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that's an interesting take, what do you base that on?
5 points is a big loss to overcome in the totally legitimate and well-run elections of Pennsylvania. Why do you think McCormick would have overcome that? Other GOP candidates who weren't run by Trump didn't.
edit: It can't be that McCormick was more moderate than Oz. It has to entirely rest on Oz being a carpetbagger. Frankly, I highly doubt an electorate who is willing to send an obviously brain damaged person who struggles to form basic sentences by 5 points would have magically swung for a neocon establishment Bushite like McCormick. Oz did very well with the demo McCormick does well with (college educated whites). Oz did poorly with the working class. Do you think McCormick appeals to the working class? The primary results do not support that.
Because of that, I think if anything McCormick would have done even worse. But to be honest, I don't think candidate quality is the reason why the GOP so underperformed historic trends in specific parts of the country with specific election laws who run elections in similar ways. From what I can tell, the difference between nat'l vote and % of representatives is the worst in a midterm very long time (I stopped looking past a few decades).
whose endorsements did better?
I think that a fantastically wealthy and out of touch Muslim carpetbagging celebrity who’s served in a foreign military and was a democrat until recently might shave five points off of what you could reasonably expect, yes, and conspiracy fest radical ideas with no plans guys like mastriano might shave even more. Yes, fetterman was brain damaged and pretty weird to begin with. But he was, without a doubt, Pennsylvanian, in a way that Oz was, very definitely, not. He was ultra-progressive in all the ways Oz did a very poor job of assuring the electorate he wasn’t, and gave every sign of probably moderating in office(does anyone expect this guy to join the squad? No. He’ll be a more Neanderthal like establishment democrat and I think everyone knew that). He wasn’t going to campaign on Christian values but he was also not a Muslim. He was weird and had never worked but he wasn’t a celebrity with a history of pushing blue tribe quackery running from his mansion in another state.
Likewise mastriano did impressively bad because he wanted to get rid of public schools with no plan to replace them. Republicans tread carefully about moving away from a public schools model and have much clearer plans for how to put a replacement in position before doing so in much redder states than Pennsylvania.
I’m not even discounting voter fraud(I think it requires more evidence in the specific case of Pennsylvania 2022 to boost it over the alternative hypothesis of ‘GOP ran terrible candidates’ because the alternative hypothesis is true. They did run terrible candidates. Youngkin, Desantis, and Abbott have specific ways they bring right wing ideas into the public consciousness to subsequently win elections and these guys didn’t do that. They were clowns), but you know, let’s try to run better candidates that can actually win elections too.
So you think McCormick would have done better with which part of the electorate? He did worse than Oz (and far behind Barnette) with the working class. He did worse than Oz with the college educated and suburb crowd. McCormick and Oz appeal to the same part of the electorate. If your claim was that Bernette would have done better, I think that has a stronger argument for many of the same reasons you've listed, but you're claiming a neocon Bushite would have done better and I'm just not seeing which demographic he was going to outperform Oz by +5 on while not losing significantly with other demographics.
Mastriano did poorly because he was locked out of corporate journalist interviews, couldn't get a debate, and was locked out of middle to large scale donors by the GOP establishment which he would need to overcome those handicaps against a candidate with a $70m warchest and had been running ads lying about his record for the better part of a year by the time the election opened up. From what I could gather Mastriano didn't want to get rid of public schools, he wanted basic a GOP 101 school choice plan which had already been passed in other states. It didn't help that of any money spent by national GOP in PA was spent against and lying about Mastriano. The national GOP fed millions to Karl Rove to attempt a "Oz good, Mastriano bad" ad buy in the week leading up to the election.
PA GOP did poorly because the PA GOP had zero groundgame and the national GOP refused to help at all beyond last minute garbage including attacking their own candidate. While PA Dems were harvesting totally real ballots from totally real eligible voters, the GOP was giving money to Karl Rove to run anti Mastriano ads. In order to think the Candidates were the main problem, you would have to believe all GOP candidates were bad because they all performed poorly. Or was it top ticket candidates were so bad it brought down the entire PA GOP? Is it that or is it that the overall strategy of PA GOP and national GOP was weighing down all boats (and pouring water against their own candidate)?
in his case, it's not about bringing right wing ideas to the public, it's about not being forced to run against the Dem candidate, the media, AND the established GOP party structure stabbing you in the back
Desantis and Abbott are the beneficiaries of hundreds of thousands of rightwing lockdown refugees fleeing to their states from states like PA. Which is why other statewide candidates did even better than both of them.
Yes, the top performing statewide candidates in Texas are open nationalists who think that Covid was fake and(if you read between the lines) non-christians shouldn't have the right to vote.
They're also downballot in races no one pays attention to and so were able to get 100% of Abbott's (entirely real and genuine)support while also getting the right wing crank vote that doesn't like Abbott very much. That's why they ran 3-5% ahead of him. The Pennsylvania GOP does not benefit from the same effect- no one doubts that Abbott and Desantis know how to grow an economy and maintain a first world society who would be open to voting for republicans in the first place. Lots of people doubt that about Mastriano and Oz, so they don't show up to vote for them and then statistically straight R for another 25 races. McCormick would probably have brought out lots of people who couldn't hold their nose and vote for Oz, and yes, I think that a hedge fund manager would do substantially better in a general among working class voters than a literal muslim blue tribe carpet bagger.
Okay, so you claimed Abbott wins because he packages rightwing ideas better and then your excuse for why multiple other candidates in the statewide elections did better was that in addition to all of Abbott's votes they got the "crank" votes too?
If that's the case, why wouldn't Abbott appeal to "the cranks" since it demonstrably would have made him perform better? You claim he packages right wing ideas better for a bigger audience, but then "the cranks" do it demonstrably better.
Given your claims about Mastriano which you didn't support and are now sliding on to making new claims about other people, I'm going to just ignore the newest claims about the "cranks" unless you support them. It looks like gish galloping sniping which you back off whenever someone confronts you about them.
The PA GOP is a disastrous joke of group which failed miserably, the way they run elections are an embarrassment, and despite this now being multiple elections with similar results of PA GOP failure, trying to blame the newest round of failure on this batch of candidates when the entire slate across the state did poorly is a bad argument. The National Party blowing more money attacking their own candidates is just a cherry on top showing the problem is far more than candidate quality.
McCormick did the worst with working class voters in the GOP primary, but he was going to motivate them in the general (and without any Trump rallies)? No he wasn't.
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McCormick would have cleaned up in the suburbs and with independents, both groups Oz somehow managed to lose against a socialist loser with heart problems. McCormick codes as a business conservative in places that used to only elect business conservatives like the Philly collar counties. He would especially have had an easy time riding to victory over the brain dead if Lou Barletta were at the top of the ticket instead of Mastriano, who acted like an anchor, dragging the entire state party down with him.
McCormick may well still end up a Pennsylvania Senator. There's a lot of interest in having him run for Bob Casey's seat, although Casey is a tougher nut to crack than Fetterman was.
What polling or primary results support these claims?
Your claim is McCormick would do better than Oz in suburbs and independents except Oz polled ahead of him with those groups and did better with one them in the GOP primary. McCormick's demo was foxnews boomers who did vote for Oz in the general. Oz got killed not because of indep or suburbs, but because no working class people showed up to vote for him. This is why I think McCormick would have done even worse.
If you're losing to someone who is obviously brain damaged, candidate quality isn't what mattered.
an anchor tied around his foot put their by the PA GOP and RNCC
if this was the first election the PA GOP underperformed, maybe this argument would be stronger, but this is now the 3rd election where the PA GOP has failed miserably, they did nothing at all to address the election process failures of 2020 (not to mention the long history of fraud in PA), and this is the result
it's convenient for the people who have been failing in PA for a while to blame the newest batch of outsiders, but it looks little more than a just-so story to avoid blame yet again
the PA GOP "get out the vote" program is nothing more than Donald Trump and without him the GOP fails miserably in the keystone state (not to mention they sit by and do nothing at all as fraud runs rampant, see The Parallel Election by Stenstrom)
1.3 million people voted in the Republican primary, 5.3 million people voted in the general. Primary results don't mean much for the general, otherwise Mastriano wouldn't have gotten blown out everywhere.
What's convenient is that, every time a horrid, worthless candidate gets pushed over the primary top by the Orangenfuhrer, their loss is always excusable by something. Even if those losses are totally discordant with how other elections in the state went, like Oz and Mastriano running hundreds of thousands of votes behind the GOP House candidates in PA, or how the AZ GOP Treasurer obliterated their Democratic opponent. There's always some excuse.
Also, Trump's 2016 'get out the vote program' in PA...received fewer votes in PA than Obama, both times.
this is only a claim there is room for something to change, not that it would change in your counterfactual
did you look at working class/urban/suburban/college educated breakdown differences between the primary and general?
it doesn't support what you're claiming
pot meet kettle
what's convenient is that every time a non-status quo dork runs for political office and wins a contested primary and is then attacked and undermined by the status quo dorks from the party they allegedly share, there is a coordinated shock campaign to push a narrative that the reason for X bad thing is this new non-status quo dork and definitely not because of systemic failure and behavior of the status quo dorks in the first place
heads I win, tails you lose; your trying to paint others as always coming up with excuses given the history of behavior and results for the PA GOP (and natl GOP) is just ridiculous
trump bad isn't an interesting discussion, so I'll just end this here
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