The Pennsylvania Christian nationalist was defeated soundly in the November 2020 gubernatorial election. He is now staging a comeback. Here is WKOK News with a piece from Penn Live’s Charles Thompson:
Doug Mastriano was back on the political stage in Pennsylvania Saturday, hosting the first political rally under his “Walk As Free People” banner since a landslide defeat to Democrat Josh Shapiro in last year’s governor’s race. “The Walk as Free People movement is not over,” said Mastriano, taking the stage at the Green Grove Gardens event center to a round of applause. “We’ve just begun.” It was the clearest signal yet from the state senator from Franklin County that he still sees himself as smack in the middle of a viable political career that enjoyed both surprising success and, in the end, a crushing defeat in 2022.
There have also already been published reports speculating that Mastriano could take a crack at the U.S. Senate in 2024, when Democratic incumbent Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. is expected to seek a fourth term in office. For now, Mastriano needs to keep the grassroots army that rallied to his campaign in last year’s Republican primary interested and intact, first to try to influence the battery of school board, local government and judicial races that will fill the state’s ballot in 2023. “We plan on doing these every few months or so in different parts of the state,” he said in a brief interview after the mainstage event featuring Newsmax personality Wendy Bell and Christina Bobb, an attorney who gained notoriety as a mouthpiece for former President Donald J. Trump’s unsubstantiated election fraud claims on One America News Network, and now works on Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.
“Messaging is important… and we had 2.2 million people which is the highest (vote count for a Republican governor candidate) in 60 years, since William Scranton. And the second-highest in the state’s history,” Mastriano said. “Such momentum at the grassroots level, with no establishment support. So we’ve got to keep it alive. We’ve seen previous gubernatorial candidates walk away when they lose. I always wondered, even before I was in politics, why would you do that? Why would you leave behind people who had invested so much in you?” Mastriano clearly wants to help local candidates. On Saturday, at least a third of the stage time at a venue near Greencastle was devoted to a slate of Franklin County candidates who Mastriano wanted to share some of his star power with.
And the crowd of more than 300 was solid for the very start of the primary cycle in an off-year for politics. But there’s some self-interest here, too. If Mastriano can keep his political movement together in this off-year cycle, that gives the retired U.S. Army colonel a strong launch pad for whatever his next political act is. Many of those in attendance made clear they hope there will be one. “There’s a lot of us that are letting him know that we’d like him here in the state,” said one ardent supporter, Bobby Lawrence of Washington Township, Franklin County, who said he’d like to see Mastriano ultimately make another run for governor in 2026. “This is where we need him. In our state,” Lawrence said. But first, there are also some intriguing 2024 questions to consider, too.
Read the rest here.
Once again, MAGA Christian nationalist Sean Feucht led worship.
