It’s a crowded field — there are in excess of a dozen declared Republican candidates.

One of those candidates, Bill McSwain, was in Warren County for a campaign stop last week.

“I want to be a governor for the entire state,” McSwain told the Times Observer in a phone interview Friday morning. “Warren County is a very important part of the state. I think I can help Warren County.”

How?

Photo provided to the Times Observer One of over a dozen candidates are seeking the GOP’s nod in the governor’s race, Bill McSwain was in Warren this week for an event Thursday night at the Conewango Club.

“Principally by getting the government off of people’s backs,” he said, arguing he would bring about a “pro-energy” and “pro-business” administration that will “create the kind of business climate that is going to bring jobs…. It’s a very important part of the state.”

He met with members of the county GOP on Thursday and identified some of the issues local voters were concerned about.

“I think they all feel the government is too big, too intrusive,” he explained, saying that want to “get government sort of out of the way.”

McSwain touted his “law and order” experience as the “only candidate in the race with law enforcement experience.”

Former President Donald Trump appointed McSwain to serve as US Attorney for the Eastern DIstrict of Pennsylvania in 2018.

“The president entrusted me with that job,” he said, highlighting cracking down on rioters in 2020, stopping heroin injection sites and indicting two Pennsylvania mayors on corruption charges.

“Philadelphia has a reputation, rightly deserved, of lawlessness and I stood up (to) that,” he said. “I made a difference.”

McSwain also previously served as a U.S. Marine and said he would “bring a marine’s mentality to the race “ including “toughness” and a “mission-oriented attitude.”

“I think we need a conservative outsider,” he said. “We need a Marine to come in there and insist that our government be smaller, more limited, less intrusive.”

That’s at the heart of his plan on how to reduce taxes.

“The first thing we need to do is reduce the size of government,” he said. “That’s the core of the problem.” The current size of government places “too many economic burdens on working families.”

Families are also at the focus of a strong school choice position.

“No child should be trapped in a failing public school,” he said. “(I) want to fund the family and fund the child and not fund the system, give the family the choice about where to spend their educational dollars,” whether public schools, charter, parochial, etc. “We should not have a public school monopoly.”

McSwain is one of several GOP candidates actively courting the endorsement of Trump.

“President Trump is going to have to decide what he is going to do,” he said. “(I) have asked for his endorsement.”

He said he’s the only candidate “he’s entrusted with an important job in his administration.”

McSwain identified population loss as the greatest challenge facing Warren County.

“As people have left… population follows the job so what we need to do is bring jobs to Warren County,” he stressed. “We do that by creating a business friendly climate” and by “aggressive pro-energy policies” that will get the “economic engine roaring again.”

“Warren County deserves a governor who cares about the citizens of Warren County,” he added. “I do and I want to be that governor.

“We are just a few months away… from being able to put Pennsylvania and Warren County on the right track If we have a Republican governor with a spine, someone like me.” With a Republican General Assembly, he said “(we) can transform the state almost instantaneously.”