How Pennsylvania’s governor is taking the fight to MAGA 'election deniers': report

19 September 2023

Pennsylvania, the consummate swing state, is considered a must-win by President Joe Biden's reelection campaign. Biden's campaign realizes that if he loses Pennsylvania in 2024, he's likely to lose the election.

MAGA conspiracy theorists suffered a major disappointment in 2022, when Democratic now-Gov. Josh Shapiro defeated far-right election denier Doug Mastriano, the GOP gubernatorial nominee, by around 15 percent. Nonetheless, Mastriano and other MAGA Republicans in Pennsylvania have clung to the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump in their state.

In an opinion column published on September 19, the Washington Post's Greg Sargent praises Shapiro for taking the fight to election deniers with an ambitious campaign to make voting easier in Pennsylvania.

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"Perhaps no Democrat campaigned as aggressively in defense of democracy in last year's midterm elections as Shapiro did," Sargent argues. "As state attorney general in 2020, he fought Donald Trump's efforts to reverse his loss, and in 2022, he vowed to use the governorship to prevent a future stolen election, parlaying all that into a landslide victory over ultra-MAGA opponent Doug Mastriano."

Sargent adds, "In Pennsylvania, the state GOP continues to elevate election deniers to positions of local importance, in effect feeding doubts about the state's voting system itself.But if automatic voter registration is well received in Pennsylvania, it could act as an antidote to that MAGA mania."

According to Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the Brennan Center's Voting Rights Program, automatic voter registration is a good way to demonstrate that "the people who are attacking our democracy are wrong."

Morales-Doyle told Sargent, "The answer to people undermining faith in our democracy is to give people a democracy that works."

Read Greg Sargent's full Washington Post column at this link (subscription required).

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