Oh this is just so delicious: Each top contender for the Pennsylvania’s GOP Senate nomination – celebrity quack Melmet Oz and failed Trump groveler David McCormick – believes that he will eke out a primary victory once all the mail ballots are counted.
Yes, the mail ballots.
Jeez. If memory serves, this is precisely the same mail-ballot process that Donald Trump and his goons falsely denounced as “corrupt.” In the lying words of Rudy Giuliani, holding forth at Four Seasons Total Landscaping shortly after the ’20 election, mail ballots in Pennsylvania are purportedly fixed by “the decrepit Democratic machine.”
And yet, two nights ago, Senate candidate-in-limbo McCormick, trailing Oz by a fraction of a percent, told his followers: “We’re gonna win this campaign…We have tens of thousands of mail-in ballots that have not been counted, that are gonna need to be counted…We can see the path ahead, we can see victory ahead.” Everybody dutifully went yay, egged on by McCormick’s smiling nodding wife. Who happens to be Dina Powell. Who worked in the White House for Trump. The same president who relentlessly attacked the integrity of mail ballots long before anyone started voting in 2020.
You can’t tell the scamps without a scorecard. Trump still hates mail ballots, but the candidate he endorsed in the Senate race, Dr. Oz, told his followers on Tuesday night that he awaits the results of the mail ballots: “When all the votes are tallied, I am confident we will win.” Trump apparently wasn’t happy with that remark – how dare Dr. Oz honor the results of mail ballots! – because he subsequently wrote on his social media site: “Dr. Oz should declare victory. It makes it much harder for them to cheat with the ballots they ‘just happened to find.'”
(Trump is referring to legitimate ballots that simply haven’t been counted yet. As opposed to the imaginary ballots that he asked for in Georgia, when he ordered the state’s top election official to “find” him 11,000 votes. But I digress.)
Meanwhile – stay with me on this – Pennsylvania GOP gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano has a tricky predicament. He can’t publicly denounce the state’s mail-ballot process right now even though he reportedly intends to abolish it. Because if he were to denounce it now, he’d be implying that regardless of whether the winner is Oz or McCormick, that victory will be inherently tainted. (By the way: Mastriano, as a state senator, voted in 2019 in favor of the current mail-ballot process. So there’s that, too.)
So, the big question: Why are Oz and McCormick honoring the legitimacy of the uncounted mail ballots, with nary a peep of protest from Mastriano or any other Republican aside from Trump? It ain’t rocket science. When Democratic voters – especially people of color in the cities – use mail ballots, bingo, it’s fraud. But when overwhelmingly white Republican primary voters use mail ballots, presto, it’s all legit.
What a break for Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman. While Oz and McCormick are compelled to wait for the mail ballot count and the virtually certain recount, a process that could drag into late spring, Fetterman gets time to recover from his stroke.
And I love this quip from veteran political commentator Norm Ornstein: “The best thing that could happen for Democrats is for McCormick to win based on the mail-in ballots, and have Trump denounce him as a cheat and liar.” Pass the popcorn.