SCRANTON, Pa. — Pennsylvania voters go to the polls Tuesday after a dramatic and unpredictable primary delivered one more day of twists and questions, with one front-runner hospitalized, a surging candidate facing new questions, and a cliff-hanger finish looming in the Republican Senate race.
Much of Monday — like the rest of the final week of the campaign — centered on the surprising rise of GOP Senate candidate Kathy Barnette, who faced new questions about participating in the march that preceded the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, her Islamophobic tweets, and a suggestion that if she loses, she won’t support either of her top Republican rivals, Mehmet Oz and David McCormick.
Most polls have shown Oz, the celebrity surgeon known as “Dr. Oz,” clinging to a relatively narrow lead in the GOP Senate primary, with all three in a close grouping at the top of a race that will decide the party’s nominee in one of the country’s most critical contests. Jeff Bartos and Carla Sands trailed the top three by a distance. Former President Donald Trump leaned into his support for Oz on Monday, recording a robocall for him and calling into Oz’s closing campaign event.
In the Democratic Senate primary, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the front-runner, remained hospitalized after a stroke Friday and planned to skip his election night party Tuesday as he recovers. An email to supporters Monday said he was “on his way to full recovery.” His wife, Gisele Baretto Feterman, was expected to headline the Tuesday night event instead.
His main rivals are U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb and State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta. Lamb, who will need to defy public polling to rally and defeat Fetterman, kept a relatively low public profile Monday.
In the Republican primary for governor, public polling has consistently shown State Sen. Doug Mastriano with a significant lead over former U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta, who in the final days of the race consolidated much of the GOP establishment support, including from a major political group that spent millions backing another candidate, former U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain. But with Mastriano seemingly leading by a significant margin, Trump endorsed him Saturday.
State Attorney General Josh Shapiro, is running unopposed in the Democratic primary for governor.
The primaries for both Senate and governor have drawn national attention for their importance to control of the Senate, the potential for significant changes in state laws if the GOP wins the governor’s mansion, and signals about the strengths and directions of both parties in a critical swing state.
The Republican Senate race, in particular, is being watched as a test of Trump’s strength with GOP voters even after leaving office, as he put his muscle behind Oz.
Voters’ decisions Tuesday will frame critical races this fall.
Much of the attention in the campaign’s final days centered on Barnette, a conservative commentator who has surged to the forefront, despite the vast spending by both the wealthy Oz and McCormick.
Even Trump focused part of his remarks on Barnette during his call into Oz’s Montgomery County rally, during which Oz held up a microphone to his phone to amplify the former president’s words.
“Nobody knew anything about her until a few days ago, literally, and she has some explaining to do,” Trump said. “I think that what’s going to happen is, when she’s vetted, it’s going to be a catastrophe for the party.”
Around the same time in Scranton, Barnette remarked on her own rise, and the opposition she’s now facing.
“Everybody’s piling on, the left, the right,” she said, later adding, “the long knives are out because we’re winning.”
Earlier Monday, she gave a string of interviews to conservative radio outlets, attempting to answer the last-minute questions her rivals have raised as they try to stop her sudden momentum.
The wide variety of queries reflected the haphazard vetting that has gone into a candidate who was long overshadowed by her big-spending rivals and only in recent days appeared to be in position to win.
Asked by radio host Dom Giordano about Islamophobic social media posts that Barnette made between 2014 and 2015, she doubled down on her explanation that she wasn’t speaking in “full thoughts” when she tweeted that “Islam must not be allowed to thrive” in the U.S. and shared a link to a piece with the headline, “Pedophilia Is a Cornerstone of Islam.”
“It is not a complete sentence, it’s not a complete thought,” Barnette told Giordano. “It’s however many characters Twitter would allow you to copy or paste over, right? It’s seven or eight years ago, and now everyone is sticking this in my face … and I can’t explain the context of the tweet seven or eight years ago.”
Barnette then went on to offer context, saying the tweets were made during a national debate about whether Syrian refugees were being properly vetted under the Obama administration, and then alluded to a few U.S. terror attacks with ties to Islamic terror groups.
Pressed by Giordano on the pedophilia claim, Barnette said, “I don’t think it’s a cornerstone of Islam, no, but again … I don’t know if at the end of that text I was saying something different.” Her entire tweet on the subject was the headline and a link to the piece.
In another interview, Barnette suggested that if she loses, she won’t support either of her main GOP rivals in the general election.
She described Oz and McCormick as “globalists” and later, when asked about supporting her party’s nominee, responded, “I have no intentions of supporting globalists.”
“I believe our country is in trouble, and I don’t believe that we have much longer,” she told the conservative outlet Breitbart. “What I have done is, I have made it possible where Pennsylvanians do not have to hold their nose and vote for the lesser of two evils this time.”
But later in Scranton, Barnette appeared to ease off that comment.
“I will do anything I can for the GOP,” she told reporters.
And while Barnette has long openly questioned the lawful results of the 2020 election, and was already known to have traveled to Washington for the Trump rally that preceded the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, only on Monday did images emerge showing her joining the march to the building.
There was no evidence she entered the Capitol or took part in the riot. Asked by Breitbart about her participation that day, she pointed to her First Amendment rights but did not directly answer about whether she went into the building.
“As a law-abiding American, I wanted to go and support my president at the time, President Trump,” she said. “I wanted to hear what he had to say. I wanted to hear if there was a plan. I went, I prayed with a lot of people, had a great time, got on a bus, and came back home.”
Later in Scranton, she didn’t say whether she saw herself as a candidate of the far-right. Instead, she said she was a Republican who believes the U.S. is the greatest country in the world.
”I am the kind of Republican who believes we are a land of law and order,” she said, “and I will uphold that.”
Barnette’s rivals said the many questions should give GOP voters pause.
“She’s still a mystery to a lot of voters,” Oz said in his own interview with Giordano. “And we need to vet her to make sure that she is an individual who doesn’t have other issues going on that could hurt or kill her ability to win the general election.”
Similarly, McCormick told the host in a separate interview, “There are some very basic questions … and I don’t think those questions have been answered adequately by Kathy.”
Campaigning later on Monday in Washington County, McCormick told about 200 supporters that “we have victory in our sights.” He compared the primary campaign to an epic battle like the ones portrayed in movies, saying: “I’m gonna be your Gladiator.”
”I think the country is in trouble,” he said, “and if people don’t dig in, don’t jump into the arena, we’re gonna be lost.”
Trump recorded a robocall that was blasted out statewide, bashing both Barnette and McCormick.
“These are not candidates who put America first, and that’s what we need,” the former president said in the call, adding of Oz, “he’s tough, he’s smart, and he really loves our country.”
A former Trump ally whom the president spurned in the governor’s race, meanwhile, expressed disappointment Monday in his own campaign stop at the Penrose Diner in South Philadelphia.
“I think he made a mistake,” Barletta said of Trump’s decision to back Mastriano.
Mastriano said a last-minute effort by some Pennsylvania GOP leaders to halt his rise shows the establishment is “terrified of having a candidate that really works for the people.”
“They’re afraid of losing power and influence, because I report to the people,” Mastriano, a retired Army colonel, said on Wendy Bell Radio Monday. “It’s about power and control.”
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(Inquirer staff writers Chris Brennan, Max Marin, Andrew Seidman, Julia Terruso, and Anna Orso contributed to this article.)
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