MAGA in PA

Looks like someone is in a great position to win a Republican primary:

Surging Pennsylvania GOP Senate candidate Kathy Barnette has a history of anti-Muslim and anti-gay statements. In many tweets, Barnette also spread the false conspiracy theory that former President Barack Obama is a Muslim. In one speech uploaded to YouTube in 2015, Barnette forcefully argued it was OK to discriminate against Muslims and compared rejecting Islam to “… rejecting Hitler’s or Stalin’s worldviews.” In comments on her radio show, she said accepting homosexuality would lead to the accepting of incest and pedophilia. One post she wrote called a transgender person “deformed” and “demonic.” Barnette surged in recent polls in the upcoming Pennsylvania Republican US Senate primary, putting her in a dead heat between Donald Trump-endorsed former TV star Mehmet Oz and former hedge fund manager David McCormick. The Pennsylvania Senate seat is one of the one of the best pickup opportunities for Democrats this November, and Barnette’s sudden, rapid rise is causing worry among Trump allies.

She understands her audience!

Meanwhile, the frontrunner in the GOP gubernatorial primary thinks that democracy is the wrong way to decide elections:

Mastriano didn’t just try to help Trump overturn the election. At the time, he also essentially declared his support for the notion that the popular vote can be treated as non-binding when it comes to the certification of presidential electors.

Mastriano is now running for a position that exerts real control over the process of certifying electors. Republicans fear he could secure the nomination, because he might be a weak general-election candidate. But forecasters note that in a bad enough year, he could win.

This is deeply worrisome: It means Mastriano could soon have the power to help execute a version of the scheme he endorsed — certifying electors in direct defiance of the state’s popular-vote outcome, based on bogus claims that this outcome was compromised.

Much of the coverage of Mastriano’s surge — see here, here and here — doesn’t quite capture this underlying reality.

For much of the press, when covering the Republican War on Democracy too late isn’t quite late enough.