Kathy Barnette, Jeff Bartos, George Bochetto, Sean Gale and Carla Sands during the Republican U.S. Senate debate at Dickinson College on April 26, 2022.
Joe Hermitt / PennLive
With big spenders off-stage, ‘the pack’ tries to shake up Pennsylvania’s Republican Senate race
Here’s a look at how the candidates - who have generally trailed Dave McCormick and Mehmet Oz -- on the stage distinguished themselves.
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Charles Thompson/PennLive
Joe Hermitt / PennLive
Kathy Barnette, Jeff Bartos, George Bochetto, Sean Gale and Carla Sands during the Republican U.S. Senate debate at Dickinson College on April 26, 2022.
(Carlisle) — The chances are dwindling now for candidates for statewide office to change the trajectory of their campaigns.
But with big spenders David McCormick and Dr. Mehmet Oz off-stage, Tuesday’s “Spotlight on Pennsylvania” debate among the five other candidates on the Republican Party’s U.S. Senate primary ballot had a golden chance to do just that.
Here’s a look at how those candidates – who have generally trailed McCormick and Oz since they established political “air superiority through an advertising blitzkrieg this winter – on the stage distinguished themselves.
Gene J. Puskar / AP Photo
Voters stand in line as they wait their turn to cast their ballots during primary voting, at the North Braddock Municipal Building in Braddock, Pa., Tuesday, June 2, 2020.
The 2020 election.
Jeff Bartos, the Montgomery County real estate developer and 2018 GOP lieutenant governor nominee, and Philadelphia attorney George Bochetto both said that they would have voted to certify Pennsylvania’s 2020 election results.
That’s not necessarily an easy position to take in the wake of former President Donald J. Trump’s unproven charges of fraudulent practices – here and in other swing states around the nation – that Trump and some of his allies claimed cost him a second term.
Bartos called his decision in part a technical one based on a close reading of the Electoral Count Act, which he said gives the Congress a pretty ministerial role in the process. But he also explained that, given his familiarity with the county officials across Pennsylvania after a full year of campaigning, he has faith that the counties, who truly administer the elections in Pennsylvania, by and large did their jobs accurately and fairly.
Bochetto, who during this campaign has often touted the fact that his law firm was asked to help frame the free speech defense for former President Donald J. Trump when he was tried on articles of impeachment in February 2021, also adopted a pro-certification stance when asked for a clarification after the debate.
Bochetto made plain during Tuesday’s debate that he believed the election was run under a law that improperly permitted no-excuse, mail-in balloting in Pennsylvania, which he said he would try to end if elected to the Senate. But he clarified to PennLive that he would have had to have left the 2020 results stand because there wasn’t a demonstration of widespread fraud at that time.
Candidates Carla Sands and Sean Gale made clear they would not have voted to certify the vote in January 2021.
Sands, the Cumberland County native who made her fortune with her late husband in California and parlayed her support for Republican candidates including Trump into an appointment as U.S. Ambassador to Denmark, she said she couldn’t have voted to certify based on the unresolved questions she had at that time.
Gale, like Bochetto, he believes the state law permitting the mail-in balloting was unconstitutional. He said he would vote not to certify on that basisKathy Barnette, the conservative commentator and author from Huntingdon Valley, Montgomery County, didn’t directly answer the question on certification, but said that she did see irregularities in the 2020 election, in which she ran in an unsuccessful campaign for Congress against U.S. Rep. Madeleine Dean.
Sands, Gale and Bochetto also made clear Tuesday that they would seek to end no-excuse mail-in balloting in the future.
“If France… can have an election day – in person, with paper ballots, affirming that they are a citizen, and they can count those votes in one day, and they can tell the citizens of France the outcome of that election – how the heck can we not do it in the greatest democracy in the world?” Sands asked, referring to France’s presidential election Sunday.
In this photo combination of images taken in 2022, are Republican candidates for U.S. Senate, from top left, Kathy Barnette, Jeff Bartos and Dave McCormick, and Mehmet Oz, bottom left, and Carla Sands. The five are scheduled to meet in Harrisburg, Pa., for a debate on Monday, April 25, 2022. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
Unfriendly Fire.
While several of the candidates trained fire on the two candidates, McCormick and Oz, who weren’t in the room Tuesday night, Gale and Sands made several pointed attacks on Barnette, who has shown some improvement in some recent polling in the race.
Sands at one point veered from a question on universal background checks for gun sales to assail Barnette for losing to Dean in the Congressional race by nearly 20 percentage points in 2020. Sands argued that won’t cut it against a Democrat like Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the polling leader in the Democratic primary.
Barnette countered that her very presence as a Black woman gives the Republicans a unique chance to broaden its tent.
“When I walk through that door (as a Black woman) my very presence neutralizes more than half of Democrat’s talking points,” Barnette said. “That is power in the hands of the Republican Party.”
Gale, an attorney from Plymouth Meeting, Montgomery County, then took his turn to lash out at Barnette. “Her whole campaign is she’s going to be the first Republican Black woman in the Senate… That’s exactly what we’re seeing and I’ll prove it this way: ‘There’s seven candidates running for this race. There’s nine running for governor. There’s only one candidate that had to put her picture on the sign, and that’s Kathy Barnette.”
Barnette shrugged off the attacks.
“Listen, they’re punching up right now,” she said of Gale and Sands. “They’re losing and so… they’re looking for a viral moment.”
Jeff Bartos takes part in a forum for Republican candidates for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference in Camp Hill, Pa., Saturday, April 2, 2022. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
Different shades of red.
There was broad agreement on a lot of the polestars of 21st Century Republican ideology like increasing border security; getting control over federal spending; banning abortion; and vowing to protect the right to own guns. But there were some nuances.
On immigration reform, for example:
Bochetto said he supports the creation of year-round, low-skill visas to help America’s farmers flesh out their labor forces. “We can keep track of these people, we can register them, they can pay taxes, and we know who they are and where they’re coming from. That’s the kind of immigration reform we need,” Bochetto said. “It’s not enough just to say we’re going to plug the hole in the border.”
Barnette promised stronger oversight of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to try to address what she said is a 1.5 million person backlog in processing applications for green cards and citizenship.
Bartos said he would be a vote for withholding federal funds from so-called “sanctuary cities,” or municipalities with a policy, written or unwritten, that discourages local police from reporting the immigration status of individuals unless it involves investigation of a serious crime. In Pennsylvania, Philadelphia has adopted that tack.
On abortion, all the candidates said they consider life to begin at conception and they would look to abolish abortions from that point. But Bartos made clear he would permit exceptions in cases where the life of the mother is at risk, or in cases where a pregnancy resulted from a rape.
Barnette, who has said that she was the child of a rape, and Bochetto said they would support exceptions for the life of the mother.
Gale said he wants an abortion ban with no exceptions.
In a question designed purely for Republican voters, Gale, Bochetto and Barnette counted themselves as definite or likely “no’ votes for returning U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, as the Senate Republican’s floor leader.
Bochetto said he thinks the Republicans need new blood, and he believed McConnell was divisive in how he handled the 2021 impeachment of Trump. At the time, McConnell first signalled to his colleagues that he felt Trump bore responsibility for the Jan. 6, 2021 attacks on the U.S. Capitol, but then he voted to acquit Trump in the impeachment trial. Finally, McConnell excoriated the former president in a post-vote floor speech.
Gale, once again, was far rougher: “You’ve been there for 36 years. 79 years old.. If you haven’t got it done yet, you’re not going to get it done now…. Mitch McConnell has been failure… and on Day One when I get to Washington I’m going to lead the effort to oust Mitch McConnell as the leader of our party. He has to go.”
Matt Rourke / AP Photo
Jeff Bartos, Kathy Barnette and Carla Sands take part in a forum for Republican candidates for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference in Camp Hill, Pa., on April 2.
Bartos said he would have to see who’s in the running, though he allowed that his personal favorite for the position would be U.S. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina. Sands sidestepped the question, saying her focus is on making sure that a Republican will be the majority leader, instead of the current Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer of New York.
As for the missing candidates, McCormick’s spokeswoman Jess Szymanski said he was occupied with a campaign finance dinner in Philadelphia tonight. Oz’s campaign told debate organizers that he had a schedule conflict, but they did not elaborate.
Both campaigns stressed that their candidates did participate in a GOP Senate debate broadcast on Pennsylvania’s Nexstar television stations Monday night.
With the U.S. Senate’s balance of power currently at a 50-50 tie between the two major parties, the Pennsylvania seat is seen as one of a handful nationwide that is likely to define who has majority control come 2023. The incumbent in this seat, U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, a Republican from Allentown, announced in late 2020 that he would not be seeking a third term.
In November, the winner of the Republican primary will face the winner of the Democratic primary between Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb of Allegheny County, state Rep. Malcom Kenyatta of Philadelphia and Jenkintown borough council member Alexandria Khalil.
Tuesday’s Senate GOP debate will be rebroadcast in its entirety at 9 a.m. Wednesday on the Pennsylvania Cable Network. Both the Democratic and Republican Senate debates will be aired on PCN on May 1, at 1:30 p.m. and 3 p.m., respectively.
Primary election day is May 17.
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