When John Fetterman arrived at the Pennsylvania State Capitol on January 5, 2021, a crowd of hundreds of political discontents had gathered beneath his balcony. As the capital of the commonwealth, demonstrations are not an unfamiliar occurrence in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. But as Fetterman, the Democratic lieutenant governor, put it, there was “an edge and an anger” to the protest that morning. It was fertile ground for Donald Trump’s “big lie”; chants of “Stop the Steal” and jeers of “you rigged it” garnished the disordered display. What Fetterman didn’t expect was to be met by that same energy once he walked into the capitol.
It was the first session of the Pennsylvania State Senate in the New Year, and on the day’s agenda was to swear in newly elected and reelected members. More pomp than circumstance, Fetterman likened the exercise to a political “picture day” (“no one wants to ruin picture day,” he noted). Yet, Republicans—who have held the majority in both chambers of the Pennsylvania legislature for more than a decade—did just that when they refused to seat Democrat Jim Brewster, who had won reelection to the State Senate in a closely contested race. Fetterman, in his capacity as president of the Senate, pleaded with the Republican leadership to swear in Brewster but, in a troubling denouement, Republicans voted to oust Fetterman from the chamber.
Reflecting on that day one year later, Fetterman still couldn’t believe that it happened, but also said he was relieved that the scene in Harrisburg didn’t devolve into violence. In many ways, the spectacle in Harrisburg on the fifth of January was a harbinger not only of the attack the following day on the U.S. Capitol, but also the ongoing attempts by the Republican Party to subvert the democratic process and pave the way for a potential Donald Trump victory in 2024. Pennsylvania is poised to become an even bloodier battleground in the next presidential contest. And the contours of that all-but-certain fight will be determined by the 2022 election cycle.
The state has already garnered national attention ahead of the midterms, with outsize focus on the race to take outgoing senator Pat Toomey’s seat—particularly as the Republican primary field fills out with the likes of television personality Mehmet Oz and David McCormick, who has surrounded himself with prominent Trumpworld operatives—but the importance of the 2022 election in the state goes beyond control of the Senate. With Democratic governor Tom Wolf termed-out, the gubernatorial race is critically important. It will not only dictate control of the executive, but the lieutenant governor and, perhaps most importantly, the secretary of state—which oversees elections in the commonwealth—potentially becoming, in our new reality, the final line between ensuring a free and fair election, and subverting it. Beyond that, with current Pennsylvania attorney general Josh Shapiro in the race for governor, his successor will be appointed by whomever wins the gubernatorial bid to finish out the remainder of Shapiro’s term.
“I think 2022 will be the first election where we’re starting to see the consequences of the division that we’ve seen around election integrity and around efforts to undermine confidence in our democracy,” former Philadelphia city commissioner Al Schmidt told me. “I would have thought, or thought at the time, that things would have been better by now. And if anything, they’re every bit as bad—if not worse.” Schmidt, a Republican, drew the ire of Trump and members of his party when he voted to certify the 2020 election results, amid baseless allegations of voter fraud in Pennsylvania. Now, Schmidt says, “The big question that is unanswered is whether our system of government was saved in 2020 by the strength of our institutions or by a dozen or two people in critical positions throughout the country.”
That is a question Democrats in Pennsylvania don’t want to have to answer. “Everything that’s happened since 2020, the election and Joe Biden taking office, the GOP’s plan is really just a rematch in 2024. Everything they’re doing is a methodical march and setting the table for 2024, for Trump’s second term,” Fetterman lamented. “I don’t think enough attention has been given to just how impossibly close this election was. You had three states—Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia—decided by about 45,000 votes.… If those would’ve dropped a different way, and they very easily could’ve, you would’ve had a 269 Electoral College tie, and it would’ve all come down on Pennsylvania, and you know how contentious and how crazy it was in Pennsylvania.”
Some Democrats see a worst-case scenario on the ballot. With the Biden–backed voting rights legislation stalled at the federal level, and 2020 serving as a portent of what’s to come, Pennsylvania Democrats are bracing for another political brawl in their own backyard. Republicans are still expected to hold the majority in both the Pennsylvania House and Senate in 2022, if by a smaller margin, should new legislative maps—currently in a preliminary redistricting stage—be officially approved. If Democrats lose the governor’s mansion they will have no real ability to block draconian legislation and the further erosion of voting protections. Not to mention, should the 2024 presidential race be a repeat of 2020, Democrats fear that Republicans, beholden to “the big lie,” would subvert any election results that don’t go their way.
Joanna McClinton, the Democratic leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, described a broken political process in Harrisburg, one that has worsened since January 6. “Normally I’d say we can be rather productive, work across the aisle,” she said. “But [in the] fallout from the 2020 election, we have not seen bipartisanship fostered in a strong way—strong or meaningful.” Case in point, she noted, in the weeks following the attack on the U.S. Capitol, one of the first pieces of legislation introduced by lawmakers and approved by voters imposed new limits on Governor Wolf’s emergency powers—against the backdrop of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic—despite the existing ability of the state legislature to overturn an emergency disaster declaration with a two-thirds majority. “The partisanship was just so high and it was so toxic that they wanted to publicly humiliate the Democratic governor,” McClinton said.
“I am deeply concerned about some of the policies that Republicans in our General Assembly have been pushing. They just refused to accept the fact that President Biden won Pennsylvania fair and square. In fact, right now they’re in the middle of just another one of these absurd audits,” Val Arkoosh, a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, said. “Governor Wolf has been steadfast in rejecting those sorts of pieces of legislation.”
Joe Biden’s slim victory of 50% to Trump’s 48.8% in Pennsylvania not only thrust the former over the 270-vote threshold needed to win the Electoral College but cemented the commonwealth as one of the few remaining presidential battlegrounds. But to cast Pennsylvania as a “purple state” would be something of a misnomer. As Christine Jacobs, the executive director of the Represent PA PAC, explained, “I tend to think we’re a checkerboard state. There are red pockets and there are blue pockets, but there are not many purple ones”—not unlike the country as a whole.
Pennsylvania is a microcosm of the ataxia of the body politic we are seeing at the national level. Democrats are blunt in their assessment that Trumpism has infected the bloodstream of the Pennsylvania Republican Party. “They’re all peddling dangerous conspiracy theories and undermining our democratic institutions because they’re beholden to the big lie,” Shapiro, the sole Democrat running for governor in Pennsylvania, said of the Republican primary field in the gubernatorial contest. (By way of example, the GOP field includes—among other Trumpy characters—Doug Mastriano, a Republican state senator who personally attended and used campaign funds to pay for buses to travel to the U.S. Capitol for the “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6.) “There is a clear contrast in this race. And I think the stakes could not be higher because the battle over our democracy is playing out, not in our nation’s capital, but in state capitals, and Pennsylvania is the epicenter of that fight.”
Shapiro—who, in his capacity as attorney general, says he oversaw and won more than 40 lawsuits brought by Trump and his enablers to overturn the election results in Pennsylvania—sees “a straight line between the initial lies in early 2020 coming from the former president, to the litigation to make it harder for people to vote and then, ultimately, make it harder for votes to count in Pennsylvania.” Democracy, he stresses, is on the ballot in 2022. “I think it is important that people understand that all of these things are interrelated and connected,” Shapiro said.
The Republican Party’s deep-seated fixation with Pennsylvania was laid bare when in December 2020, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against the state of Pennsylvania and three other battleground states over pandemic-era changes to election procedures, a moment in which Shapiro thinks “a significant line was crossed,” and what he argued before the Supreme Court was an act of sedition—a stance he maintains to this day.
Pennsylvania congressman Conor Lamb, who is in the race for Toomey’s Senate seat, said he views Trump as “much more deeply embedded in a personal and organizational way” in Pennsylvania than in other states. And Trumpworld figures—including retired general Michael Flynn, Jenna Ellis, Rudy Giuliani, Kellyanne Conway, Bill Stepien, and Tim Murtaugh, among others—are engaged with Republican campaigns in Pennsylvania in various capacities. “As a result, the local lawmakers and the people who are doing his bidding at the state level are just a lot more loyal to him and I think they are willing to go a lot further in their attempts to either overturn the last election or get ready to subvert the next one,” Lamb said. “Let’s just be honest about what the modern Republican Party really is like,” he said, pointing to candidates who say they represent the working class, yet are “not just wealthy, but ultrawealthy people parachuting into our state who hadn’t deemed it worthy to set foot here in years until their political interest and their desire to become a celebrity made them come back here.”
“That’s David McCormick, that’s Dr. Oz, that’s Carla Sands,” he said. (If in search of Dr. Oz, you might find him in his New Jersey mansion rather than rubbing elbows with Pennsylvanians.) “The only thing tying those three people together is the fact that they’re seeking Donald Trump’s approval to try to become a celebrity wealthy politician,” Lamb continued. “That’s what the Republican Party is now in our state. That’s not what it was. It used to be Tom Ridge. It used to be Arlen Specter. It used to be John Heinz, and that is a major, major, major change. And people should register that for what it is.”
“The big lie” is arguably more potent today than in the days leading up to the January 6 insurrection. Rather than a blemish on the records of the Republican officials, cable news talking heads, and Trumpian troubadours who pumped election conspiracy theories into the ether, “Was the race rigged?” has emerged as a litmus test for the GOP, particularly those courting the endorsement of the 45th president. “It’s a conspiracy that will never go away, because the first Republican that would acknowledge that it wasn’t true is immediately incinerated. You literally have no future in elective politics as a Republican if you acknowledge that Donald Trump lost that fair and square and that Donald Trump isn’t the greatest president in the history of America. I defy you to find anyone that does,” Fetterman said. When asked by The Philadelphia Inquirer, none of the most prominent Republicans running for the Pennsylvania Senate seat would say definitively that they would have voted to certify the 2020 election results. “It’s just an entirely next level of performance art, and it’s all grounded in the knowledge that everyone that’s engaging in it knows that they are lying,” Fetterman said.
That Pennsylvania is fertile ground for “the big lie” to fester and foster might be surprising at first blush. But it is a consequence of a confluence of several factors. As one of the few remaining battleground states, with a prize purse of 19 electoral votes, winning Pennsylvania is a base motivator. But as Marc Elias, who says he has represented the Biden administration and the Democratic National Committee in 65 election-related lawsuits, stressed that it is in a state like Pennsylvania—where the margin of victory often falls within the single digits at the state-level and in presidential elections—where voting laws can have a real impact on the outcome of an election. “Pennsylvania is that state…. Elections in this country in states like Pennsylvania, or for president, are decided by inches, not feet, and certainly not yards.”
“Trumpism is now doctrine in the Republican Party.… It’s actually remarkable. Rather than the fever breaking, the fever got hotter in the Republican Party,” Elias said.
Democracy is on the ballot in Pennsylvania, sure. And the commonwealth is undeniably a swing state. It went for Barack Obama in 2012, Trump in 2016, and Biden in 2020. But what will swing it in the future is an open question. What role will the events of January 6, 2021, play in pulling people to the polls? How closely is the average Pennsylvanian paying attention to the bills passed by the Republican-led legislature that die on Governor Wolf’s desk? Is it the economy, stupid?
“I think that what often gets kind of overlooked or maybe misunderstood about Pennsylvania is that Pennsylvanians are just down-to-earth, hardworking folks. They don’t get caught up in labels or a lot of rhetoric, they just want to elect people who are gonna help solve their problems and make their lives a little bit easier,” Arkoosh said. “They don’t want the B.S., they don’t want, you know, the crazy tweet. They don’t want any of that. They want somebody who’s gonna help them solve their problems.”
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