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Hello, and welcome back to Tomorrow Will Be Worse!
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Today, as every Wednesday, I bring you the work of the inimitable Tina Nguyen—plus, some bonus content for subscribers after the main event.
This week, Tina dives into something I’ve long wondered about: does MAGA candidates’ strategy of actively avoiding any but the most MAGA media actually work? Tina explores this through the campaign of Doug Mastriano, the self-declared Christian nationalist running for governor of Pennsylvania. Mastriano won a crowded G.O.P. primary with the help of an endorsement from Donald Trump, but though both men are overtly hostile to the mainstream media, their communications strategies are actually quite different. Trump bashed the mainstream press while actively courting it, but Mastriano has completely isolated himself from it. How’s it going for him? And does this strategy only work for Trump because Trump is truly so sui generis, unable to be replicated?
I’ll let you read Tina’s fascinating reporting—and wickedly delicious prose—to find out.
Julia
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Doug Mastriano’s Snowflake Strategy |
After crashing through a G.O.P. primary, Mastriano’s fringey brand of Q-inflected, hyper-MAGA politics has been a harder sell with general election voters. The Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate hasn’t made things easier by insulating himself from the very media outlets he needs to win. |
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Among the more fringe candidates who muscled their way onto the sputtering G.O.P. rocket ship this year, Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, might be the purest of MAGA true believers: an election-denying, vaccine-dismissing, QAnon-espousing, self-proclaimed Christian nationalist and Confederate cosplayer. As Larry Ceisler, a Philly-based political communications strategist told me about Mastriano, “He truly believes that God is talking to him. And God wants him to run MAGA.” Ceisler is a Democrat, but he’s not wrong: Mastriano led a prayer session on Jan 5., 2021, calling on God to help Trump “seize the power.” The next day, he marched on the Capitol.
Mastriano’s radical brand of post-Trumpian politics has been a tough sell with Pennsylvania’s general election voters. After beating nine less zany Republican rivals with a whopping 42.3 percent of the primary vote, Mastriano is now lagging his Democratic rival, the state attorney general Josh Shapiro, by somewhere between 3 and 11 points, depending on the poll. That’s worse than expected given the G.O.P.’s structural advantages this cycle, but it’s basically in line with Dr. Mehmet Oz’s performance against John Fetterman, also in Pennsylvania. And, frankly, it’s still within striking distance of Shapiro, especially if the polls are off. Mastriano still has time, in theory, to modulate some of his hard-right positions, as Blake Masters has done in Arizona, or to engage traditional media, to capture the moderate voters he needs.
But Mastriano, thus far, has evidenced zero ability to pivot. He barely has a relationship with the Republican Governors Association, the organization that’s supposed to be working on his behalf, and he’s been downright hostile toward the mainstream press—not just national outlets like The New York Times, but also local television and radio stations in Pennsylvania. Instead, he’s deliberately limited his media exposure to digital livestreams with far right internet personalities, such as Real America’s Voice and the Chris Stigall Show, and appearances on Newsmax, OAN and Steve Bannon’s War Room. His campaign rallies are functionally closed to the press. He’s beefed with Breitbart and ignored Fox News, very occasionally talking to their digital team but otherwise ignoring their cable arm.
The closest that any non-MAGA journalist has gotten to interviewing Mastriano was when the Washington Examiner’s national political columnist, Salena Zito, approached Mastriano at a Turning Point USA rally that he held with Ron DeSantis in August. Initially waved through by a Turning Point representative, Zito immediately found herself blocked by a Mastriano staffer. “He said, ‘Well, you’re not going to talk to Mastriano. That’s not happening today. You’ve not been nice to him,’” Zito told me. She wasn’t surprised: like dozens of other journalists covering the Pennsylvania governor’s race—both national and local—Zito had already experienced the pointy end of the Mastriano campaign’s non-press strategy. Indeed, there have been numerous reports of journalists being explicitly barred from entering his rallies by armed security, and shoved out of Mastriano’s path, to say nothing of having requests for comment even returned. (True to form, the Mastriano campaign did not respond to my requests for comment.)
I was surprised because Zito, who’s also a columnist for the New York Post, is hardly the stereotypical Fake News stooge. In fact, she’s drawn mainstream scorn and Never-Trump hatred, as well as praise from outlets like The Federalist, for her sympathetic profiles of Trump voters. Nevertheless, earlier in the summer Zito had committed the apparently unforgivable sin of writing a column asking why Mastriano was avoiding the media. The affront had not been forgotten two months later when she was stiff-armed by the Mastriano staffer, who told Zito that the campaign would reconsider her access to the candidate if she was “nicer” in the future. Zito was baffled. “I’m like, this is not a transactional relationship,” she told me. “I mean, our job is to ask the questions that voters want to know.”
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The bunker media strategy may have worked in Mastriano’s favor during the G.O.P. primaries. While he faced more than a dozen candidates in the primary, several of whom were pro-Trump stalwarts like Rep. Lou Barletta, Mastriano took his campaign off the grid with a grassroots coalition of election skeptics and QAnon sympathizers, cultivated largely on Facebook. In the end, he trounced his more moderate opponents, despite several of them dropping out in a last-minute bid to coalesce around an establishment challenger. A belated endorsement from Donald Trump helped seal the deal.
And Mastriano has kept to that strategy, so far, during the general election, even going so far as to refuse to attend any debates unless he can pick the moderator himself. Last week, he posted a video on his Facebook page with a screenshot of an article titled “Doug Mastriano’s Ghosting of Media in PA Guv Race Brilliant, Working: Experts.” (Replied one follower: “Stick to it Doug! It’s working!”)
The safe-space strategy, I’m told, was the brainchild of Mark Serrano, the C.E.O. of the conservative firm Proactive Communications, which also consulted on Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign. But if it’s supposed to reflect the middle-fingers-to-the-media ethos of the MAGA movement’s leader, it also has a massive blind spot. “Even Donald Trump engaged with the news media day in and day out. In fact, he relished it, even though he argued and battled with them every chance he had,” noted Jim Schultz, a former Trump White House counsel and a Pennsylvania Republican supporting Shapiro. “Mastriano’s apparent strategy of ignoring the news media and insulating himself from any accountability makes no sense. The question everyone should have is ‘what is he hiding?’”
It’s a hard question to answer, for that very reason. Mastriano’s media quarantine on conspiracy island has forced journalists to make near-herculean efforts to dredge up info on the would-be governor, such as scouring fringe websites that are practically unknown outside of MAGA world. (Have you ever heard of The Wendy Bell Show?) The result has helped to insulate Mastriano’s public profile as a suit-and-tie-wearing gubernatorial candidate from his downright nutty private life. (Mastriano spoke at an event for a church that worships the AR-15 assault rifle, for example.)
And for a certain number of voters, it’s working. There are plenty of Republicans in Pennsylvania who are fine closing their eyes and pulling the lever for the guy with the R next to his name, and the less they know about him, the better. But Mastriano’s refusal to engage with the press, and his aversion to traditional television advertising, has also given Shapiro endless opportunities to define his opponent. “They’re not allowing Mastriano to normalize himself,” Ceisler told me, referring to Democratic attacks. “That’s why they keep pushing out the anti-Semitic stuff, the Confederate stuff, all of that.”
With six weeks in the race left, it’s unclear whether Mastriano can get over the near-infinite number of hurdles in his way—a severe lack of money, a paltry ad budget, a record of insanity miles long—or even get out of his own way. If there’s a silver lining for Republicans, it’s that Mastriano won’t necessarily drag down Oz, or vice versa, since Pennsylvania allows voters to split their votes across multiple parties on the same ballot. “I was just out in Somerset County and Westmoreland County, and I saw signs that had Shapiro and Oz in them,” Zito told me. Good news for Oz, perhaps, but it’s hardly the portent that the G.O.P. needs.
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Julia back on the mic. One more note before I let you go. Last week, I wrote about the 20 percent vacancy rate among U.S. ambassadors and how, in part, that was because many nominations get jammed up in the Senate. I also mentioned that the nominees that have the hardest time getting out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and to the Senate floor for a final vote are the women. The reason is that the committee is almost all male: the only female senator on it is New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen (who, by the way, mentioned the piece on the Senate floor on Wednesday). And because the Senate is, on average, quite old, the women Joe Biden nominates run into major problems.
As soon as my story came out, so many women across Washington came out of the woodwork to tell me horror stories of Biden’s female State Department nominees getting caught in the parochial maw of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Biden, to his credit, has nominated some extremely impressive women to State Department posts, women who are deservedly confident in themselves, their accomplishments, and their abilities. But, as any professional woman knows, men don’t always see it that way.
In meetings with senators, Biden’s female nominees were called “insolent,” “arrogant,” and “condescending.” Women had to apologize to senators, both Republican and Democrat, for policy positions they had held before, including as part of their jobs, including as spokespeople for prior administrations. One nominee, for instance, had to apologize to a senator for defending Barack Obama’s open Cuba policy as an N.S.C. spokeswoman. One nominee was harangued so aggressively by Republican male staffers at a meeting, that State Department employees had to begin accompanying her to meetings with committee senators to head off future harassment. (And this is a nominee who had survived being kidnapped by a terrorist group.)
In short, that’s what it’s like to be a woman in Washington, which can still be a small-minded, conservative, patriarchal place. And reader, it sucks.
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FOUR STORIES WE’RE TALKING ABOUT |
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The Putin Opposition |
The doyenne of Russian independent journalism reflects on the dark mood in Moscow. |
JULIA IOFFE |
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Apple’s Pixar Fantasy |
If ‘Luck’ was a flop, what does that tell us about Apple TV+—and streaming writ large? |
JULIA ALEXANDER |
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Slick Rick |
Rick Scott’s maverick running of the N.R.S.C. has ruffled some feathers. |
TARA PALMERI |
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