SCRANTON, Pennsylvania (AP) – The last full day of the campaign in the highly contested Pennsylvania primary for governor and U.S. Senate began Monday with a leading Senate candidate in the hospital and Republican Republicans trying to prevent candidates from winning. who worry that they will be ineligible in the fall.
Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who is leading a poll and fundraiser for the Democratic Senate for the U.S. Senate, was hospitalized Monday after suffering a stroke just before the weekend.
The campaign told him he would not appear at the party on Tuesday night in the Pittsburgh election, although Feterman said on Sunday that he was feeling better, expected to fully recover and would resume the campaign once he died. .
Meanwhile, new advertisements are airing for an attack on the late-growing Republican Senate nominee Katie Barnett, as many in the Republican Party began trying to consolidate support to prevent Doug Mastriano from winning the party’s gubernatorial nomination. the presidential staff on the battlefield.
Some Republicans fear that Barnett and Mastriano are too polarizing to defeat Democrat opponents in a general election. Barnett and Mastriano campaigned together, supported each other and promoted conspiracy theories, including lies by former President Donald Trump that widespread voter fraud cost his 2020 election.
They have also spent some of the money that some of their rivals have.
The crash reflected Tuesday’s high stakes in Pennsylvania’s election and the uncertainty that shook campaigns last week amid news of Feterman’s hospitalization and jockey at the last minute of the Republican primary.
In the race for governor, an organization that said it spent about $ 13 million to promote Republican nominee Bill Maxwayne, a lawyer who was appointed by Donald Trump as U.S. attorney in Philadelphia, transferred his allegiance to former Congressman Lou Barletta just two days ago. the end of the election.
The Chamber of Entrepreneurs of the Commonwealth Partners, a business advocacy group whose political action committees are channels for money from billionaire Jeffrey Yass, said it believed Barletta had the best chance of defeating Mastriano. The group is now urging Maxwain to give up and support Barletta.
Mastriano, recently endorsed by Trump, downplayed Republican efforts to defeat him and described Democrats, including President Joe Biden, as far-left radicals.
“The swamp hit back, but they hit and failed, they missed, and Donald Trump got into the middle of their conspiracy with the other’s swamp-like creatures and supported me and cut my legs under them,” Mastriano said in an interview with Light of Liberty podcast Monday.
Meanwhile, in the Republicans’ stubborn primary election to the US Senate, Barnett is working to repel growing attacks from former hedge fund chief executive David McCormick and television celebrity surgeon Mehmet Oz, a Trump-approved candidate.
Barnett told conservative radio Breitbart on Monday that “I’m not a globalist, they both are” and that they have “very strong ties to the World Economic Forum,” an organization that has been the subject of right-wing conspiracy theories.
They pretend to be “trump-wearing members of the Patriotic Party,” she said, calling Oz, who was born in the United States to parents who emigrated from Turkey and has dual citizenship – “not only American, but Turkish too.” . ”
“Globalist” is a derogatory term of anti-Semitic origin, adopted by Trump and others in his orbit to call an elite international group that does not serve America’s best interests.
Barnett also suggested on Breitbart Radio that he would not support Oz or McCormick if they won the primary, saying: “I have no intention of supporting globalists.”
Later, however, she seemed to contradict herself, telling reporters in Scranton: “I believe they are globalists and I find that very worrying. But … I will do my best for the Republican Party to make sure we win and the Democrats don’t win. “
Trump’s approval of both Mastriano and Oz has distorted the Republican establishment in Pennsylvania, as some warn that Mastriano is too far to the right to defeat Democrat Josh Shapiro in the fall general election.
Trump himself warned that Barnett could not win in the fall – but Mastriano is campaigning with her. In a telephone conversation with Oz on Monday night, Trump warned that when Barnett was “checked, it would be a disaster for the party.”
With polls showing a late jump for Barnett, Trump’s attacks reflect an eleven-hour brawl behind the scenes of Trump’s allies and rival campaigns to discredit her. If elected, she will be the first black Republican woman to serve in the Senate.
On Monday, Oz’s campaign sent a 90-second automatic call to Republican voters urging them to vote for Oz and attacking McCormick and Barnett as “not candidates who put America first,” Trump’s label for his governing philosophy.
In addition to new attacks on Barnet, she was asked about a history of inflammatory comments that included contempt for Muslims and gays. She said her Islamophobic tweets were taken out of context.
She was also asked if she took part in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol after she took part in Trump’s Stop the Theft rally that day. It wasn’t, she said.
“It’s confusing to understand Cathy Barnett. “Every time she answers a question, she raises a lot more,” Oz said on the Brian Kilmead Show on Fox News Radio.
Barnett, speaking to several dozen supporters at the Scranton Hotel on Monday night, said her rivals were lying about her because she was winning.
“Do you really want to hear more slanderous attacks, more attacks, throwing people under the bus, using leftist tactics to try to destroy one of their own?” Barnett asked.
McCormick, an award-winning U.S. military veteran who has had strong ties to the party establishment since serving in the administration of President George W. Bush, has also been criticized repeatedly by Trump over the past two weeks.
However, McCormick ended the campaign by airing a television commercial showing a video of Trump at a private ceremony in 2020 congratulating McCormick, saying that “you have served our country well in so many different ways.”
“You know why he said that,” McCormick said in a television commercial. “It simply came to our notice then. I risked my life for America and I would do it again in a moment. … I’m a pro-life, a pro-gun, a conservative at America First, and I’m damn proud of that. “
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Levy reported from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Follow Mark Levy on Twitter at
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