jan. 6 riot, organized buses to take Pennsylvanians to it and wanted the state legislature to overturn the popular vote for electors committed to Joe Biden. He spoke at a QAnon event last month, at which conspiracy theorists presented him with a ceremonial weapon they called the “sword of David.”
Yes, democracy itself will be on the ballot this fall when Mastriano faces state Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the Democratic nominee . ...
The latest returns showed Mastriano with 44%, to 20% for former congressman Lou Barletta, his nearest rival.
In the state’s marquee contest for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination, only a tiny fraction of the vote separates the Trump pick, celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, and former hedge fund executive David McCormick.
McCormick, who served in the George W. Bush administration, tried desperately to recast himself in the Trumpian mold, but it sure looked fake. As the Wall Street Journal’s conservative columnist Gerald Baker wrote this week, “if he’s a genuine populist, I’m the patriarch of Constantinople.”
The fact the race was so close reflected the strength of rival candidate Kathy Barnette, a conservative media personality who campaigned extensively with Mastriano. Barnette, an authentic radical right voice, won a quarter of the vote, roughly seven points behind the two leaders, and likely took more votes from Oz than from McCormick.
It is delicious, by the way, that the GOP primary may be decided by those mail-in ballots that Trump so despises. “Here we go again,” Trump posted on his social media platform on Wednesday. “It is a BIG MESS.” For the GOP, it is.
Not for nothing did President Biden’s statement warmly endorsing
Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the landslide Senate Democratic primary winner, refer to the GOP contest as “a malicious, chaotic primary campaign to be the most extreme.”
“Whoever emerges” as Fetterman’s opponent, Biden added, “will be too dangerous, too craven, and too extreme to represent Pennsylvania in the United States Senate.” ...
The bottom line is that Trump was strong enough to drag the unlikely Oz candidacy close to the finish line — despite the split vote on the far right ... As important, non-Trump candidates of the McCormick stripe are forced to demean themselves by claiming to honor a man who plainly despises them and to pretend allegiance to his worldview.
And it underscores the virulence of the Trumpist contagion that a candidate such as Mastriano can win going away on the basis of a direct assault on democracy — even as a feckless GOP establishment proves itself powerless to stop a candidacy it knows is lethal. This is what voters need to ponder in November.