Staring down Trump and chasing front-runners, McSwain goes on offense in governor’s race
.jpeg "Bill McSwain has become the most aggressive candidate in GOP primary for governor.")
This week’s debate between the four leading Republicans running for governor opened with a question about the ramifications of cutting Pennsylvania’s gas tax.
After three of the candidates served up their answers, Bill McSwain set his sights on them.
“What you’ve just heard is a bunch of double-talk from three politicians. They say one thing and then they do another. That’s why people don’t trust politicians,” the former U.S. attorney said standing alongside his rivals. “What we need in Pennsylvania is a conservative outsider as governor.”
With just over three weeks from the primary, McSwain is taking a calculated risk of directly attacking his rivals and assuming the most aggressive posture in the crowded primary race as he attempts to catch polling leaders Lou Barletta and Doug Mastriano.
To his critics, it may look like an act of desperation after former President Donald Trump instructed his supporters not to cast a ballot for McSwain for failing to challenge the commonwealth’s 2020 election results. But it could also be seen as a tactical necessity to plant seeds of doubts in voters’ minds about the front-runners before they settle on a final decision.
In a recent interview with McClatchyDC, McSwain asserted that Mastriano and Barletta are essentially predicating their campaigns on promises they’ve already broken.
“Doug Mastriano, for example, voted for the no-excuse mail-in balloting law, so why would we trust him to fix the problem that he created?,” McSwain asked. “Lou Barletta, for example, has supported all manner of higher taxes, including higher gas taxes.”
McSwain’s charge against Mastriano refers to his 2019 vote as a state senator for Act 77, a law which allowed Pennsylvanians to vote by mail up to 50 days prior to an election and be placed on a permanent list to receive a mail-in ballot.
Mastriano has argued the state Supreme Court “hijacked” the law by later widening the mail-in ballot provisions during the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
McSwain’s hit on Barletta’s gas tax position also holds some veracity.
While Barletta says he’d review and potentially cut the state’s gas of 58 cents per gallon, in the past he’s stated the importance of the federal gas tax.
During the congressional debate over Trump’s infrastructure proposal in 2018, Barletta told The Hill “the simplest and fastest answer” to fund projects “is a user fee and the gas tax.”
McSwain is pledging to permanently cut the state’s gas tax in half and says he’ll make up for the lost revenue by examining all state spending. He cited “giveaways to alternative forms of energy” and subsidies to develop racehorses as items he’d likely cut.
In the debate, McSwain was no less aggressive during a later round of questioning on electability, suggesting that Barletta would lose a general election to presumptive Democratic nominee Josh Shapiro, the state’s attorney general.
“Something that Lou Barletta said caught my ear. He said, ‘You know what you’re going to get with Lou Barletta.’ And he’s right. We do know what we’re going to get. We’re going to get a career politician who raises taxes, who approves increased spending, he approved [former President] Obama’s budgets and you’re going to get somebody who gets wiped out in general elections,” McSwain said. “You lost by 14 points to Bob Casey and that was a year where we picked up seats in the Senate. That was not a great Democratic year, we picked up seats as Republicans.”
Barletta responded by accusing McSwain of voting for Obama but later apologized for hurling that charge.
“I was wrong and I apologize to Mr. McSwain. He didn’t vote for Obama, he voted for Bill Clinton because you were a Democrat during that time,” Barletta said.
McSwain also returned to targeting Mastriano’s voting record in Harrisburg, charging that he supported spending increases championed by Gov. Tom Wolf and dusted off his former comments about how he’d handle those infected by Covid-19.
“Worst of all, he has proposed a Covid registry. So if he were governor our personal medical information would have been broadcast out to the world. That’s bad for Pennsylvania and we’re not going to do that when I’m governor,” McSwain said.
Mastriano wanted to temporarily suspend HIPAA laws that protect the names and identities of patients who have contracted the virus.
“When it comes to a contagious disease, we should be able to know, yes this person had it, and so then the word will go out that I had contact with him or her,” Mastriano told Harrisburg’s ABC-27.
It’s a comment that will surely gain greater scrutiny if Mastriano captures the GOP nomination on May 17.
Public polling shows Mastriano and Barletta statistically tied for the primary lead with McSwain about 6 points behind, but the significant swath of undecided voters will likely determine the outcome in the contest’s final weeks.
Needing to make up ground, McSwain is only likely to accelerate the pressure on his rivals.
In his latest TV ad that began running this week, McSwain slams Barletta, Mastriano and Dave White, a Delaware County Council member, as “three tax-raising politicians.”
