Among the unwrittten rules of politics that Republican Doug Mastriano is trying to shatter this year is that staying competitive in the dollar race is necessary to win the Pennsylvania governor’s office.
It’s not clear if it’s a question that Mastriano ever wanted to ask - his campaign has not responded to questions from PennLive about its fundraising efforts this month - but it’s one the Republican appears destined to get answered for him as his campaign fundraising continues to lag well behind Democratic nominee Josh Shapiro’s through the just-completed summer reporting period.
Shapiro has raised - and spent - way more than Mastriano.
According to the latest filings, Shapiro had raised $25.5 million coming into general election campaign, brought in another $25.4 million during the last three months alone, and has more than $10.9 million in cash on hand for the home stretch. He has already shattered former Gov. Ed Rendell’s longstanding record for funds spent on a single gubernatorial race - $40.6 million in 2002.
Mastriano, meanwhile, raised only slightly more than $700,000 through the Republican primary, and had just $397,000 on hand at the start of the summer.
Since June, Mastriano has added $3.2 million, his latest filing shows, and he has about $2.6 million on hand entering the last six weeks.
The near 40-to-1 imbalance in spending through Sept. 19, the cutoff date for the latest reporting period, is most obvious to anyone who watches television: Entering the last week of September, Mastriano’s campaign still had not aired any campaign spots on broadcast or cable channels, or booked any time going forward.
Shapiro’s campaign had already spent $18.6 million on such advertising through Sept. 24, according to media analysis group Kantar/CMAG, with $7.8 million more in ad buys reserved for the final six weeks.
Mastriano has certainly tried to raise money through the summer.
In most of his shots on national media outlets he’s closed with appeals for donations from conservatives inside and outside of Pennsylvania. He’s used appearances with big-name surrogates like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump Jr. - the former president’s son - to old pricey VIP receptions for photos ops and more intimate, private time with the headliners.
Some influential state party leaders have tried to introduce him to their donor corps.
And nearly all Republican office-holders who see themselves with viable futures in the party are publicly supporting him, be it for policy reasons or their tacit fear that a poor performance at the top of the ticket could be damaging down-ballot, where the party hopes to pick up Congressional seats and retain its state legislative majorities.
But the promised unification of the GOP after a fractious primary hasn’t shown up in Mastriano’s campaign war chest yet.
Even large national donors like the Republican Governors Association have so far refused to make big financial commitments to Mastriano. The endorsement by former President Donald J. Trump, in Mastriano’s case, garnered a joint appearance in Wilkes-Barre, but no real financial support to date. (The former president is scheduled to do a “tele-rally” with Mastriano Tuesday night.
Mastriano’s latest campaign filing shows scant direct support from political action committees in Pennsylvania or beyond, with the largest grant being a $50,000 contribution from his lieutenant governor running mate Carrie Lewis DelRosso’s “Carrie for PA” committee.
Mastriano has been heard recently complaining about this.
In one interview with a conservative outlet last week, he openly worried about being overlooked by national groups much like New Jersey Republican Jack Ciattarelli in 2021, who didn’t get a lot of outside support in his race against Democratic incumbent Phil Murphy, but only lost by a 51.2 percent to 48.0 percent margin.
“We cannot mess up like that in Pennsylvania,” Mastriano said, in what appeared to be a thinly-veiled shot at the RGA.
He went on to note that he hears from small-dollar donors across the country when he makes an appearance on a national outlet, but it so far hasn’t been matched by support from “political leaders...
“The Democrats see how important Pennsylvania is, and they’re putting their money where their mouth is. On our side here, I don’t really know what’s going on as far as these national groups. Chasing dreams (of a Republican win) in Oregon and elsewhere is nice and interesting, but Pennsylvania is the energy base for our nation,” Mastriano said.
Some in-state Republicans say that part of the problem is the candidate’s own apparent personal discomfort with raising funds.
Mastriano does make standard appeals for contributions on his media appearances, and through emails to his supporters. But, maybe because of his own battles with the political establishment, or maybe because of the clarity with which he sees his own cause, he’s been reported to be very reluctant to dial for dollars.
“People that are writing major checks want to have a personal conversation with the person they’re writing the check to,” said Charlie O’Neill, a former executive director of the Republican State Committee. “They want to understand the strategy of the campaign. They want to understand the mechanics of it.”
Scott Wagner, the Republican’s 2018 GOP nominee for governor who said he is personally focused on raising funds for U.S. Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz this year, told PennLive this summer that he spent hours each day trying to rally donors to his cause.
Mastriano? The word on the political street is, not so much.
“Everything that I’ve heard is he’s not putting that effort in, which can really be a death knell,” O’Neill said.
That is compounded by the fact that Mastriano - picking up Trump’s mantle as a disrupter- was never the preferred candidate of much of the GOP establishment, who generally aligned with former U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain, former Congressman Lou Barletta and Delaware County businessman Dave White.
In the most recent campaign filings, most of the major donors to Mastriano’s primary campaign rivals are either missing in action, or they have given a drastically lower amount to the Republican nominee.
The one exception is a combined $1 million donated by Richard and Liz Uihlein, an Illinois billionaire couple that has emerged in the Trump Era as one of the largest contributors to conservative candidates and campaigns. The Uihleins, in the words of a New York Times profile from 2018, have a passion for “firebrand, anti-establishment candidates.”
Richard Uihlein gave a reported $4.25 million to a political action committee supporting candidates who back expanded school choice in Pennsylvania in advance of this spring’s primary election. That PAC, Commonwealth Children’s Choice Fund, then in turn donated nearly $5 million to the McSwain campaign.
Another Pennsylvania political committee, the Commonwealth Leaders Fund has about $3.2 million booked in what are expected to be anti-Shapiro ads for the six weeks to come, as has been previously reported here.
But paging through the Mastriano campaign’s latest filing this morning, it was hard to find contributions from any of the other largest GOP donors from the primary cycle. That could mean many of the traditional GOP rainmakers have decided to support other Republican candidates, or they’re still weighing their options.
A handful, like Philadelphia attorney William Sasso, have openly endorsed Shapiro for governor. Shapiro’s full summer report had not been fled as of 7:30 p.m. Tuesday night.
The next-largest donors, behind the Uihleins, appeared to be Eric Kendle, the former owner of a large RV dealership in Greencastle, and William Werzyn of Mechanicsburg, the head of the West Shore Homes home makeover company. Both made contributions of $50,000 to Mastriano’s campaign committee this summer.
“He was the only politician who stood up for us when the tyranny of Wolf, Fetterman and Shapiro shut down our businesses and put our children through what they were put through,” Kendle told PennLive Tuesday. “He was the only voice who stood up for the common person.”
Mastriano has demonstrated success as raising smaller amounts from small dollar donors. And there are still six weeks for major donors to help him close the gap with the Shapiro campaign.
And this very unconventional candidate may simply be betting that, as long as he gets his base out on Election Day, all the money spent by Shapiro isn’t going to matter as much as it has in the past. If he can pull a win out of this kind of spending mismatch, it may be Mastriano’s greatest upset of them all.
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