“Josh Shapiro, the Democratic attorney general for Pennsylvania, is projected to become governor after defeating Republican state Sen. Doug Mastriano,” Huffington Post reported on Tuesday night, November 8, 2022 (read story here).
It wasn’t close. With 93% of the votes counted, Shapiro led 55.3% to 42.9%, or 2,847,551 votes to 2,206,660 votes, a 668,891-vote difference. The remaining 7% of ballots amount to roughly 360,000 votes.
Mastriano hasn’t conceded. Instead, Huffington Post said, he plans to wait “until every vote is counted.”
You can do simple subtraction in your head, right? He can’t, because even if he wins every remaining vote, he’ll still lose. You don’t need a chalkboard, or paper and pencil, for this: 668,891 is more than 360,000.
Mastriano can’t pass a 7th-grade civics test, either; see article here. And though he has a Ph.D. in history and has written military books (see titles here), he’s not a scholar or a serious student of American history and culture. He thinks we’re exclusively a Christian country and there’s no space here for anyone else.
Huffington Post said Shapiro’s victory, which was predicted by polls, “ensures that Mastriano, an election denier, will not be in charge of a key battleground state for the 2024 presidential contest — a prospect that had raised alarm across the country.” Mastriano was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; read why else that was so alarming here.
Mastriano was 1 of 6 candidates in the GOP primary. His main opponent was a former congressman. He won Trump’s backing by endorsing the latter’s election lies, and sailed to an easy primary win (see details here). He’s one of many extremists who did well in the GOP primaries but went down to crushing defeat yesterday.
The military uses a concept called “lessons learned” (described here). The lesson GOP voters should learn from this is if they nominate unelectable candidates, they won’t be elected.
It would be nice if the GOP resumed being a normal political party, and that might be a first step in that direction; we need competition in our politics.
But given that a large number of Republican voters want Trump to run again, and believe his election lies, I’m not holding my breath.
Related story: Two years later, Mastriano blamed his election defeat on a fellow historian’s criticism of his academic work (see story here).
Photo below: Mastriano supporters prayed for divine intervention on election night, but came away disappointed (see story here)
