Republican Doug Mastriano and Democrat Josh Shapiro never had a face-to-face debate in their race for governor. But back-to-back visits in Allegheny County on Tuesday and Wednesday nights made clear the stakes in their contest, demonstrating far-reaching differences in style and political conviction.
Joined by local Democrats, Shapiro gave a focused 15-minute speech before fired-up supporters standing outside Acrisure Stadium on Tuesday evening.
Twenty-four hours later, Mastriano brought with him former presidential candidate Ben Carson for a much looser 40-minute address to an enthusiastic capacity crowd in a South Hills hotel ballroom.
Both addresses offered a vision of freedom — and of the threat their opponents pose to it.
Mastriano likened his movement to the aspirations of state founder William Penn, who he said served “several jail terms for having the wrong church affiliation, having the wrong political ideals, talking too much about Jesus. … He wanted men and women to be able to walk as free people, live the life as you see fit – not as a governor or a king or magistrates saw fit.”
Shapiro, for his part, warned that Mastriano would set himself up as the kind of intolerant ruler that William Penn would oppose.
“This guy loves to talk a good game about freedom,” Shapiro said. “Let me tell you something: It's not freedom to tell women what they're allowed to do with their bodies. That's not freedom. It's not freedom to tell our kids what books they're allowed to read. … It's not freedom to tell you [that] you can't marry the person that you love.”
Given the differences over such fundamental questions as whose liberty is at risk, it’s little surprise that the candidates’ speeches offered sharply different views of the path forward on a number of key issues.
Crime
Some of Mastriano’s sharpest criticisms of Shapiro focused on spiraling crime rates, a problem in Pennsylvania and across the country.
“He has blood on his hands,” Mastriano said. “If that was a Republican attorney general … there would be breathless reporting on how he needs to be impeached.”
Mastriano himself pledged a much more hardline response to problems such as fentanyl overdoses, with solutions that included sending Pennsylvania’s National Guard troops to the Mexican border.
“As the commander-in-chief of the Pennsylvania National Guard, if you want some help on the border there, Pennsylvania will show up,” he said.
While the attorney general is the state’s top law enforcement position, the vast majority of criminal cases are handled by district attorneys at the county level. For a time, Shapiro had the ability to prosecute gun crimes in Philadelphia, but Republicans faulted Shapiro for not pursuing such cases. That authority expired in 2021.
During his own speech, Shapiro touted his success in going after drug dealers, but he also tied those efforts into a broader struggle against opioid manufacturers whose prescription painkillers led many into addiction to begin with. He and other state attorneys general have sued those companies to help pay for addiction treatment.
“We’ve arrested 8,200 drug dealers for peddling poisons in our communities,” Shapiro said. “But … they didn’t manufacture that crisis that we see in our communities. It was those greedy executives in the pharmaceutical company boardrooms who did.”
Election laws
A key part of Shapiro’s case that Mastriano is “dangerous” lies in the fact that Mastriano has repeatedly called into question the outcome of the 2020 election, and as governor he would be a position to influence future vote counts. Shapiro noted that Mastriano was present at the Jan. 6 uprising at the Capitol building: "He was there that day to stop your vote from counting. He was there that day to deny you your voice.”
And as governor, Mastriano would decertify voting machines in heavily Democratic areas, Shapiro warned. “That's not how things work in our democracy.”
Mastriano played down his previous advocacy around 2020: “Asking questions, media, does not make you an election denier. An election happened, we had questions.”
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Mastriano has signaled that as governor, he would do more than just ask questions. Previously, he has said he would require every voter in the state to re-register, among other sweeping proposals.
During his speech Thursday, he said that while “there’s a lot of issues” with state elections, “I don’t have time to go over them” beyond mentioning a voter ID requirement.
But notably, Toni Shuppe of the group Audit the Vote, was seated in the front row of the audience while Mastriano spoke. There has been widespread speculation that Mastriano might name her as the state’s top elections official — even though her group’s work to cast doubt on the 2020 election has been called “rife with errors.”
Transgender issues
Mastriano’s repeatedly stated opposition to accommodations made for transgender children have been a frequent refrain in his speeches. And on Wednesday evening, they provided some of his speech’s biggest applause lines, as he pledged, “No more boys in the girls' [school sports] team. … No more boys in the girl's bathroom.” He also mused about whether female students would contract urinary tract infections if they avoided bathrooms throughout the school day.
Shapiro “fought hard to get boys the right to go in the girls’ bathroom,” he said.
Shapiro said little about transgender students in his own speech the night before. But he has called for anti-discrimination laws to be extended to LGBT Pennsylvanians, and he previously joined with other attorneys general in a “friend of the court” brief urging schools in Virginia to allow transgender students to use bathrooms that match their gender identity.
Mastriano and other Republicans have blamed such advocacy for a 2021 incident in that state in which a male student in a skirt assaulted a female student in a girls’ bathroom. But court testimony painted a far more complicated picture than the lurking predator in a bathroom stall that conservative attacks have often evoked. And in any case, the assault took place months before new bathroom polices were introduced.
Faith and identity
Shapiro is Jewish, but his stump speech refers only glancingly to the fact.
“I do what I do because of my faith,” he said Wednesday day — quickly adding “I’m not here to preach at you or tell you what to believe, or to believe at all.”
But he accused Mastriano of “actively recruiting white supremacists to be part of his campaign” through an affiliation with the web site Gab, a haven for antisemitic commentary frequented by the man accused in the Tree of Life synagogue shooting.
“Unless you look like him, unless you think like him, unless you pray like him, unless you marry like him, unless you vote like him, then you don't count,” Shapiro said.
Mastriano bristled at such criticism, though rather than address his previous Gab ties directly he mocked Shapiro’s courage and height — a frequent jibe.
He said he’d “like to see that gentlemen stare me in the eyes and call me an antisemite. … Be a man: Face me eyeball to eyeball. I'll give you a box so you don't have to look up to me. It's OK.”
Mastriano’s speeches are unapologetically laced with references to the Bible, Old Testament and New. Nor is he given to disclaimers that he isn’t trying to preach.
“God has risen up a new generation of leaders, of men and women,” he said. “I'm looking around the room here, and that's you.”
