PHILADELPHIA — It is almost impossible to overstate how bad the press coverage has been for Doug Mastriano’s gubernatorial campaign. Enough to give a campaign manager nightmares straight through to the 2023 primary.
Yet, in the final countdown to Election Day, the coverage has somehow gotten … even worse.
Last Friday, former Sen. Rick Santorum, who campaigned with Mastriano in Delaware County in September, went on Rob Carson’s Newsmax Radio show to talk about Mastriano’s chances.
Fellow Republican. Conservative radio host. So far, so good.
“Let me just be honest,” Santorum started.
Uh-oh.
Santorum then proceeded to rip Mastriano for failing to raise money or reach out to new voters.
“He doesn’t do interviews with the mainstream media. … He won’t do any debates,” Santorum said. “So he’s run … what I would call sort of a covert campaign. Very few covert campaigns are successful.”
In other words: Not great, Bob.
The next day, former Rep. Ryan Costello, Republican from Chester County, told The Associated Press that “if he were running for office and were invited to a party event, ‘I would ask if Mastriano was coming and if they said ‘Yes,’ I would do something else. He’s horrible.’”
OK, so the final week of the campaign got off to a bumpy start.
Then, on Tuesday, the Daily Beast reported that Mastriano’s official campaign Facebook account is the administrator of a meme group that it described as “a fire hose of right-wing online content, sometimes hosting dozens of posts a day. Some of the most extreme content mocks trans people, fearmongers about migrants, and trafficks in antisemitic tropes.”
On Wednesday, The Washington Post chimed in with a triple-bylined story about how Mastriano appeared in a low-budget movie about the Holocaust “that some scholars now say distorts history to promote a conservative agenda.”
“It is offensive to weaponize the Holocaust for political ends, yet that is what this film does and quite proudly,” Neil Leifert, director of the Center for Holocaust and Jewish Studies at Penn State, told The Post.
Hours later, another headline from the AP: “University makes new review of Mastriano’s doctoral research.” The news organization reported that the University of New Brunswick is “investigating a fresh complaint about his work that makes multiple allegations of academic fraud in his recently public dissertation.”
Also Wednesday, WESA in Pittsburgh reported that Mastriano’s running mate, lieutenant governor candidate Carrie Lewis DelRosso, recently told supporters “don’t go down that hole” when referring to the issue of abortion.
“She said she had ‘many women calling my office screaming. They’re emotional voters.’ But, she said, “I don’t think they’re gonna vote. … They yell and scream, and they forget to go to the polls,’” WESA reported, citing a recording that was provided to the station.
Mastriano supports a no-exceptions ban on abortion and said in 2019 that women who violate an abortion ban should be charged with murder.
It is unclear what Thursday holds in store. But the day is young.
Mastriano did not respond Thursday to a request for comment from The Philadelphia Inquirer, but that is not a surprise. The AP said they’ve been trying to reach him for “almost two years.”
Instead, Mastriano’s campaign and his political allies have been pushing out increasingly bizarre content on social media this week, including debunked election conspiracies, cringe-y memes and regular reminders that Josh Shapiro, the Democratic nominee for governor, is not as tall as Mastriano.
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