‘Be Careful What You Wish For’: The Election Conspiracy Theorist Freaking Out Both the Left and the Right

2 years ago

MERCERSBURG, Pa. — On Memorial Day morning, Doug Mastriano, the retired Army colonel, election conspiracy pusher and, now, Pennsylvania’s Republican nominee for governor, put on his dress military uniform, with his white gloves, saber and golden spurs, and fell in behind the color guard for a small parade here.

Winding through town from an elementary school to a cemetery, he was followed by a black Ram pickup, whose driver aired Christian pop rock through an open window before the marching band picked up. A man along the parade route said to him, “Good luck!” And though Mastriano said at the cemetery it was a day for “no politics,” not long after, when he called into the Wendy Bell Radio program, it plainly was, and had been all along — the uniform, the church, the “days of turmoil and uncertainty” that he’d referenced at the cemetery.

The Democratic Party, Mastriano told the conservative talker, had become “so far left, so radical.” America was “going through dark times.” The Democratic “party machine” and the mainstream media was against him.

What Mastriano had was a “movement.”

His hope, he said, is that “it’s going to be such a great blessing to all people.”

A state senator little known until recently outside of his conservative, south-central Pennsylvania district (he was the fourth-place finisher in a 2018 House primary), Mastriano’s victory in the Republican primary for governor last month disgusted Democrats and panicked establishment-minded Republicans. To them, he represented a structural threat to democracy, objectionable primarily for promoting Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was rigged.

Many of Mastriano’s supporters admire him for that same reason. They too, remain devoted to Trump’s election falsehoods, and they cheered Mastriano’s protests of Covid restrictions in the state.

But Mastriano’s appeal is not strictly — or even principally — secular. When he announced his candidacy, at an hourslong event in January, a man introduced as “Pastor Don” blew a shofar and said “the presence of God is thick in this place.” Mastriano’s wife, Rebecca, read from a psalm. Mastriano told his supporters they were part of a new generation of leaders “raised up” by God. And when people at the patriotic, flag-dotted events he participated in on Memorial Day weekend stopped to talk about him, they fell into religious language quickly, too: “I’m a Christian, and I think we need more of that,” one of them told me. “He represents the restoration of religious liberty,” another said. “Prayer,” a third person said, “can help him win.”

Mastriano represents a growing style of politics we don’t have a common name for yet: Journalists in Pennsylvania and elsewhere have called it “Christian nationalism,” a worldview shaped by the fusion of Christian messaging and American identity, though Mastriano himself has dismissed that label. He considers himself, instead, a torchbearer of “restoring your freedom.”

But talk to his supporters and listen to him speak, and it’s clear that at the heart of his campaign is a style of political evangelicalism now very comfortable to much of the Republican electorate. Like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, the evangelical convert who sees Trump’s ascendancy as closely entwined with his own conversion story, or like Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin, who said “God calls us to pick up the sword and fight, and Christ will reign in the state of Idaho” (and who lost her gubernatorial primary on the same night Mastriano won his), those voters’ beliefs about God and America found an expression in a strictly secular idea: That Trump was unfairly denied the White House, and must be returned. Now, it’s the broader underpinnings of those beliefs that Mastriano and those like him are reinforcing on the right.

At an event at a church in Lewisburg two days before the parade, Stan Hudson, a conservative retiree who introduced Mastriano to a hall full of supporters, told me, “We believe the Constitution, through our founding fathers, had a Judeo-Christian value system, and that’s what made our country great.”

Like most conservatives, Hudson is not blind to the political reality of Pennsylvania, where Democrats still outnumber Republicans by about 550,000 voters, and where there are enough traditionalist Republicans that Mastriano didn’t crack 50 percent of the primary vote. But even if Mastriano falls short in November, his easy defeat of much better-funded candidates — and the angst he is causing his own party as he eyes the governor’s mansion — suggests that the Trump-era religious groundswell on the right may be closer to its beginning than its end.

In Lewisburg, Hudson said, “The people on our side, conservatives and the Christian community, they’re looking for a fighter, someone who will carry the banner of Judeo-Christian values.”

Mastriano, he said, “does that.”

It may be a quixotic undertaking. Mastriano’s political profile is so far right that once more traditionalist Republicans realized they had to take him seriously in the gubernatorial campaign, they scrambled unsuccessfully to consolidate the primary field around anyone else, convinced that Mastriano would doom the party’s prospects of winning in November. Democrats, too, pegged Mastriano as a weak general election contender — so much that Josh Shapiro, the Democratic nominee, aired an ad in the primary designed to elevate Mastriano in the hopes that that Mastriano would be his opponent in the fall.

“He’s a nut bag,” said Neil Oxman, a veteran Democratic ad maker based in Pennsylvania.

Melissa Hart, a former congresswoman from Pennsylvania who dropped out of the state’s Republican gubernatorial primary days before the election, said Mastriano “comes across as a cult guy.”

“He has some rhetoric where you expect people to start holding hands and running towards the cliff,” said Daniel Fee, a longtime Democratic strategist in the state. “I think he will disqualify himself.”

For most Democrats — and some establishment Republicans — he already has. A chief proponent of Trump’s election conspiracy theories, Mastriano made a name for himself organizing the infamous post-election hearing in Gettysburg that Rudy Giuliani attended — and that Trump, who endorsed Mastriano — called in for. He was in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, the day of the riot at the Capitol, visited Arizona to observe its farcical ballot review and pressed for a review of ballots in Pennsylvania, including in rural Fulton County, which Trump won easily. (Aside from saying he would not talk about politics on Memorial Day, Mastriano and his campaign did not respond to requests for comment on that or other days.)

It’s not as though Mastriano has tempered his politics in the year-plus since. During the primary, he developed a following by railing against Covid mask and vaccine mandates. He said his opposition to abortion rights includes no exceptions for rape, incest or the life of the mother. He wants to require voters to reregister. And as he begins his general election campaign — a turn in the race where most candidates in a swing state would begin courting moderate, suburban voters — Mastriano is instead generating headlines like these: “Doug Mastriano doubles down on comparing U.S. gun control to Nazi Germany” and “Doug Mastriano shared an image claiming Roe v. Wade is ‘so much’ worse than the Holocaust.”

Last week, Mastriano shared materials with the Jan. 6 select committee investigating Trump’s effort to overturn the result of the 2020 election, including documents regarding his work to arrange buses carrying pro-Trump protesters to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021.

One prominent Republican in Pennsylvania described post-primary conversations among donors who fear Mastriano may collapse so quickly in the general election that Democrats will be able to redirect money from the governor’s race to down-ballot contests, lifting otherwise vulnerable Democrats in state legislative races.

“No one wanted him,” the Republican, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said.

Yet in the Republican primary, a startling number of Republican voters did. For months, Republicans had been reviewing internal polling that suggested Mastriano was on track to win 20 percent of the vote or less. He ended up with nearly 44 percent, doubling up on his closest competitor, former Rep. Lou Barletta, while carrying even more moderate Philadelphia and two of its collar counties, Bucks and Montgomery.

“It just broke his way,” said Joshua Novotney, a Republican lobbyist and former adviser to Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. There was the initial 20 percent or so, Novotney said — “folks that wanted to re-hash 2020 … that was his core.” And then there was the rest. “The extra 20 or 23 percent that he gained later on, I think these are people that are fed up and didn’t want to hear the kind of mainstream song and dance. They don’t like what’s going on.”

When I asked Novotney if Mastriano could expand his support from 44 percent of a primary electorate to a majority of the vote in a general election, he paused. In a normal year, maybe not. But many experienced Republican and Democratic strategists assumed in early 2016 that Trump was not electable, either. He carried Pennsylvania, that year. And between inflation and President Joe Biden’s dismal public approval ratings, a measure closely tied to a party’s performance in the midterms, the electoral climate for Democrats is even worse this year than it was then.

“I’d say he’s not running against Josh Shapiro,” Novotney said. “He’s running against Joe Biden, and anything’s possible.”

Charlie Gerow, a Republican strategist who ran for governor and finished far back in the field, said Mastriano’s appeal “is pretty clear. It’s the people that are really angry with what’s going on in our country, our state, our society, our neighborhoods,” he said. “They’re pissed off they have to pay five bucks a gallon for gas, that if they can find the groceries they want, they have to pay through the nose for them, and they don’t like what’s going on in our schools, and they want change.”

Now that they have Mastriano, he said, “I’m reminded of the old adage, ‘Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.’”

In rural Pennsylvania, where “Let’s Go Brandon,” “Fuck Biden” and “Trump 2024” signs fill the landscape, it seems possible. And on social media, where Mastriano developed much of his following — filming himself speaking to his supporters online — it seems like providence.

Sitting in front of an American flag, a ring light visible in the reflection of his glasses, Mastriano addresses his supporters as he would his friends: “Hello Matt and Karen … Hey, Steve, good morning … Liz, good to see you. Hello, Rachel.”

In return, he gets comments like these:

“We WILL take back our state with God’s grace.”

“God is GREAT.”

“He was appointed by God.”

“Doug has Gods [sic] blessing! Good wins over evil!”

“Glory to God!”

“Incredible victory in Jesus!!!”

Carl Fogliani, a Republican strategist based in Pittsburgh, described Mastriano’s campaign as “like the tea party plus Trump plus the Grateful Dead all wrapped into one.”

Christopher Nicholas, a longtime Republican consultant based in Harrisburg, called it “just a different vibe.”

One Republican familiar with the campaign, granted anonymity to speak candidly, told me, “He’s like Jim Jones in Guyana.”

If everything goes right for Mastriano and wrong for Democrats in November, Mastriano by this time next year could be governor, overseeing one of the most pivotal swing states in the country when the next presidential election is held, in 2024.

At the Memorial Day parade in Mercersburg, Mastriano paused to speak with four children who were sitting on a brick wall.

As he turned away, one of them asked his mother, “Who’s that?”

She said, “Your future governor.”

It was Republican fury over the results of the 2020 election and, separately, Covid restrictions that gave Mastriano his opening with a disillusioned electorate. But what is truly at the center of his campaign became clear the minute that he stamped “John 8:36” on the lower right corner of his campaign signs. True freedom, according to the scripture, is found in Christ, which Mastriano, who is 58 and grew up in New Jersey, has said he came to as a teenager, through an “on-fire youth pastor.”

“There’s nothing more important to me than my relationship with Jesus Christ,” Mastriano said after the primary election on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, a platform the former Trump campaign strategist has used to amplify Trump’s claims that the election was stolen.

Mastriano says he’s not a Christian nationalist — “What does it mean and where have I indicated that I am a Christian Nationalist?” he asked one reporter — but the distance between Mastriano’s faith and politics is narrow, if it exists at all. He projects himself as a candidate running not only against a Democratic nominee, but what he depicts as a “a dark time in our history.”

“It’s Christian nationalism, that’s what it is,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who has extensively studied the intersection of race, class and partisanship in America. “And he’s not the only one. This is a movement. Republican events are increasingly looking like church revivals. … You’re seeing large crosses showing up at Republican events now. The [separation] between evangelical Christianity, white identity and American nationalism is basically gone. They’re merging into the same thing.”

A big part of that is still about the 2020 election. Polling by the Public Religion Research Institute last fall found white evangelical Protestants are more likely than other groups to believe it was stolen. But it also surfaces in grievances about woke-ism, vaccine mandates and critical race theory, among other flashpoints.

Madrid, who was a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said, “It’s all framed in apocalyptic terms. … It’s an attack on modernity, it’s an attack on social change.” (A Shapiro adviser said that Mastriano “has so much that’s just beyond the pale,” and that the campaign plans to use his rhetoric to depict him as extreme.)

At his election night party, where a ballroom full of supporters pumped their fists and hoisted signs that read, “Walk as Free People,” Mastriano quoted from Corinthians. He declared that “God is good.”

“They like to call people who stand on the Constitution far right and extreme,” he said. “I repudiate that. That is crap.”

Repeatedly — both that night and in the days since — he has depicted Christians as persecuted by the media, invoking Pennsylvania’s founder, the religious thinker (and Quaker) William Penn, and asking his supporters to “keep us in prayer.”

“The media today, they’re OK mocking people’s sincerely held beliefs,” Mastriano said. “And I don’t stand for it. And I come against them.”

He is not coming alone. Lowman Henry, president of the Pennsylvania Leadership Council, which puts on gatherings of conservative activists (think CPAC, but for Pennsylvania) knew that Mastriano had a following that was not yet apparent elsewhere when, during a virtual conference in 2020, the camera turned to Mastriano.

“When he started speaking, the tech guy looked at me and said, ‘Look how many people are watching online,” Henry said.

There were more than 10,000 viewers, for a conference he said usually draws fewer than 1,000 people.

Repeatedly in Pennsylvania, I ran into supporters of Mastriano who said they were unaware of him until they came across him in their Facebook feeds — or at the recommendation of their more online friends or family members.

At the church in Lewisburg where Mastriano spoke, Lynn Kerstetter, who had sung “How Great Thou Art” at the service,” approached Mastriano to tell him “thank you for letting me into your living room.”

Kerstetter said she was drawn to him because she doesn’t trust the news, “so I’m looking for truth,” and believes she found it in Mastriano.

Jason Blowers, a history teacher who approached Mastriano for his signature, said the state was suffering from a “degradation of society.”

His wife, Susanna, said of Mastriano, “He’s only a man.”

Still, she said, “I think he could put us in the right direction.”

The conventional wisdom is that Mastriano, now that he is the Republican nominee, should stop talking about anything other than Biden and, to the extent that he can staple Shapiro to Biden, Shapiro. The U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania between Mehmet Oz and John Fetterman is expected to draw money — and attention — that will dwarf the gubernatorial race. Mastriano, appearing on the same ballot in November, could hope to simply go along for the ride.

Henry, at the Pennsylvania Leadership Council, said that if he was advising Mastriano, “I would focus this entire election on the failure of the Biden administration and the complicity of candidates like Josh Shapiro in advancing far-left policies.”

On the other hand, he said, “to a degree, if you over-discipline the guy, you take away the appeal that he has.”

Mastriano, in recent videos on social media, said that in the general election, “we’re going to be trying to reach a broader swath of the populace” and that his campaign team would “expand a bit and change a little bit.” But there has been no indication that his message will change. Multiple gubernatorial candidates said Mastriano has not reached out to them after the primary, a perfunctory step most candidates would take to help consolidate support. He remains deeply suspicious of the media.

But if inflation is still weighing heavily on voters’ minds in November — or baby formula shortages, or gas prices — it may not matter how far right Mastriano is. Hart, the former Republican gubernatorial candidate, said she goes back and forth daily between believing he has no chance of winning in November and thinking that people “are so disillusioned with the current administration in Washington, and certainly not happy with the governor in Pennsylvania, a Republican governor candidate X could win,” regardless of who it is.

And then there are the true believers.

In Franklin County, a sign that reads “Trump: Four more years!” is affixed to the trunk of an oak tree across the street from the church that Mastriano attends. Passers-by used to stop to take pictures with an “Impeach Biden” sign on the garage door at the residence before wind blew it down.

A few houses down the road, in front of Dennis Bumbaugh’s home, it’s “Mastriano for Governor.” His daughter, Brittany Bumbaugh, who was sitting on the porch one recent Sunday morning, had discovered Mastriano online and told her father about him. He became convinced “Doug stands for the people.”