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Tag: Dave McCormick

  • John Fetterman’s favorability dips as voters see him more as a Republican than a Democrat

    John Fetterman’s favorability dips as voters see him more as a Republican than a Democrat

    A majority of Pennsylvania voters view U.S. Sen. John Fetterman (D., Pa.) more as a Republican than a Democrat as he continues to heavily criticize his party and side with President Donald Trump in some major policy areas, according to an Inquirer/New York Times/Siena University poll published Thursday.

    Fetterman’s overall favorability among Pennsylvanians — which had already taken a dramatic turn in the last year and a half — has also dipped in recent weeks, a period that featured new revelations about the senator’s job performance and his surprise participation in the Republican Party’s midterm convention with a video message praising Trump.

    For the first time in polling conducted by Siena University on behalf of The Inquirer and the New York Times, a plurality of likely voters in the state have a negative view of Fetterman.

    The senator is viewed “somewhat” or “very” unfavorably by 47% of voters and favorably by 42%, according to the poll of 615 likely voters from Sept. 15 to 21. That’s an 11-percentage-point swing since the organizations’ poll in August found Fetterman maintained an overall positive favorability rating.

    Four years after he flipped a Republican-held seat with a promise to be Democrats’ 51st vote in the Senate, just 26% of likely voters consider Fetterman as more of a Democrat than a Republican, the poll found.

    A majority — 57% — view him as more of a Republican.

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    “He insists that he’s not going to be changing parties. However, a lot of people are afraid of that because of the way he has voted,” said Sandra Boyles, a retired teacher and Democrat in Fayette City who believes “a lot of people feel betrayed” by the senator.

    Nearly three-quarters of Democrats see Fetterman as a Republican. And roughly half of Republicans feel the same way, as do a similar proportion of independents.

    Fetterman’s party loyalty has become a pressing question — not just for his own political future, but also for which party controls the U.S. Senate during the final two years of Trump’s presidency.

    Democrats need to win at least four competitive Senate races in Trump-friendly states to win the majority, an uphill battle that has seemed like more of a possibility in recent weeks as the president’s popularity lags.

    Independent election experts consider Democrats to have a real chance of winning states like Texas, Iowa, and Alaska. Ohio, North Carolina and Maine are also official Democratic targets. Even Kansas, which Trump won by 16 percentage points in 2024, appeared to raise some level of concern for Republicans when Vice President JD Vance tried to boost the GOP incumbent this month.

    Neither of Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate seats is on the ballot this fall. But if Democrats retake the majority by one or two votes, Fetterman’s role as a wild card — even one who votes with Democrats the vast majority of the time — could have an impact as his party tries to rein in or reverse the president’s agenda.

    “That would definitely be a concern of mine,” said Boyles, 74.

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    Fetterman has not said whether he will seek a second term in 2028, and he has repeatedly rejected the idea that he would switch parties.

    “I’m a lifelong Democrat who votes overwhelmingly with my party — and should the Senate flip in November, I will still be the 51st vote that I ran on,” he said in a statement while facing a new round of criticism for appearing by video at the GOP convention in Dallas this month.

    Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senators John Fetterman (left) and Dave McCormick appear together on June 29 to promote the savings accounts for kids that were a signature piece of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

    Fetterman’s Democratic colleagues have tried to keep him in the fold.

    U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat and chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said this week that Fetterman is a “very reliable Democratic vote.” As she leads her party’s effort to win the Senate races, Gillibrand said, she does not have, nor has heard others having, concerns about Fetterman’s role in a slim Democratic majority.

    Asked if Fetterman — who appeared at a convention aimed at boosting Republican campaigns — was involved in the Democratic campaign efforts, Gillibrand said she thought Fetterman had visited some candidates but she was not sure.

    “I’m very grateful that Sen. Fetterman is serving in the U.S. Senate as a Democrat, and I think he will continue to do so,” Gillibrand said.

    Still, Fetterman has supported parts of Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda, the war in Iran, and some of the president’s nominees. Senate Democratic leaders would likely try to act as a check on Trump in each of those areas if they win the majority for the next two years.

    Fetterman has also left the door open to leaving the Democratic Party if it makes opposition to Israel an official party stance. The senator has not explained exactly what that situation would look like, though he has been highly critical of Democrats when they push back against the Israeli government’s war against Hamas.

    With the three-year anniversary of the conflict approaching on Oct. 7, more than 70,000 Palestinians have been killed and nearly all Gazans have been displaced, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. Critics say Israel’s military response has been excessive, while Fetterman has said he supports the war in order to root out Hamas fighters who initiated the war by killing more than 1,200 people in Israel in a terrorist attack.

    The latest poll of Pennsylvania voters shows Fetterman’s position is out of step with a majority of voters.

    Among Pennsylvania likely voters, 60% are against the U.S. providing additional economic and military support to Israel, compared with 34% who support it.

    Four in five Democrats, and about a third of Republicans, oppose the aid to Israel. In a sign that Fetterman would face a challenging reelection campaign, 63% of Democrats said they would support a candidate who opposed aid to Israel.

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    Victor Oyola, 47, of Philadelphia, said he considers himself a conservative Democrat and has no issues with politicians supporting Israel’s right to exist. But Fetterman has been more of a voice for the foreign nation than for his home state, he said, while also showing limited interest in other aspects of his position.

    “You don’t want to do the job, but you’re strongly supporting Israel over Pennsylvania?” said Oyola, who works in retirement management. “Everything is Israel, Israel, Israel. But what about Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania?”

    Reports of Fetterman’s lack of interest in doing routine aspects of his job as a senator also appear to have played a role in how Pennsylvanians view him.

    In a widely circulated story earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Fetterman tried to evade meetings with leaders at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and with wounded veterans, as well as a funeral for three York County police officers who were killed while on duty.

    Donald Harer, a Democrat from Northumberland who voted for Fetterman in 2022, said that he saw the story and that it seemed like the senator has “really not held his end of the bargain and done his job the way he’s supposed to.”

    As an Army veteran who served in Iraq, Harer said, he was particularly disappointed in Fetterman’s reported refusal to meet with wounded veterans.

    “When he campaigned, when he first started to run, he seemed like a go-getter,” said Harer, an operations manager for a grocery store. “But he let a lot of people down. I kind of call him a traitor.”

    Don Levy, the director of the Siena Research Institute, which conducted the poll, said he did not know if changes in Fetterman’s favorability ratings since last month could be attributed to the recent national attention on him.

    But with recent polls continuing to show Fetterman’s widespread cross-party support, his position as a Democratic darling for the GOP and antagonist for Democrats “looks pretty baked in,” Levy said.

    “The Republicans have now grown in their favorability for him, which may be a reflection of them starting to feel like ‘he’s one of us,’” Levy added. “And Democrats are even more upset with him for moving away from what they believe they elected him to do.”

    Staff writers Joe Yerardi and Gillian McGoldrick contributed to this article.

  • Sen. Dave McCormick calls for increased NIH funding, breaking with Trump in Washington Post piece

    Sen. Dave McCormick calls for increased NIH funding, breaking with Trump in Washington Post piece

    U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick called for doubling the National Institutes of Health budget and prioritizing “merit-based science” in a Washington Post opinion piece published Wednesday.

    The column emphasized the Pennsylvania Republican’s disagreement with decisions made under President Donald Trump’s administration over the last year and a half that have disrupted billions in scientific funding, prompting lawsuits and court reversals in certain cases.

    “I’m a Republican senator. America needs more science, not less,” read the headline on McCormick’s column.

    He opened with a reference to KJ Muldoon, a Philadelphia-area child whose life was saved by a personalized gene-editing therapy. NIH funding helped researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania develop the treatment. This work represents how federal investment can drive breakthroughs in American medicine, McCormick noted.

    “Meanwhile, the U.S. is underinvesting in discovery,” he wrote, highlighting how the NIH budget has declined by more than 10% since 2003, adjusting for inflation.

    Though McCormick has largely supported Trump’s agenda, he has repeatedly pushed back on cuts to research funding.

    His office last week publicized a letter authored alongside Sen. John Fetterman (D., Pa.) in which the senators issued a bipartisan call for the federal government to explain recent cuts to healthcare research grants affecting Pennsylvania.

    CHOP and Penn are among the institutions that had to shut down programs after the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality stopped funding more than 100 grants nationwide, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, in July.

    Dave McCormick and John Fetterman press Trump administration for answers on health funding cuts

    In his commentary, McCormick cited examples of NIH funding “saving lives and lowering the cost of disease.” Although less than 1% of federal spending goes toward NIH research, he said, the investment delivers outsized returns.

    The nation’s leadership in scientific innovation could slip if federal funding continues to fall, he added.

    “Conservatives should recognize that basic research, like national security, is a public good that private capital rarely funds,” he wrote.

    At the same time, he echoed some of the Trump administration’s criticisms of research funding, which it says overemphasizes diversity, equity, and inclusion.

    The federal government has canceled nearly 1,400 grants midstream, many due to language referencing diversity, he said.

    In the Philadelphia area, research on LGBTQ+ health and health disparities — how social factors like race, income, and living conditions affect health — has been particularly targeted by cuts.

    “While some of these grants deserved to be canceled, some were legitimate research with buzzwords inserted to get approval from the Biden administration,” McCormick wrote.

    Philadelphia universities have weathered tens of millions of dollars’ worth of cuts to scientific research

    A federal judge had ruled that some of the cuts targeting diversity-related grants were unlawful and discriminatory, after researchers and institutions pushed back through lawsuits.

    McCormick said he has urged the government to let scientists revise their applications to continue their work, rather than wasting the investment in those canceled grants.

    He also called for the government to double the NIH’s $48 billion budget within five years, rather than cut it by nearly 40% as the Office of Management and Budget had proposed last year. The proposed cuts were rejected.

    “If we dare, KJ’s story can be the beginning of a new golden age of American science,” he concluded in the op-ed.

  • Next-door states banned ICE-cop deals. Why not Pa.? | Will Bunch Newsletter

    Next-door states banned ICE-cop deals. Why not Pa.? | Will Bunch Newsletter

    One of the many things we won’t forget about the Trump era is how much the family of POTUS 47 has enriched itself — not only the president but his children, including Donald Trump Jr., who is said to be now worth at least $500 million and growing. So it was no surprise when his second marriage to Palm Beach, Fla.’s Bettina Anderson in May was a lavish affair on two private islands in the Bahamas. What is a surprise — as we now know from some stunning work by a team of reporters from ProPublica — is who paid: a very close associate of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. So maybe the “Russia, Russia, Russia” folks were onto something?

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    Pa. Democrats are alarmed at the rapid growth of ICE-police deals. But can they stop them?

    Immigrants’ rights advocacy group members and their supporters hold up letters that read “The people vs 287(g)” during a rally last September in Doylestown against the Bucks County sheriff’s efforts to implement a 287(g) program.Daniella Heminghaus | Bucks Coun

    The big, mostly under-the-radar story around the Donald Trump regime’s relentless push to arrest and remove immigrants from the United States has been this year’s explosion of so-called 287(g) agreements. These allow local cops to act as immigration agents, working collaboratively with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

    But if you look at a national map to understand how these 287(g) agreements have spiked from just 135 when Trump retook office in January 2025 to more than 2,500 such pacts today, you’ll notice that one state sticks out like a sore thumb.

    In Pennsylvania, amped-up promises of federal cash incentives have meant a soaring number of localities where local beat cops are now working with ICE to make arrests — up from just a handful at the start of the year to some 130 now. Most 287(g) collaborators are in Trump-voting pockets of the Keystone State — northeast and south-central Pennsylvania, or out west near the Ohio border.

    But when you look at the rest of the Northeastern United States, the 287(g) map is very sparse. That’s partly because most local pols across the region agree with their constituents about opposing Trump’s mass deportation policies, and in several states it’s also the result of legislation that aims to ban the program altogether.

    In late August, New York enacted the Local Cops, Local Crimes Act — backed and signed by its Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul — which calls on police departments and county sheriffs to terminate their 287(g) agreements, although several counties are still challenging the measure in court. Maryland has a similar law on the books, while New Jersey, which had long prevented such pacts under an attorney general’s directive, also passed a law this spring to codify the ban.

    There’s a growing number of Pennsylvania lawmakers who want to pass a similar law here, but there’s one big problem: Republicans. They control the state Senate in Harrisburg — currently by a 27-23 margin — and GOP lawmakers have no interest in rebuking the president on immigration policy.

    “The reason we exist alone is because of our split legislature,” State Rep. Heather Boyd, a Democrat who represents heavily immigrant Upper Darby and adjacent parts of Delaware County, told me. Last year, Boyd circulated proposed legislation to ban 287(g) deals in Pennsylvania, and while dozens of Democrats in Harrisburg are supportive, any move is on hold until a November election that could shift the balance of power. Boyd said lawmakers are wary of “starting any culture wars” ahead of the vote.

    I pressed the office of Gov. Josh Shapiro, who’s running for a second term and who is seen as a possible top contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, for his position on reining in the 287(g) program here.

    “Governor Shapiro has been clear that law enforcement should be focused on keeping Pennsylvanians safe — not sowing fear in communities or targeting people who are working hard, raising families, and contributing to our Commonwealth,” his press secretary, Rosie Lapowsky, said. She noted that the governor has barred Pennsylvania State Police from any formal ICE collaboration, and he would urge local police to take a similar stance.

    She added: “Ultimately, however, these decisions rest with local law enforcement agencies. The governor does not have the unilateral authority to dictate whether individual sheriffs or police departments enter into these agreements.”

    Many of those local law enforcement agencies have instead rushed to join 287(g), with ICE promising small-town departments an initial $100,000 cash windfall and additional incentives for training officers to make arrests and to cover the cost of working overtime on the program.

    Last week, I reported from Schuylkill County in east-central Pennsylvania, where some 14 law enforcement agencies have raced to adopt 287(g), more than any other county in the state. Since the spring, local cops there have arrested about 100 immigrants at highway stops or by assisting ICE in job site raids. The blitz has prompted rising complaints about alleged racial profiling, the handcuffing of U.S. citizens, and a sense of fear that permeates a growing Latino community in Pennsylvania coal country.

    Statistics obtained from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security by advocates show that local police in Pennsylvania have arrested and turned over to ICE more than 1,200 immigrants this year — ranking the state fourth in the nation on a list in which the other leading states are all south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

    In Washington, some of the state’s Democratic House members say they’re fed up with a lack of transparency over who is being detained and how the 287(g) program is working here. Last week, four of them — Reps. Mary Gay Scanlon and Madeleine Dean from the Philadelphia suburbs and Reps. Chris Deluzio and Summer Lee from Western Pennsylvania — sent a letter to ICE’s acting director David Venturella demanding information on why the agency’s data lack any specific details about which departments are making arrests, which is required by law.

    “It is unacceptable to me that ICE is hiding information from Pennsylvanians about who ICE is working with in their mass deportation regime,” Deluzio — viewed as a potential 2028 primary challenger to embattled Sen. John Fetterman — told me in an emailed statement.

    Deluzio also summed up the growing unease by many over the speedy growth of 287(g) in the state. “Let’s keep local law enforcement focused on local public safety, rather than enlisting them in extreme federal immigration enforcement that has ripped away American liberties and targeted so many law-abiding families,” he said. Indeed, 287(g) data guru Andrew Thrasher has reported that a whopping 70% of the immigrants arrested in Pennsylvania under the program have no criminal record or pending charges.

    “People in my community are getting smashed off the streets,” said Boyd, the Upper Darby lawmaker. That Delco township is about to vote on a local ordinance to restrict its cops from collaborating or sharing data with ICE.

    Statewide, Boyd says she’s one of about 50 House Democrats in a Welcoming Pennsylvania Caucus with an extensive list of proposed bills that would not only bar 287(g), but look to expand opportunities for noncitizens to do things like obtaining driver’s licenses or gain professional certification. But any serious action hinges on November, when Democrats are hoping a blue wave at the ballot box will flip at least three more Senate seats and create a trifecta for their party in Harrisburg.

    “Even if we can’t stop ICE from picking them up on the streets, we have to protect their rights,” Boyd said. “And right now, there are barriers to that in the state of Pennsylvania.”

    Yo, do this!

    • The issue of wrongful convictions is back in the news here in Philadelphia — but for all the wrong reasons. Some reckless and seemingly wrongheaded moves by Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner and his underlings have the vultures who’ve always opposed criminal justice reform circling. The shame is that the real crisis around wrongful conviction is the thousands of mostly Black and brown folks who remain behind bars for crimes they did not commit. I cannot say enough about a book that came out earlier this year from Brown University (yay!) sociologist Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve called Crime Fictions: How Racist Lies Built a System of Mass Wrongful Conviction. She mines the most outrageous prosecutions — often of young Black teens and boys — to make a compelling argument that wrongful convictions aren’t a flaw in the criminal justice system. They are the system.
    • If timing is everything, then you’ve got to hand it to my freshman dorm pal at Brown who became Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones, David Corn. On the heels of ProPublica’s bombshell reporting on ties between the Trump family and Vladimir Putin, Corn is out Tuesday with his newest book: How Russia Won — Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America. It promises a raft of new information about Russia’s efforts to meddle in U.S. elections in 2020 and 2024, the ongoing close links between Team Trump and Team Putin, and how the current president’s pro-Russian slant has changed the world.

    Ask me anything

    Question: What happens when [House Speaker Mike] Johnson refuses to seat newly elected Dems in January? — David Minckler (@audivita.bsky.social) via Bluesky

    Answer: Suddenly, Jan. 3 — the date the 120th U.S. Congress begins, and new members who won their November elections are to be sworn in — has become the new Jan. 6. Summer vacations are over, and the body politic is focused on the looming midterms, and — more importantly — with polls showing the Democrats on track to retake one and possibly both chambers. So there’s been a surge of speculation that the Trump-allied Johnson will do what former Vice President Mike Pence would not do on Jan. 6, 2021, and somehow fail to certify Democratic winners. That’s based on an assumption that Trump’s election-meddling tactics like stopping mail voting — blocked on Monday by the U.S. Supreme Court — won’t work, yet Team MAGA will attempt to undo the election after the fact, as was tried unsuccessfully in 2020-2021. Lawfare has published the most detailed analysis of a so-called rogue clerk theory in which Johnson appoints a MAGA loyalist to serve as House clerk with the understanding that some Democratic wins won’t be certified. Its article notes that such a gimmick is unlikely to pass muster in the courts, but that won’t necessarily stop Trump and the GOP from trying. My only guidance is: Fasten your seat belts.

    What you’re saying about …

    It turns out readers of the newsletter aren’t eager to join the punditocracy. Only a few of you responded to last week’s question about the chances of a Democratic-led Senate in 2027, and one of them was to give me a verbal tongue-lashing for even asking this. (Frequent writer Daniel Fleisher called it “a pointless exercise in predicting the unpredictable.”) That said, Cathy King has her eye on Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, her home state, writing that “he seems to be following [Zohran] Mamdani’s playbook.” Meanwhile, in Iowa, Mary Chilton thinks the Dems’ Josh Turek has a real shot in a state won three times by Donald Trump, noting that farmers are up in arms “over the data center issue, imported beef, water pollution and the soaring cancer rates …”

    📮 This week’s question: Suddenly, everyone is talking about one thing: the Silicon Valley whistleblowers saying there’s not a trivial chance that a swarm of angry artificial intelligence agents could wipe out humankind by the end of the decade. Are you worried by this, or do you think Big AI is deflecting here to draw attention away from other issues like data center opposition or the stock market bubble? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “the AI threat” in the subject line.

    Backstory on that other thing that could kill humanity

    A barge on the Ohio River moves past the Mountaineer Power Plant, a coal-fired power plant near New Haven, W.Va., in March.Carolyn Kaster

    This weekend, a Bluesky post went super viral almost the second its author, a scientist named David Ho, hit the button to post it. “I resigned from ExxonMobil today,” he wrote. “I spent the last three years doing fossil fuel extraction research at both BP and ExxonMobil. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing to maximize extraction while the window to act closes, and gambling with our lives.”

    It’s a safe bet that many of the 13,000 people who liked Ho’s post truly believed they were sharing the words of a brave whistleblower — but instead the post was satire from a leading climate scientist based at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Ho would never work for a Big Oil giant. He was trying instead to mimic — and thus make a point about — the recent posts from Silicon Valley whistleblowers that triggered the new freakout over whether AI robots are a threat to human existence.

    Climate change is a threat to society, and it’s even closer to reality. Maybe we should freak out about that?

    Ho absolutely has a point. Just before his post, it was announced that August had been tied for the hottest month ever recorded in the history of the planet. That doesn’t come without consequences. In the Himalayas between Nepal and Tibet, a glacier and the adjacent bedrock of mountains at 17,000 feet abruptly collapsed in a region plagued by higher-than-normal temperatures, sending a 150-foot-high cocktail of floodwater and debris down a populated valley at 100 mph. At least 1,386 were killed, and thousands more remain missing. Here in the U.S., a summer of record heat triggered wildfires across the Pacific Northwest.

    Robots didn’t do this. Humans did. Maybe that’s why humans — at least the ones that are running Donald Trump’s America — are reacting so differently to the danger of AI than the way they’re dealing, or not dealing, with the lethal pollution from burning fossil fuels. In the case of artificial intelligence, even tech leaders like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, whose firm makes the Claude program, have urged a slowdown until we better understand the risk from rogue AI agents.

    But in the case of climate change, willful ignorance rules the day. The latest outrage from a Trump regime that’s expensively killing off wind farms while racing to extract as much fossil fuel as possible? The now ironically named Environmental Protection Agency is repealing the rule that limits greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants that burn coal or natural gas. A president who spent his summer sweltering on the golf course continues to insist climate science is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”

    There’s one last irony here. Increasingly, the biggest new sources of climate-altering pollution are the massive data centers that power AI. An Amazon data center proposed for Pecos County, Texas, would likely become the world’s largest source of carbon dioxide if it opens, spewing out 33 tons from natural gas generators every year. Slowing down the AI arms race would also help the planet. Artificial or not, that would be intelligence.

    What I wrote on this date in 2019

    Joe Biden performing badly in a presidential debate? Say it ain’t so, Joe. We all remember what happened on that 2024 stage in Atlanta (“The night the lights went out in Georgia,” I called that one), but I was almost as unimpressed with the future 46th president during a Democratic primary debate on this date seven years ago. That put me at odds with the punditocracy. I wrote, “The cable TV news show that both channels and is most revered by Washington’s elites — MSNBC’s Morning Joe — is at times so over the top in its bias toward Barack Obama’s former wingman that it could be renamed Morning Joe Biden.”

    Read the rest from Sept. 15, 2019: “Elite D.C. pundits love moderation, low taxes on the rich … and Joe Biden. They just don’t get it.”

    Recommended Inquirer reading

    • Summertime is over, and the living is no longer easy. I published my monthlong investigation into local cops collaborating with ICE under the controversial 287(g) program in semirural Schuylkill County, northwest of Philly. I found U.S. citizens handcuffed, families hiding behind blanket-covered windows, and a community wrestling with what it means for neighbors to be treated as suspects. Over the weekend, I delved into the astonishing $850 million or so Trump World has raised in campaign contributions since his reelection — despite the fact that he’s barred from seeking office again. You don’t think he has a scheme to pocket the excess cash, do you?
    • Dante only had Nine Circles of Hell, but the downward spiral of Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman seems to be never-ending. It’s one thing to profoundly disagree on a political and moral issue such as the war crimes of Israel’s right-wing government in Gaza, but recent reporting suggests things are far, far worse in Fettermanland. No senator — regardless of how much their ideology has flip-flopped — should be blowing off their home-state constituents, or clocking out of committee hearings after five minutes. The Democratic senator’s surprise video appearance at the midterm miniconvention of Donald Trump’s GOP, introducing his new best buddy, Republican Sen. Dave McCormick, did nothing to dispel the sense of utter betrayal among liberal voters who now see his winning 2022 campaign as a big lie. The next two years will be crazy as Democrats line up to primary Fetterman, amid rumors the hoodie-clad politico might run as an independent or even change parties. The only sure thing is that The Inquirer will be there for every move. Join us. Subscribe!

    By submitting your written, visual, and/or audio contributions, you agree to The Inquirer’s Terms of Use, including the grant of rights in Section 10.

  • Vulnerable Pa. Republican Rob Bresnahan delivers ‘Trump-a-palooza’ speech in Dallas amid tough race back home

    Vulnerable Pa. Republican Rob Bresnahan delivers ‘Trump-a-palooza’ speech in Dallas amid tough race back home

    DALLAS — In an arena littered with President Donald Trump’s image — from the photos that lined the concourse to the gift shops selling merch depicting the president as a cowboy — one of Pennsylvania’s most vulnerable Republican lawmakers this fall went all-in.

    U.S. Rep. Rob Bresnahan, running for reelection in a Scranton-based district that is one of the most competitive in the nation, addressed the Republican Party’s first-ever midterm convention during its opening night on Wednesday.

    His decision to attend “Trump-a-palooza” (as the RNC has described it) at all was notable. Some Republicans in tight races decided to stay away out of concerns of associating themselves with a president with low approval ratings. U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R., Bucks), for example, is not attending and has distanced himself from parts of Trump’s agenda.

    Bresnahan promoted Trump’s signature tax policy in a brief speech focused on supporting workers and their families.

    “Tax relief matters,” Bresnahan told hundreds of party loyalists at the American Airlines Arena in a speech that followed Ken Paxton, the controversial Trump-backed U.S. Senate candidate in Texas. “In Northeastern Pennsylvania, we work until the job is done. And those extra hours should mean more money in your pocket.”

    Democrats have used Bresnahan’s vote for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included cuts to Medicaid and food assistance, as a wedge against Bresnahan and other vulnerable Republicans. But Bresnahan contended the income tax cuts and other policies in the legislation, like no tax on tips, are paying dividends for families.

    Two other Pennsylvania GOP lawmakers in similar situations, U.S. Reps. Ryan Mackenzie (R., Lehigh) and Scott Perry (R., York), are also attending the two-day convention, with Mackenzie slated to speak Thursday.

    Key Pennsylvania races to watch in the midterm elections this November

    Bresnahan spoke to a somewhat sparse crowd compared with Republican National Conventions during presidential election years, which served as a model for the novel midterm convention this year as the party looks to energize its base of voters while seeking to defend narrow majorities in the House and Senate.

    Delegates, clustered by state on the convention floor, cheered and waved signs reading “Keep the majority” and “Republicans are fixing Democrats’ mess.” The stands in the roughly 19,000-person arena remained largely empty, at least for the first few hours before Trump’s speech.

    Merchandise shops were packed with Trump’s typical MAGA merchandise, copies of his son Eric Trump’s book, Under Siege, and new mugs and shirts showing Trump on a horse in cowboy gear. Red, white, blue, and — in an unmistakable nod toward the president — gold balloons waited in the rafters for the grand finale on Thursday.

    “I’m asking you to pretend that I’m on the ballot. I’m on the ballot, just one more time,” Trump told the cheering crowd in prime time, noting there were about 35 “swing” races the party was prioritizing.

    President Donald Trump speaks at the Republican convention Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2026, in Dallas. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)Alex Brandon

    About 1,500 miles away, in another town called Dallas, one of Bresnahan’s constituents hatched a plan to tune in.

    On the opening night of the annual Luzerne County Fair — in a booth yards from deep-fried Oreos, flying elephant kiddie rides, and life-size cardboard cutouts of Abraham Lincoln, Donald Trump, and Jesus — Dwayne McDavitt fiddled with his tablet to see if he could stream the convention.

    The symmetry of Dallas, Texas, and Dallas, Pa., was “too good to pass up,” said McDavitt, the head of a conservative group called Thunder and Liberty PAC and also the Pennsylvania chapter of Bikers For Trump.

    He said he supports Bresnahan, who lives in Luzerne County, over Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti, the Democratic nominee.

    “He shares our values of faith, family, and freedom — meaning free and fair elections,” McDavitt said.

    Interviews with other voters in the district on Wednesday underscored the potentially risky nature of Bresnahan’s leaning into the Trump administration.

    Malcolm Mabry, 28, of Wilkes-Barre, said he had been victimized by a “Trump bait and switch” as a Republican who voted for the president two years ago. He picked Trump, believing that better policing of the Southern border was paramount.

    And while Trump has been using ICE to “grab up people,” as he said, Mabry said much of what else the president promised, like lowering prices and avoiding war, has not occurred.

    “Trump just said what he had to, to get into office,” said Mabry, who was unaware of the convention happening at the same time.

    A campaign about workers and affordability

    Bresnahan won his seat by less than 2 percentage points in 2024 to take down a six-term Democrat in the northeast corner of the state. Trump won the district by more than 8 percentage points.

    His Democratic challenger, Cognetti, has garnered high-profile supporters like Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is also up for election, and she has repeatedly targeted Bresnahan for trading stocks while in office despite his previous statements that he would not do so.

    Bresnahan, the former head of a family-run electrical contracting business, has made jobs and the workforce a top focus in his campaign and in his brief congressional career.

    On a few occasions, he has broken with House Republican leaders to support bills that would strengthen union protections for federal workers. He has said that he hopes his party changes tactics to support those kinds of bills.

    “We need the unions that have trained generations of some of the most skilled workers in American history,” Bresnahan said onstage Wednesday. “We have those workers in Northeastern Pennsylvania, and communities across this country are ready for the same opportunity.”

    Texas state Rep. Keresa Richardson (R), right, attends the GOP midterm convention. (Joel Angel Juárez/For The Washington Post)Joel Angel Juárez

    Bresnahan has racked up a series of union endorsements that are otherwise rare for Republicans. While major unions like the AFL-CIO and the Pennsylvania State Education Association have backed Cognetti, he has won support from organizations like the American Federation of Government Employees and the Teamsters — groups that, in a region with a long history of union issues, could make a difference in a close race.

    In his speech, Bresnahan talked generally about supporting workers and manufacturing in the U.S. He spoke about tax policies that put “more money in your pocket” and help “build communities where people can stay, raise a family, and build a life.”

    U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.), in a speech that was introduced with an unusual video featuring U.S. Sen. John Fetterman (D., Pa.), also spoke about Trump’s push to improve economic indicators.

    They and other speakers did not address other affordability issues that Democrats have seized on and that polls show voters have top-of-mind heading into early voting.

    Trump has mocked the Democratic attacks on the issue as a hoax, including in a speech in Bresnahan’s district last year. But it is a message, and a reality, that has resonated with voters in Pennsylvania, according to polls and interviews.

    “I’m on a fixed income,” Bill Dudeck, 83, of Nanticoke in Luzerne County, said Wednesday. “But under Trump, gas, groceries, and utilities are skyrocketing.”

    Trump promised a lower cost of living, “but now all our money is out the window,” said Dudeck, a Democrat and former construction worker in Bresnahan’s district.

    Bresnahan, whose campaign said earlier this week that he was looking forward to bringing “NEPA to the national stage,” appeared onstage instead with a sheet metal worker and mother of seven from Baltimore.

    Cognetti’s campaign noted the pairing in a comment Wednesday that criticized Bresnahan, in part, for trading stocks in office.

    “That’s probably why he didn’t have a Pennsylvanian on stage with him tonight,” a Cognetti campaign spokesperson said in a statement. “His speech is just more empty words to try and distract from his broken promises.”

    Nora Pruitt, who joined Bresnahan, had previously been recognized by the White House as a beneficiary of Trump’s second term. Listed on the agenda as an “everyday American, factory worker, working mother and manufacturing success story,” Pruitt said “things have really improved for our family since President Trump returned to office.”

    “We are so grateful President Trump and Republicans in Congress like Congressman Bresnahan vote for families like ours,” she said.

  • Sen. John Fetterman appears in GOP convention video praising Trump on supporting steelworkers

    Sen. John Fetterman appears in GOP convention video praising Trump on supporting steelworkers

    DALLAS — In a remarkable move for a Democratic lawmaker, U.S. Sen. John Fetterman on Wednesday appeared in a video at the Republican midterm convention — an event specifically designed to boost GOP candidates this fall — in a way that praised President Donald Trump for his support of Pennsylvania steelworkers.

    The video was a clear escalation of a monthslong shift in which Fetterman has drifted from the Democratic Party. Though he has repeatedly rejected speculation that he would switch parties — and did so again after the video Wednesday — he has consistently criticized Democrats and praised Trump since the president took office.

    In the video — which introduced U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.) as he took the stage — Fetterman said he and McCormick “will work with President Trump to fight and defend the steel way of life right here in the Steel Valley.”

    “I’m always going to stand with America. I’m always going to reject the extremes and socialism, and the anti-American way of life,” he said, repeating a common refrain in which he criticizes the leftist wing of the Democratic Party that has secured several high-profile wins this year.

    Fetterman, who was not physically in attendance at the American Airlines Arena in Dallas, was cheered and applauded after McCormick took the stage and said, “How great is John Fetterman, right?”

    In addition to McCormick, several vulnerable House GOP incumbents from Pennsylvania were at the convention. Fetterman’s video appearance came shortly after a speech from U.S. Rep. Rob Bresnahan (R., Luzerne), who represents one of the districts Pennsylvania Democrats are hoping to flip this year.

    U.S. Rep. Madeleine Dean (D., Montgomery), who traveled to Texas to protest the GOP convention, said she was “gravely disappointed” that Fetterman chose to participate in the GOP event rather putting his energy to electing Democrats in key Pennsylvania races — the latest in a growing list of transgressions.

    “I will tell you, from the ground, from suburban Philadelphia, my constituents are livid. Those who went out and knocked doors for him, they are absolutely livid,” she said the following day.

    Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, who has a frosty relationship with Fetterman, said Thursday at an event in Chester that he did not see the video before adding that he was “not going to get distracted” from his duties as governor and his reelection campaign.

    Democrats nationally are aiming to flip both the House and the Senate, which could put Fetterman in a powerful position as a swing vote if Democrats narrowly win control of his chamber.

    And while leaders in both parties have reportedly made appeals to him, Fetterman said in a statement after his video went out that he would not switch parties if the Senate changes hands.

    “I’m a lifelong Democrat who votes overwhelmingly with my party — and should the Senate flip in November, I will still be the 51st vote that I ran on,” he said, referencing his campaign promise in 2022 to be the Democratic vote that clinched the majority.

    On Thursday, a web page soliciting donations to Fetterman’s campaign committee included a link to the video and said Fetterman would “keep standing his ground, speaking his mind, and putting Pennsylvania first.”

    Fetterman has long been a supporter of the state’s steel industry as the former mayor of Braddock, the Pittsburgh suburb home to the Edgar Thomson Steel Works mill — which served as a backdrop to the video he shot for the convention.

    U.S. Steel has pledged to invest up to $2.5 billion into that mill and other Mon Valley Works plants around Pittsburgh since its sale to Japan-based Nippon Steel last year.

    The $15 billion sale had been held up for a year, opposed by both Republicans and Democrats concerned about a foreign takeover of the iconic company. Former President Joe Biden blocked the deal, and both Fetterman and McCormick criticized it before Trump took office.

    But in the early months of Trump’s term, McCormick was among those who privately lobbied the president to negotiate.

    Trump went on to secure a pledge that Nippon would have an American CEO, not lay off workers, and give the U.S. a so-called golden share in the company. Trump returned to Pennsylvania for his first rally in the state to celebrate the deal with steelworkers outside Pittsburgh.

    “Under Joe Biden, Democrats blocked critical investment in U.S. Steel, risking thousands of jobs,” McCormick said on stage Wednesday. “I promised Pittsburgh steelworkers I would fight for the steel way of life, and President Trump did, too. And with the president’s leadership, we delivered a deal protecting and creating over 100,000 American jobs.”

    Fetterman’s participation in the GOP conference — in the type of promotional video that is common at party conventions — is extremely rare.

    The Pennsylvania Democratic senator’s decision to record a video praising Trump ahead of the election may draw comparisons to Georgia Democratic Sen. Zell Miller’s fiery speech praising President George W. Bush — and denigrating Democratic nominee John Kerry — at the 2004 Republican National Convention.

    State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, a Philadelphia Democrat who ran against Fetterman in the 2022 Senate primary, drew a different historical comparison.

    “John is Benedict Arnold, but lazy. Could barely get off the couch in his million-dollar mansion to kiss Trump’s ring, he phoned it in like everything he does,” Kenyatta, a Democratic National Committee vice chair, said on X.

    U.S. Rep. Brendan Boyle, a Philadelphia Democrat, similarly blasted the senator’s video appearance at the rival party’s convention.

    “A year ago, I labeled John Fetterman ‘Trump’s favorite Democrat.’ Tonight, he yet again proves why,” Boyle said on X.

    And U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio — a Western Pennsylvania Democrat who, like Boyle and Kenyatta, could be a candidate when Fetterman’s seat is up for election in 2028 — declared in a statement that Fetterman is “not going to be a Senator after 2028 — mark my words.”

    “If the failing Republican politicians want him, they can have him,” Deluzio said. “Like them, John Fetterman has failed the Pennsylvanians who elected him, who expected him to fight against White House corruption, health care cuts, and reckless war, not cheerlead it.”

    Fetterman has not yet said he will run for reelection and his dismal approval ratings among Democrats could make it difficult to win a primary — unless he switches parties. Among Republican voters, he was even more popular than McCormick in a poll last month from The Inquirer, the New York Times, and Siena University.

    Fetterman has developed a close association and friendship with McCormick since the Republican’s election in 2024. While Fetterman rarely makes public appearances in the state he represents, he has appeared at a few with McCormick.

    In a striking move, the bipartisan pair also set up a joint fundraising campaign committee this summer as Fetterman’s own fundraising lagged. This past week, McCormick came to Fetterman’s defense after the Wall Street Journal reported that the Democrat frequently avoided meeting with, and privately criticized, constituents and interest groups.

    “These stories are the latest example of outrageously disloyal staff and forces on the Left using anonymous leaks to cancel my friend John Fetterman,” McCormick wrote on social media. “They hate that he is an independent thinker who refuses to fall into line so they want to silence him.”

    In the convention video, Fetterman called McCormick a “great American, a great senator.”

    “Yes, he is in a different party, but I’m proud to count him as my great friend,” Fetterman said.

  • Why don’t construction and factory workers want to build ships?

    Why don’t construction and factory workers want to build ships?

    The U.S. government is spending over a billion dollars to recruit hundreds of thousands of workers it estimates will be needed in Philadelphia and other shipbuilding centers to expand the Navy and compete with lower-cost Chinese yards, as President Donald Trump proposes. The campaign includes “Build Submarines” ads on social media and SEPTA bus shelters and grants to training programs.

    “You have to work the parents,” Michael Cadenazzi, assistant secretary of war for industrial base policy, told contractors assembled by Trump and U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.) at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle in July. “Mom and Dad need to understand their kid is succeeding,” even if they skip college for “AI-proof jobs” as “the wizards behind the warriors — shipfitters, welders, pipe fitters.”

    BuildSubmarines.com, a U.S. government-funded marketing effort, is trying to recruit workers for shipyards through public-transit and social-media ads. It also sponsors a Nascar team.U.S. Navy

    If would-be college students prove a tough sell, there’s an even larger population of American workers who have what it takes to build ships but don’t want to, said Gary Kim, a Wharton School graduate student who has studied U.S., Chinese, Japanese, and Korean shipyards.

    In essays for the U.S. Naval Institute and a series of papers titled The Brutal Realities of Building Ships, Kim, formerly a junior officer with U.S. Navy construction units in Asia and a Detroit manufacturing manager, has detailed rough conditions and skilled-labor shortages and suggested what shipyards have to do to realistically fill those jobs.

    Kim is a scheduled speaker at the Philadelphia Navy Yard Symposium on Sept. 26. He agreed to an interview with The Inquirer on a recent visit to Philadelphia. Questions and answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.

    You’ve written that shipbuilding is heavy construction work — more dangerous than putting up buildings, less comfortable than modern factories, but not better paid.

    Shipyards are great for everyone except the people who work there. The economic boom is paid for in blood.

    The question we should be answering isn’t ‘Why can’t we convince 150,000 more kids to build ships?’ but ‘Why are the 30 million Americans already in the industrial workforce — construction, manufacturing, transportation — refusing shipyard jobs?’

    Gary Kim in Philadelphia in August 2026. Kim is a Wharton School graduate student and naval reserve officer who has studied U.S., Chinese, Japanese, and Korean shipyards.Joseph N. DiStefano

    Shipyard work is an agglomeration of tasks done in the wider industrial economy: welding, plumbing, truck driving. Why does most of that workforce turn away from building ships? Because it’s dark work in dangerous corners. And it doesn’t pay much.

    Companies have invested a lot in improving factory conditions over the past 30 years. Manufacturing became gentler on your body.

    But it’s also less unionized than before. In the new factories, adjusting for inflation, the pay is less. Factory workers and warehouse workers accept repetitive labor in air-conditioned facilities, in exchange for lower pay.

    Construction is a rough trade, but it pays better. The economic rewards have increased. Not only there’s better pay, but it’s a way men and women can become entrepreneurial. Some become contractors. It’s just as hard as shipbuilding, but the payoff is better.

    In shipbuilding, the pay in real terms has declined, but the workplace is only transforming recently with advanced robotics. Sometimes shipyard apprenticeship programs that teach industrial skills see [their graduates] leave for other industrial jobs.

    Comparison of construction, shipbuilding, factory, energy, and entry-level service jobs, pay vs. relative danger, 1975-2025, from data compiled by Gary Kim and posted in his series “The Brutal Realities of Shipbuilding.”Gary Kim
    Could Philadelphia double the ship workforces, as Hanwha Philly Shipyard and Rhoads Industries say they hope to do in the next few years?

    Philly is going to struggle to recruit an industrial workforce. There is a rhyme and rhythm to an industrial city.

    You have industrial accidents. You have elevated rates of chronic conditions years afterward.

    Look at the reactions to the Canada wildfires. Detroit had the worst air quality in the world for a day, but nothing shut down. Everyone from the UAW director to the people in the city government knows the four or five closest auto plants each generate tens of millions of dollars in economic activity daily. Even if city health officials say it’s too much risk, nobody needs to be told what you are taking out of the city if you close.

    Industrial work brings prosperity and less economic inequalities, with [personal and environmental] costs. Manufacturing requires higher risk and having your citizens accept that risk. You have that in the Gulf [home to the U.S. oil industry] and in the Mississippi Valley [where the U.S. steel industry has moved], and in Michigan [auto plants].

    The economy here has been running on services and logistics for so long that I don’t think Philadelphia any longer has that intestinal fortitude to accept what shipyards really are.

    Do U.S. shippers really want more U.S. commercial ships at U.S. prices?

    If the Jones Act [requiring U.S. ships for cargoes between U.S. ports, suspended by Trump] is waived indefinitely, companies are not going to need more ships built here.

    And you need more orders. If a shipyard does not lay out several a ships a year, you can’t develop a career. You start laying a keel; you need a lot of welders. Then cutters. Then plumbers. Then there’s a surge of need for electricians. You can’t sustain that workforce unless you can stage crews across different jobs in the time it takes to build a ship.

    Rhoads in Philadelphia fabricates nuclear-submarine modules for General Dynamics. Can this region eventually build subs?

    Nuclear reactors, spaceships, and American submarines are the most stringent things to build in the world. If Philadelphia wants a more meaningful part of the submarine value chain, we need to build with spaceshiplike tolerances.

    The Navy is putting out the correct messaging that the industrial base needs a diversity of jobs. An amazingly large part of the maritime industrial base doesn’t come from port cities but from inland operations. The most critical part of submarines is the gearboxes, built in California.

    The government has ordered two missile and satellite tracking ships from Hanwha Philly Shipyard. Will Philadelphia-area defense contractors likely do the electronics?

    [The Lockheed Martin-run Navy electronics facility in Moorestown] is the technology center of that industry. But I think the biggest reason Philadelphia landed the tracking ships here was that the yard needed a win. And backlogs in other shipyards are now 10 years and more.

    Hanwha wants to buy Austal’s Alabama shipyards and submarine module works and its California ship repair facility. What does that leave for Philly Shipyard?

    Hanwha wants to be a globally competitive defense prime contractor. Buying Austal would make Hanwha a solid #3 shipyard operator in the U.S., plus their megayard in Korea.

    I expect the Austal yard would focus on smaller warships. Philly would focus on surface auxiliary vessels.

    Most yards lose more money the more ships they build. Hanwha thinks they can do better, and I seriously hope they are right.

    Editor’s note: This article wrongly identified the role of Philadelphia Gear in Navy ship construction. It has been updated.

  • With control of Congress on the line, Pa. Republicans head to Trump’s midterm convention in Dallas

    With control of Congress on the line, Pa. Republicans head to Trump’s midterm convention in Dallas

    Key figures in Pennsylvania Republican politics — including the state’s top elected federal GOP official and several lawmakers in the middle of heated reelection campaigns — will participate in their party’s first-of-its-kind midterm convention this week in Dallas.

    The gathering, spurred and heavily promoted by President Donald Trump, arrives as Republicans look to defend their control of Congress this fall amid difficult circumstances. Trump’s approval ratings, including on key issues such as the economy and the war in Iran, have sunk, including in Pennsylvania.

    And Democratic challengers, some of whom have outraised their Republican opponents, have waged aggressive campaigns.

    After Trump successfully won the White House and ushered in a wave of downballot Republican wins just two years ago, the convention — described as “Trump-a-palooza” by Republican National Committee chairman Joe Gruters — is aimed at energizing the base at a critical time.

    Pennsylvanians, representing a swing state that has been key to Trump’s success in the past, will play a role.

    U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.) and a pair of House lawmakers in competitive districts — U.S. Reps. Ryan Mackenzie (R., Lehigh) and Rob Bresnahan (R., Luzerne) — are among the more than 100 scheduled speakers over two days, starting Wednesday.

    Their speaking slots were among the first to be announced. Underscoring the Keystone State’s role in keeping the House Republican majority, only the host state of Texas had more representatives on the initial list of elected officials scheduled to address the crowd.

    The Pennsylvania Republican Party, meanwhile, has orchestrated a “full slate” of 55 delegates and alternate delegates.

    “The Republican Party of Pennsylvania is excited and honored to be a part of the first ever RNC Midterm Convention in Dallas,” spokesperson James Markley said in a statement. “It will be a tremendous opportunity to hear from everyday Americans about how this administration has changed their lives for the better.”

    The state party had not provided the names of the delegates as of Tuesday, though the list is expected to include party activists and other elected officials. State party leaders had encouraged Pennsylvanians to attend the gathering.

    Democrats, who see the president’s lagging approval ratings as a key to their success in the midterms, were quick to blast Pennsylvania Republicans for attending. Their response includes plans to send a small group of House Democrats, including U.S. Rep. Madeleine Dean (D., Montgomery), to Dallas to push back against the GOP messaging.

    “While swing seat House Republicans try to hide from their record of raising costs on working families, gutting Medicaid to fund tax breaks for billionaire donors and supporting a reckless war of choice in Iran, House Democrats will be present to hold them accountable,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the New York Democrat in line to become House speaker if his party wins the majority, said in a statement.

    Fitzpatrick skips as other Pa. Republicans take center stage

    Four of Pennsylvania’s 10 Republican-held U.S. House seats are considered key battlegrounds as the GOP looks to maintain its four-seat advantage nationwide.

    Of those, only U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R., Bucks) has distanced himself from parts of Trump’s agenda and is not planning on attending the convention.

    Mackenzie and Bresnahan, on the other hand, will be among the featured speakers, and U.S. Rep. Scott Perry (R., York) will attend.

    Perry, a close Trump ally, has routinely won reelection in a Harrisburg-based district but is running this year against Democrat Janelle Stelson, a former local television anchor who nearly defeated him two years ago.

    Freshmen Mackenzie and Bresnahan were elected to Congress in 2024 after they each defeated incumbent Democrats by less than 2 percentage points. Local, state, and national Democrats have rallied behind their challengers — union leader and retired firefighter Bob Brooks in the Lehigh Valley, and Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti in the district that covers the northeast corner of the state.

    Bresnahan campaign spokesperson Samantha Bullock said the lawmaker was “excited to bring NEPA to the national stage because these are the people driving his work in Washington.”

    Mackenzie, in a statement that referenced his work to bring federal funds to his district and support areas like local healthcare and tax relief, said he was “looking forward to talking to the people of the Lehigh Valley, the Poconos, and the entire nation about these accomplishments, and how we can build on them in the years ahead.”

    Brooks said Mackenzie was “flying to Dallas to kiss the ring of Donald Trump and his party bosses.”

    “This is exactly why people are fed up with a broken Washington that isn’t working for working people,” Brooks said in a statement.

    Mackenzie’s campaign has similarly criticized Brooks for campaigning with national Democrats — calling an event Brooks had with Jeffries in July a sign that “establishment backers” were trying to “bail him out.”

    The convention will feature six hours of programming each night.

    Topics that speakers will highlight include the elements of Trump’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Republicans have rebranded as the Working Families Tax Cuts Act.

    Supporters have applauded the law’s extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and its litany of other features, such as investment accounts for children. Democrats and other critics have pointed to the law’s cuts to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid spending, among other measures.

    The convention speakers will also touch on the president’s enhanced border control measures and his push for election changes such as universal voter ID, according to an outline of the agenda.

    A “candidate showcase” that will highlight “key candidates in target districts” and contrast them with their “extreme” opponents is set for Wednesday night. And an “opposition contrast” to “[deliver] the night’s sharpest partisan case against the extreme liberal Democrats” is slated for Thursday night, according to the agenda.

    Besides Trump, the members of his administration scheduled to speak include Vice President JD Vance, U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has engaged in a war of words with Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro over the state’s measles outbreak.

    National Republicans have described the convention as a way to energize voters in a tough election year.

    Two years after winning Pennsylvania for the second time in 2024, Trump had an approval rating of 39% and a disapproval rating of 58% among likely voters in the state last month, according to an Inquirer/New York Times/Siena University poll.

    The poll found that 51% of likely voters said they were more likely to vote for a Democrat for Congress and 53% said they would want to see the House flip to Democratic control, though the poll did not ask about specific congressional races.

  • The CDC’s latest measles update still doesn’t include Pennsylvania-reported deaths

    The CDC’s latest measles update still doesn’t include Pennsylvania-reported deaths

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest update Friday on the toll of measles outbreaks nationally continued to omit two measles-related deaths reported last week in Pennsylvania, extending an unusual standoff between federal and state health authorities.

    The agency instead placed an asterisk in a column where, if reported, the Pennsylvania deaths would be recorded as the first in the nation this year. A note below stated that ”available information does not establish whether measles caused or contributed to the deaths or whether the individuals died from other causes while infected with measles.”

    The omission marked a clear departure from the agency’s normal operating procedure, as President Donald Trump’s administration and Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro continue to clash over how the deaths were characterized.

    States report to the CDC cases and deaths for dozens of infectious diseases, such as hepatitis, influenza, and measles. The CDC has long compiled the data into reports that help epidemiologists monitor outbreaks and risk, and can inform lawmakers’ efforts to improve public health policy.

    In a rare break from that norm, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asked the CDC’s newly appointed director, Erica Schwartz, to omit the Pennsylvania deaths, according to Reuters.

    The move escalated a spat between Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist, and Shapiro, which began when the governor announced the deaths last Tuesday at a news conference in Lancaster County.

    Shapiro accused Kennedy of spreading vaccine misinformation that has contributed to declining measles vaccination rates, and Kennedy suggested that Shapiro’s office had fabricated the deaths to win political points.

    Public health experts warned that the ongoing political controversy sows doubt in what was designed as an unimpeachable health resource — national disease surveillance — and detracts from the ultimate public health goal of limiting the spread of illness.

    “Every data point is a broken family, a mother crying, a future that’s lost. Instead of grieving that and making sure it never happens again, you’re debating the mechanism of death,” said Brian C. Castrucci, an epidemiologist and president and CEO of de Beaumont Foundation, a community health philanthropy outside Washington, D.C.

    What do we know about the deaths reported in Pennsylvania’s measles outbreak?

    Pennsylvania measles-related deaths

    The Pennsylvania Department of Health reported the two deaths to the CDC the morning of Aug. 25, and professional staff at the CDC “did not express any concern regarding the information,” Neil Ruhland, a department spokesperson, said in an email.

    He described the communication that followed as an extension of the department’s ongoing communications around the state’s outbreak:

    The next day, the state health department discussed the details of each case with CDC professional staff. The CDC requested records containing identifiable information, which the health department did not share, consistent with its past practices.

    Shapiro has cited state privacy laws, and the need to protect the privacy of the families involved to ensure community trust, with limiting his ability to release more information.

    Instead, the health department asked the CDC for a case report form to provide de-identified information. The health department says it has not yet received that form.

    Pennsylvania health officials have a measles outbreak response meeting with the CDC every other week, and most recently met on Tuesday.

    “CDC professional staff have repeatedly made it clear that it has been supportive of DOH’s measles outbreak response,” Ruhland said.

    The CDC’s website says the agency plans to update its measles death count once it has completed its review of Pennsylvania’s cases. But officials have not said what additional information they need from Pennsylvania or when they expect to complete their review.

    The agency did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

    Joshua Sharfstein, a physician who served as Maryland’s Health Secretary from 2011 to 2014, said he has never heard of the CDC omitting disease surveillance data reported by states.

    “I wouldn’t say it’s off the table for the CDC to want more information,” but the way the agency went about it in Pennsylvania’s case is unusual, said Sharfstein, who also served as Baltimore’s health commissioner and currently works as a health policy professor at Johns Hopkins University.

    He said he would expect the agency to report Pennsylvania’s data, while alerting officials they are looking for more information. “It’s supposed to be a collaborative relationship,” Sharfstein said.

    Pennsylvania officials initially provided no additional information to the public about the two people who had died, other than they were unvaccinated Lancaster County residents.

    The state’s decision to call the deaths measles-associated came after the state health department’s “epidemiology team thoroughly investigated and verified both individuals tested positive for measles,” Pennsylvania Health Secretary Debra Bogen said in a statement.

    Pennsylvania defines a measles-associated death as deaths of people where evidence of measles is present, even when the disease may not be assessed by the coroner as the immediate cause of death.

    An alert about measles is posted in the window of a medical clinic in Lancaster.Gillian McGoldrick / Staff

    Lancaster County’s coroner, Stephen Diamantoni, added confusion last week when he contradicted the state’s account.

    Diamantoni, a physician and elected Republican, said his office was investigating one death involving a newborn and said postmortem testing showed the infant had a measles infection acquired before birth. But he said he did not believe measles contributed to the child’s death.

    The child died shortly after birth of a lacerated spleen with trauma to the torso, Diamantoni said. He did not know what caused the lacerated spleen or trauma.

    He later said measles was noted on the infant’s death certificate as a significant condition “contributing to death but not resulting in the underlying cause,” because the baby tested positive for measles.

    On Friday, he said a 6-week-old Amish infant who was being treated for a deadly genetic disorder had died of measles in mid-August. He said he did not know if the case was the second measles-related death Pennsylvania reported, saying that he reported the death to the CDC on Friday.

    Pennsylvania’s health department said it was aware of the information the coroner reported Friday and had “no new measles-associated deaths to report at this time.”

    Shapiro reshared a news article about the death on X. In his post, he blamed Kennedy for creating “a firestorm of conspiracy theories that denied these families’ pain, invaded their privacy, and undermined public health.”

    “It’s long past time for RFK to stop playing games with people’s lives, report these deaths accurately on the CDC dashboard, and heed the guidance of actual medical experts so people get accurate information to discuss with their trusted healthcare providers and can best protect themselves and their children against this deadly disease,” he wrote.

    Kennedy fired back, highlighting the Lancaster coroner’s disclosures, in another X post later on Friday: “The facts emerging now demonstrate why CDC waited for the evidence rather than allowing political grandstanding to dictate its reporting.”

    Politicizing public health

    Fixating on whether a patient died “because of” or “with” measles inevitably politicizes the issue and does not benefit people’s health, Jake Scott, a clinical associate professor of infectious diseases at Stanford University, wrote in an opinion piece published online by the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

    Measles usually kills through the complications it causes, such as pneumonia, encephalitis, secondary bacterial infections, and pregnancy complications, he wrote.

    “A death tally that can be altered by officials whom it embarrasses will not be trusted by anyone, including the officials who edited it,” Scott wrote.

    Diamantoni, Lancaster’s coroner, told The Inquirer earlier this week he did not want “to be dragged into a political fray.”

    “Our role in our office is not political in any way. We’re focused on determining the cause and manner of death, and using objective and scientific methods to do that,” he said. “We’ve worked hard to be sure that the information we’re providing is based on objective things.”

    More than a week into the controversy, lawmakers continue to take political jabs.

    “I am disgusted the Trump administration is putting Pennsylvania families at risk by spreading dangerous misinformation and politicizing these tragic deaths,” U.S. Rep. Brendan Boyle (D., Phila.) said in a statement.

    Pennsylvania’s highest-ranking federal lawmakers — U.S. Sens. John Fetterman, a Democrat, and Dave McCormick, a Republican — did not respond to a request for comment Thursday about the state’s standoff with the CDC. McCormick voted to approve Schwartz as the new CDC director; Fetterman voted against.

    U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R., Bucks), the only federal GOP lawmaker in the Philadelphia region, also did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did U.S. Rep. Lloyd Smucker, the Republican who represents Lancaster County and who blasted Shapiro last week for not providing more information about the measles-associated deaths.

    Cianey Brown, 16, receives an immunization last month during the School District of Philadelphia’s sixth annual Back-To-School Bus Tour stop at Marcus Foster Memorial Stadium. Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

    Measles outbreak continues

    Public health leaders, doctors, and epidemiologists say that finding a path forward has become an increasingly partisan issue at a time of rising vaccine hesitancy.

    Medical experts will be tasked with trying to rebuild trust in health authorities in order to contain a rapidly spreading outbreak.

    “How can any American citizen begin to make decisions about their health right now, in the milieu of misinformation and falsehoods we’ve created?” said Castrucci, de Beaumont’s CEO. “We have to get back to a point where at least the data can be trustworthy.

    As of Friday, there have been 577 measles cases in Pennsylvania, including 115 reported within the last week, according to the state health department’s online measles dashboard.

    Only South Carolina has reported more measles cases than Pennsylvania so far this year, according to the CDC’s measles webpage. There have been 3,134 cases nationally this year, the agency reported in its latest update Friday.

    Pennsylvania’s measles-associated deaths remain an asterisk.

    Inquirer staff writers Sam Janesch and Aubrey Whelan contributed to this article.

  • I spent 15 years in Head Start classrooms. Cutting the program is a mistake.

    I spent 15 years in Head Start classrooms. Cutting the program is a mistake.

    Once again, Head Start — a program beloved by millions of families and with overwhelming public support — is being threatened by the Trump administration.

    I was a Head Start teacher, administrator, and coach for nearly 15 years, and can attest to the transformative power of the program. I saw children thrive thanks to Head Start’s visionary emphasis on the whole child by providing a high-quality education, welcoming classrooms, healthy nutrition, and dental and health screenings. Through home visiting, regular parent communication, and frequent parent participation in the classroom, I saw families become stronger and more resilient.

    Research has shown, time and again, that Head Start increases high school, college, and postsecondary graduation rates, leads to higher self-esteem for participants, and has a positive effect on future generations, as examined through parents’ practices exhibited decades later.

    Which is why I am astounded by the methodical steps to dismantle a program that is the gold standard when it comes to early childhood programs. Back in 2023, the Heritage Foundation made exaggerated claims of fraud and abuse in its call to eliminate Head Start in the now-infamous Project 2025 plan for the second Trump administration.

    A year later, word leaked that President Donald Trump was planning to use the biased Heritage Foundation report to zero out federal funding for Head Start. Widespread public outcry and political pressure thwarted that plan.

    Undeterred, the Heritage Foundation developed a new strategy to kill off Head Start through death by a thousand cuts: If Head Start can’t be eliminated outright, deregulate it until it’s a skeleton of itself. Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services is proposing changes to Head Start that will do just that.

    I took part in Head Start as a child. If it’s cut, far too many kids will be kept from fulfilling their dreams. | Opinion

    In May, Health and Human Services put out a proposal to retract wage increases for Head Start teachers. This move would exacerbate the already significant challenges in recruiting and retaining the standard high-caliber staff, resulting in fewer slots and lower enrollment.

    Recently, Health and Human Services announced another proposed change to Head Start that would lower staff qualifications while raising the teacher-student ratios. The latest proposal would also eliminate some of the structures that keep lines of communication open between parents and providers, like parent-teacher conferences. And a new English-only mandate in instruction, written materials, and family communications would isolate parents and children who are dual-language learners.

    Physical and dental health screenings and follow-up care — instrumental in the identification of vision problems, developmental delays, missed vaccines, and hearing challenges for many low-income children — are also on the chopping block.

    These proposed changes are just a few examples of how Head Start would be hamstrung from providing the care and education that has transformed so many children’s lives. Even Health and Human Services’ own Administration for Children and Families admits that these proposed changes could “introduce some risk.”

    Once again, people-power can successfully defend Head Start. Contact Sens. John Fetterman and Dave McCormick and your representative and tell them to pressure the Trump administration to withdraw these proposed changes.

    Members of the public — like you — are able to voice your opinion, life experiences, academic research, or general passion for Head Start in response to the proposed changes. You can submit public comments on the Health and Human Services website — comments Health and Human Services must read and report on before finalizing anything.

    When President Lyndon B. Johnson established Project Head Start in 1965, he said, “I believe that this is one of the most constructive, and one of the most sensible, and also one of the most exciting programs that this Nation has ever undertaken.” That sentiment continues today.

    Head Start sets up society as we know it for success. We must defend against this tactic of death by a thousand cuts and make sure future generations are able to reap the rewards of this tried-and-true program.

    Zaina Cahill is the early childhood education policy director at Children First.

  • Will Donald Trump and national Republicans help Stacy Garrity’s campaign from falling flat against Josh Shapiro?

    Will Donald Trump and national Republicans help Stacy Garrity’s campaign from falling flat against Josh Shapiro?

    Seated behind his desk in the Oval Office earlier this month, President Donald Trump spoke directly to the camera in front of him. He turned to his right and looked up at the Pennsylvania Republican who, as he had indicated just a few weeks earlier, might very well lose her race for governor this fall.

    “I think you can win,” he said this time, extending his hand to Stacy Garrity. It was a change in tune for Trump, who last month at an event in Pennsylvania said Garrity’s opponent, Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, was “expected to” and might win.

    The president’s confidence in Garrity — and whether his support will extend beyond a handshake and a 17-second video with her at the White House — has become a critical question in the final stretch of the Pennsylvania governor’s race.

    Down in the polls and lagging behind Shapiro’s unprecedented fundraising, Garrity has cultivated the president’s support and the potential boost, both financially and in Republican enthusiasm, that could come with it.

    It is a risky strategy for a swing-state candidate whose party holds the White House, and particularly as polls show Trump becoming increasingly unpopular. Shapiro and his allies have enthusiastically promoted instances when Garrity, the twice-elected state treasurer, has leaned into Trump’s agenda and brand of politics.

    But with less than three months before Election Day, it is not clear to what extent Trump or other key national Republicans will pitch in on her campaign.

    After a high-profile snub in Pa., President Donald Trump meets with Stacy Garrity at the White House
    State Treasurer and Republican candidate for governor Stacy Garrity holds a rally in Bucks County at the Newtown Sports & Events Center in this 2025 photo. Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

    Trump has not yet stumped in any significant way for Garrity in Pennsylvania, a swing state where he was a near-constant presence during his winning 2024 campaign. And he has not lent his vast political resources — including a Trump-aligned super PAC flush with $400 million — to Garrity or other Republican candidates as his party faces tough campaigns across the country in the midterm elections that will determine control of Congress.

    Several gubernatorial races around the country are considered competitive, a reality that also pits Garrity against GOP nominees who polling suggests have better shots of success. The same circumstances have doomed the most recent other Trump-endorsed Pennsylvania Republican nominees for governor — former State Sen. Scott Wagner in 2018 and State Sen. Doug Mastriano in 2022 — who never ended up with national support and lost by double digits.

    Campaigns typically heat up after Labor Day, and there is still time for Garrity’s national allies to converge to boost her. But observers say the political reality is also evident.

    “The president kind of looks toward two things,” said Samuel Chen, an Allentown-based Republican strategist who is not affiliated with Garrity and who previously worked for Tom Corbett, Pennsylvania’s most recent GOP governor.

    “One is loyalty to him. Garrity has been loyal, but has not necessarily been as vocal as some others have. The other side of it is he likes winners. He wants to endorse people who win,” Chen said. “Everyone in Trump’s orbit knows that Garrity has a very uphill climb.”

    Not supporting ‘lost causes’?

    The level of involvement from groups like the Republican Governors Association has been a key indicator of whether the party believes its nominee has a chance at winning recent gubernatorial elections in Pennsylvania.

    The RGA is made up of GOP governors who collectively support one another’s agendas and campaigns. Democratic governors have a similar alliance.

    In 2010 — the last time a Republican won the governor’s mansion in Harrisburg — the group was the largest donor to then-Attorney General Corbett’s gubernatorial campaign, giving him $6 million starting in August of that year. Four years later and helmed by then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, the RGA was once again Corbett’s biggest donor. It donated more than $5.8 million as Corbett became the first sitting Pennsylvania governor in decades to lose a reelection bid. Christie, preparing to run for president in 2016, stumped with Corbett multiple times.

    The picture was starkly different in 2018 and 2022, when Republican voters nominated two candidates closely associated with Trump. Neither Wagner’s campaign against Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf nor Mastriano’s campaign against Shapiro ever became highly competitive — and the RGA and other national groups decided to sit out.

    “We’re watching Pennsylvania very closely,” Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, then the chair of the RGA, said in September 2022. He added that the group would not support “lost causes” or “landslides.”

    The RGA would spend nothing in the state that year, even with Mastriano and former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis pleading for assistance. Shapiro went on to trounce Mastriano by nearly 15 percentage points.

    This year, RGA chair and Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte has not publicly weighed in on Garrity’s chances since issuing a brief, generic statement congratulating her after her unchallenged primary in May.

    And the competitive landscape Republicans are facing across the country may mean Pennsylvania’s GOP nominee once again gets the short end of the stick. The RGA did not respond to requests for comment.

    Even with Pennsylvania’s status as a preeminent swing state that went for Trump two years ago, there are nearly a dozen more competitive gubernatorial races across the country this fall, according to the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan group that provides election analysis.

    Stacy Garrity is a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump. Will that help or hurt her campaign in Pennsylvania?

    Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio, and Wisconsin — some of which voted overwhelmingly for Trump just two years ago — are all considered toss-ups. Four other states with Democratic governors — Oregon, Arizona, Michigan, and Kansas — are also considered more competitive than Pennsylvania, which is ranked as “solid Democratic,” according to Cook, despite Republicans like Garrity and Trump having won statewide two years ago.

    The RGA, according to its most recent filing with the Federal Election Commission, had less than $1.7 million in its RGA Right Direction super PAC after spending about $16 million so far in the current election cycle.

    Its recent spending has focused on Iowa, where Democrats are attempting to capture the governor’s office for the first time in two decades, and Kansas, where the RGA launched an ad this month.

    “There’s always competition for limited resources,” Charlie Gerow, a longtime Harrisburg-based Republican strategist who also ran for governor in 2022, said of the intraparty competition for donors. “There’s only so much campaign funding to go around as everybody’s trying to get a piece of it.”

    Trump hosted a fundraiser for Garrity in March at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. He has also visited Pennsylvania twice this summer, though not for events specifically with Garrity — and in one in case he did not mention her among a list of candidates he was supporting.

    In July, Shapiro’s campaign announced he had raised $50 million since January 2025. The next financial filing deadline for statewide candidates is in September, but as of the last reporting cycle, he had outraised Garrity 10-1.

    Trump was welcomed to Pa. by Stacy Garrity. He didn’t mention her at all.
    President Donald Trump brings U.S. Rep. Ryan Mackenzie (right) to the stage as he holds an event in Mackenzie’s Lehigh Valley district at Mack Trucks in Macungie Tuesday, June 23, 2026.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

    But Matthew Beynon, a spokesperson for Garrity’s campaign, said she “does not expect, nor does she need, to go dollar-for-dollar with Josh Shapiro.” Instead, he said, she “just needs the resources to prosecute her case against Josh Shapiro … and she is on pace to be able to do so.”

    Garrity looks forward to “continued support” from the RGA, he said.

    Other national attention on Pennsylvania

    After Mastriano’s disastrous performance in 2022, Republicans coalesced around Garrity — whose 3.5 million votes in 2024 were the most ever for a statewide candidate in Pennsylvania — as their best shot at defeating Shapiro.

    But in the year since she received the party’s endorsement, Garrity has barely moved the needle. A Quinnipiac University poll in July found Shapiro leading Garrity 53% to 40% among registered Pennsylvania voters. Trump saw even lower scores: Just 39% of those polled approved of the president’s job performance.

    A poll from a Republican-leaning firm promoted by Garrity showed her down, 50% to 43%.

    Across Pennsylvania, she has also competed for attention and resources as her party prioritizes other major election battles this fall.

    Four Republican-held congressional districts — based in Bucks County, the Lehigh Valley, Scranton, and Harrisburg — are seeing a rush of national attention and money as their outcomes could decide control of the narrowly divided U.S. House.

    Shapiro has also invested heavily in trying to flip the state Senate to Democratic control for the first time in three decades, putting Republicans further on their heels. The $3.3 million that Shapiro committed to the effort is more than Garrity has raised in her entire campaign.

    Josh Shapiro has fundraised $50 million since the beginning of last year, his campaign says
    Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro addresses the audience during a rally for Democratic congressional candidate Bob Brooks at the United Steelworkers Union Hall in Bethlehem, Pa. on Sunday, July 26, 2026.David Maialetti / Staff Photographer

    On the other side of the aisle, Pennsylvania’s top elected Republican — U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick — has endorsed Garrity but has not appeared to join in her public campaign efforts so far. A Trump ally and former hedge fund leader, McCormick has raised millions since his election in 2024, and political action committees associated with him have donated to other PACs working to elect Pennsylvania Republicans in Congress.

    McCormick has hosted events and campaigned for Garrity, and he “will keep doing everything he can to help her win,” said Mike DeVanney, a spokesperson for the senator.

    “He believes she demonstrates the kind of leadership we need and the kind that President Trump and many others have recognized as one that can move our commonwealth forward,” DeVanney said.

    Gerow said McCormick undoubtedly could help Garrity down the stretch.

    “He’s a prolific fundraiser. He has the connections, and he has the personality to raise large amounts of money. And he can be very, very helpful with the Garrity campaign if he weighs in with full weight,” Gerow said.

    Garrity’s campaign said McCormick has been an “incredible supporter,” including with his early endorsement and connections to supporters.

    Shapiro has also cultivated across-the-aisle relationships with some Pennsylvania Republicans who would be expected to promote Garrity.

    In an April interview with Punchbowl News, U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a Bucks County Republican running for reelection in the nationally watched 1st Congressional District, said he thought Shapiro would win his reelection contest and should run for president, adding: “I think Josh is very, very smart.”

    And during his 2022 run, Shapiro collected endorsements from other prominent Republicans, including Jim Schultz, a former Trump White House lawyer, and former Republican U.S. Rep. Charlie Dent.

    The final stretch

    Though the November election is less than three months away, that is still plenty of time in politics. Most ad spending does not start until September, and ground game efforts — door knocking, phone banking, and get-out-the-vote campaigns — get underway in the fall.

    Winning Pennsylvania is a priority for Trump in the midterms, and Garrity’s campaign said she is “grateful” for his continued support.

    On the state level, James Markley, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania GOP, said the party is “fully invested” in helping Garrity beat Shapiro. Those efforts include training “thousands” of volunteers and working on education programs around early voting and casting mail-in ballots.

    “The more Pennsylvania voters learn about Stacy Garrity, the more they love her,” he said in a statement. “The more Pennsylvania voters learn about Josh Shapiro, they realize he has no record to stand on.”

    Gerow said Garrity’s challenge, with limited funds compared with Shapiro, is whether she has enough money to get her message out.

    “The major concern for her immediately is to be able to tell her story,” Gerow said. “She doesn’t have the resources to tell that story effectively right now, and she has a great story.”

    Buttons for State Treasurer Stacy Garrity and President Trump are left on a table following a VIP reception before a Garrity rally in Bucks County Thursday, Sept. 25, 2025. Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

    Throughout her campaign, Garrity has hammered Shapiro on several issues she said reveal his lack of transparency as a public official. She has held roundtable discussions blasting Shapiro for his early embrace of data centers, a position he has since distanced himself from after calling for new guidelines for their development. Her campaign released a video series online that questions his handling of criminal investigations. And she has repeatedly insisted that Shapiro, who is widely rumored to be running for president in 2028, is “more interested in Pennsylvania Avenue than helping Pennsylvania families.”

    How Josh Shapiro’s early embrace of data centers is testing his high popularity in Pennsylvania

    Samantha Reposa, a spokesperson for Shapiro’s campaign, disputed Garrity’s framing and emphasized that she has stood in lockstep with Trump on most of his positions.

    “Garrity is now running to be nothing more than a rubber stamp for Trump and his agenda that’s hurting Pennsylvania families — and we will continue to hold her accountable,” Reposa said.

    A new ad from Shapiro’s campaign paints her as “100% MAGA,” highlighting her support for Trump’s tariffs.

    Given Garrity’s fundraising deficit, Chen said, he would advise her to focus on meeting individual people in the community, if he were running her campaign.

    “Forget the GOP dinners. Start going to fairs. Start going to places that Republicans don’t show up. Start retail politics, and start introducing yourself to the state outside of Donald Trump, outside of modern Republicanism,” he said. “Tell the state what you’ve done for them and what you would do differently [as governor].”

    Staff writer Joe Yerardi contributed to this article.