How Election Subversion Went Mainstream in Pennsylvania
“What’s at stake is faith in the legitimacy of democracy,” a political analyst said.Illustration by Adria Fruitos
Democrats in Pennsylvania are fighting for the vote. Republicans are fighting to undermine it.
On a recent evening at the Keystone Horse Center, in Columbia County, Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano, the fifty-eight-year-old Republican candidate for governor and a onetime insurrectionist, climbed onto a dais in the soft dirt of the show ring, surrounded by chrysanthemums. Columbia County occupies an edge of the state’s northeastern coal region. Mastriano, who is tall and bald, wore a black baseball hat. His wife, Rebbie, a chaplain, stood at his right hand, her jean jacket unzipped. Mastriano reminded the audience that he was running only because, a year earlier, in this very barn, a small group of followers had begged him to. “You urged us, even with tears in your eyes, ‘Please run for governor,’ ” he said. He had also received instructions from Heaven, Rebbie added: “God said go!” Mastriano was down in the polls, but his supporters shouldn’t be fooled by phony numbers; he’d proved the polls wrong before.
Mastriano is, by almost any measure, one of the most extreme candidates currently running for office. Since 2019, when he was elected to the State Senate, he has supported prayer in schools, the abolition of gay marriage, and conversion therapy, a medically discredited practice to “reverse” homosexuality. Pennsylvania’s Republican legislature has tried to ban abortion, but it has been blocked by the Democratic governor, Tom Wolf. Mastriano has promised to outlaw the procedure without exception, and to prosecute women who get abortions and doctors who perform them for murder. Perhaps most notably, in 2020, Mastriano was one of the architects of the attempt to overturn the results of the Presidential election and award Pennsylvania’s electoral votes to Donald Trump. On January 6, 2021, he attended the insurrection at the Capitol. (Mastriano did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article, but he has said that he left the Capitol when it “was no longer a peaceful protest.”) J. J. Abbott, a political strategist with Commonwealth Communications, told me, “He engaged in a conspiracy to overturn Pennsylvania’s election. And there’s little dispute about that.”
In the barn, the story of the stolen election dominated the evening. Webb Kline, who runs Missiontrux, a program that recruits truckers to work as missionaries, took the lectern and compared the Democrats to Nazis. “This is Auschwitz!” he said. “They are coming for you.” The reign of the G.O.P. establishment also needed to end: “Tell them we’ve got our own candidates, and those guys are taking your place.” Kline praised a canny and influential organizer in the state named Sam Faddis, a career C.I.A. operations officer, who had led a team to destabilize Saddam Hussein in Iraq. After Faddis retired, he began writing and editing And Magazine, which is now a newsletter that publishes a mix of news and elaborate conspiracy theories. (Faddis told me that the newsletter “tells the truth.”) Kline said that Faddis had found “definitive evidence” that the election was rigged.
Mastriano has pledged to radically transform voting in the state. Last May, Faddis invited sixty-nine right-wing groups—including We the People, Ballot Security Now, and Unite PA—to the rotunda of the state capitol, in Harrisburg, to sign an “Election Integrity Declaration.” The oath, which begins with the words “We the People,” calls for the abolition of most voting that is not done in-person “with photo identification, proof of U.S. citizenship, state residency and hard copy paper ballots.” These measures could restrict voting among poor people, people of color, and other likely Democrats; they would also force poll workers to count ballots by hand, a process that could make tampering easier. And even the notion of widespread fraud lays the groundwork for future denials of election results. Toni Shuppe, Mastriano’s presumptive nominee for Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, who will certify elections if Mastriano wins, led a prayer at the U.S. Capitol during the insurrection. In Harrisburg, she sanctified the voting declaration by praying for a “spirit of unity” in the burgeoning movement.
When the slushy-and-hot-dog stand closed and the barn rally began to break up, I walked among the crowd. Adele Stevens, a sixty-four-year-old who owns the horse center, milled around, yanked by a border collie. Stevens, who is Puerto Rican, told me that she was tired of hearing Republicans cast as “racist.” She also told me that, unlike Mastriano, she supports “a woman’s right to choose.” But in 2021, amid resentment over covid lockdowns, she and a dozen neighbors, including Kline, had started a chapter of We the People to combat “abusive” government overreach; they read the Constitution aloud and researched the deep state. “If you were a Democrat trying to figure out the truth about something, it would be hard to find because you’re not part of these groups,” she said. “We’re on Telegram, we read things, we look at alternative news.” She told me that, for example, she had recently learned that George Soros secretly owned Fox News, and that this explained why the network had turned against Trump. (Soros does not own Fox News.) She liked Mastriano’s commitment to taking on voter fraud: “Anyone can just walk in and give someone else’s name.”
Election denialism is now so mainstream that it has become a kind of Republican purity test. According to an analysis by the Washington Post, the majority of G.O.P. midterm candidates have publicly claimed that the 2020 election was stolen. Dan Cox, the Republican candidate for governor in Maryland, has called Mike Pence a “traitor,” and bragged about serving as one of the “volunteer lawyers” who helped Trump fight the results in Pennsylvania. Eric Schmitt, a Senate candidate in Missouri, was among the attorneys general who sued to overturn Pennsylvania’s vote. Kari Lake, who is running for governor of Arizona, has said that she would not have certified Biden’s victory in her state. At the same time, Steve Bannon has called on his supporters to volunteer as precinct captains. “We’re taking this back village by village, precinct by precinct, and they can’t stop it,” he said, on his podcast. Some of these candidates will lose, but some will win, and they will influence how future elections are run. “Hopefully most of these deniers won’t make it into office,” Charlie Dent, who served as a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania until 2018, told me. “But elected officials are planting seeds of doubt. And that’s a concern.”
During the primary, Mastriano faced a field of moderate Republican candidates. Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate, spent eight hundred thousand dollars on ads highlighting Mastriano’s campaign. Observers have argued that the effort reflected a common strategy in which candidates boost their most extreme potential opponents in the hope that they will also be the easiest to beat. When I spoke to Shapiro recently, he emphasized that the ads were critical of Mastriano, and that they probably hadn’t affected the outcome, because Mastriano was already the front-runner: “I didn’t have a primary, so we were ready for the contrast.” But Democrats used this strategy in at least five states this year; in Michigan, they funded John Gibbs, an election denier who has opposed women’s right to vote, and he won his primary by a narrow margin. The tactic, however, was risky. This July, Mastriano was polling within three points of Shapiro. “The idea that Shapiro put money toward getting Mastriano elected is a little unnerving,” Christopher Borick, a political scientist at Muhlenberg College, told me. “If you do the math, from the health-of-a-democracy point of view, this loss would be epic.” He added, “It’s Russian roulette.”
In this year’s midterm elections, much hangs on how Pennsylvanians vote. “What’s at stake is faith in the legitimacy of democracy,” Ari Mittleman, who runs the bipartisan nonprofit Keep Our Republic, told me. The race between John Fetterman and Mehmet Oz could determine the balance of the U.S. Senate, and is currently a tossup. The shape of the Pennsylvania legislature could decide the future of reproductive access and voting rights in the state. And one of the gubernatorial candidates—who, if he wins, will oversee future elections—is an election denier. “This is my fear,” Malcolm Kenyatta, a Democratic state representative, told me. “Republicans are going to a place of only accepting elections when they win, and that’s dangerous as hell.”
To outside observers, Pennsylvania once appeared reliably blue: the state voted for every Democratic President from 1992 until 2016. “Those victories masked the reality that Pennsylvania was, by most other measures, deeply purple,” Borick said. The legislature has been under G.O.P. control for nearly twenty-five years. This is, in part, a result of the fact that Republican voters historically turn out for midterm elections at higher rates than Democrats. “If you scrape together five to ten thousand dollars from acquaintances at your church or rod-and-gun club, you can knock on one thousand doors and win,” Mittleman said. The oil-and-gas and insurance industries pumped money into Republican campaigns to swing the legislature. In 2011, Republican lawmakers carved some of the most misshapen districts in the nation. For the next seven years, until the state Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional, the districts pushed state politics further to the right.
Trump played on working-class grievances to turn formerly blue swaths of the state red. Pennsylvania’s No. 1 industry is still agriculture, and many farmers came to believe that regulation was driving them out of business; steel workers and coal miners resented that jobs were being moved offshore and that unions were disintegrating. Trump also stoked distrust of the government. Pennsylvanians’ level of trust in state and federal politicians is among the lowest in the country. Katie Muth, a Democratic state senator, told me, “I don’t trust the government, and I’m in it.” In 2020, pandemic lockdowns intensified the anger of those who felt squeezed. “That’s when the bitterness began,” Stevens, of We the People, told me. Jeffrey Yass, a libertarian billionaire who started the investment group Susquehanna with earnings from poker games and horse racing, funded candidates who took part in anti-masking and anti-vax rallies. And, after the 2020 vote, government distrust focussed on the notion that Democrats had stolen the election.
In the past year, grassroots groups, led by Faddis and others, have come to describe themselves as part of a statewide “patriot movement,” which Borick characterized as a “broadly defined populist and xenophobic movement.” Faddis, who has built a network of these groups called the Pennsylvania Patriot Coalition—which includes We the People; Ballot Security Now, which pushes for changes to voting laws; and Firearms Owners Against Crime, which focusses on the Second Amendment—told me, “The patriot movement is the Tea Party, maga, and America First all rolled into one.” He added, of his network, “Sometimes, at meetings, it’s hundreds of people, sometimes it’s eight guys in a barn.” Members of these groups think of themselves as part of a kind of conservative civil-rights movement: an alliance with a variety of aims but a shared fight for individual rights. Some groups, like the Three Percenters, are armed militias. A 2020 analysis by acled and MilitiaWatch, groups that monitor political violence, ranked Pennsylvania among the states at highest risk of election-related militia activity. A recently leaked membership list of the Oath Keepers militia included four elected officials from Pennsylvania.
The movement is fuelled in some quarters by what scholars call Christian Nationalism, which is centered on the notion that America is and should be a Christian country. Few people self-identify as Christian Nationalists; in 2021, Mastriano asked me, “Is this a term you fabricated?” But social scientists describe it as a belief system characterized by Dominionism: the idea that God has ordained Christians to exercise control over political institutions in order to prepare for the Second Coming of Christ. “They don’t believe in one person, one vote,” Philip Gorski, a sociologist at Yale, told me. “They think they’re involved in a battle between good and evil.”