(Mark Pellin, Headline USA) After a tumultuous and intensely contested Pennsylvania GOP Senate primary, frontrunners Mehmet Oz and David McCormick were locked in a race too close to call into the pre-dawn hours of Wednesday morning, while Trump-endorsed state Sen. Doug Mastriano blitzed a resounding victory in the state’s Republican gubernatorial primary.
Mastriano, who has been a fierce champion for exposing fraud in the 2020 presidential election, was criticized by myriad establishment dwellers as being unelectable in a general election. He moves on to face Democrat Josh Shapiro.
“There is no one in Pennsylvania who has done more, or fought harder, for Election Integrity than State Senator Doug Mastriano,” Trump said in his endorsement of Mastriano.
“He has revealed the Deceit, Corruption, and outright Theft of the 2020 Presidential Election, and will do something about it,” Trump said.
Mastriano, though, has come under fire for attending both a QAnon-linked event in Gettysburg and the Washington, D.C., rally that took place before the Jan. 6 Capitol protest, according to the Washington Examiner.
In that light, and with the potential of future controversy, Cook Political forecasters moved the Pennsylvania general election “from Toss Up to Lean Democrat” after Mastriano’s win.
“They like to call people who stand on the Constitution far right and extreme,” Mastriano said after his win.
“I repudiate that. That is crap. That is absolutely not true,” he said.
The Democrats, he said, are the ones who have “gone extreme.”
“He is a fighter like few others, and has been with me right from the beginning, and now I have an obligation to be with him,” Trump said.
The former president will need all the MAGA mojo that can be summoned to pull Mehmet across the finish line in the state’s highly-watched GOP Senate primary.
Only a handful of votes out of nearly 1.3 million counted by early Wednesday morning separated the Trump-backed Oz and McCormick.
“We’re not gonna have a result tonight,” Oz said shortly before midnight.
The most-Trumpian candidate in the race, Kathy Barnette, made a late push as a contender, until her campaign was upturned by attacks from Oz backers, and appeared out of the running Tuesday.
The winner of the GOP primary, which appears within the state’s automatic recount threshold, faces Democrat Lt. Gov. John Fetterman in the general election.
