DV Journal

Pennsylvania GOP state chair Lawrence Tabas is stepping down, and he’s going out on a high note.

Two Republicans have emerged as the candidates to replace him: State Sen. Greg Rothman (R-Cumberland) and Allentown businessman Bill Bachenberg.

Last year was a very good year for Pennsylvania Republicans. They delivered the state’s Electoral College votes for Donald Trump, picked up two U.S. House seats, and won the closest U.S. Senate victory in the country.

At the state level, Republican state Sen. Joe Picozzi took a seat from a Democratic incumbent that had been held by Democrats since 1996, and Republican voter registration continues to climb.

As a result, the bar has been set high for who ever wins the chairman’s job.

State committee members and county chairs will pick the state chair at a meeting in Gettysburg on Feb. 8.

Rothman has U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick and U.S. Rep. Dan Mueser (R-Dauphin) in his corner. However, after Bucks County resident Ted Christian dropped out and threw his support to Rothman, Bachenberg entered the fray.

Bill Bachenberg

Rothman has been interested in Republican politics since Ronald Reagan was running for president. In high school, he wrote an editorial for his school’s paper in support of Reagan. On election day, his parents allowed him to skip school “as long as I worked the polls.” Rothman was one of the few Republican students at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a school, “so far left it almost fell off the map.” While there, he “harnessed (his) debating skills.” He took a semester off to work for Jack Kemp, who was running for vice president on the 1996 ticket with Bob Dole. When Kemp lost, he returned and finished college.

After graduation, his dad asked him what he wanted to do with his life. Rothman said he wanted to go to Washington, D.C. But his father convinced him to “come home and be a conservative and work in the private sector.” Rothman joined the family real estate company. In 1991, he enlisted in the Marine Corps during Operation Desert Storm. He rose to staff sergeant and was honorably discharged in 2001. He was appointed by the president to the board of the National Veterans Business Development Corp. and was a founder of the Harrisburg Young Professionals.

Rothman helped “my old friend, Rick Santorum” run for president in 2012, working for Santorum in Iowa and New Hampshire. Rothman was elected state representative in 2015 and served until 2022. He was then elected state senator to a district formerly held by Jake Corman, that had been redistricted to include Cumberland County.

“In the last election, I knocked on 20,000 doors,” Rothman said. “I walked 880 miles in 10 months.”

Bachenberg says he kept getting calls from “grassroots” Trump supporters urging him to run. He formed an exploratory committee and on Dec. 30 threw his hat in the ring.

Bachenberg spent his career running businesses, including the technology firm DBSi. He owns a shooting range called Lehigh Valley Sporting Clays and is first vice president of the National Rifle Association (NRA).

Bachenberg’s supporters held a flag wave for him in northeast Philadelphia on Saturday.

A fundraiser for Trump, Bachenberg was an alternative elector in 2020 and an elector in 2024.

In business, “some people have called me a change agent,” said Bachenberg. For his technology business, “We re-engineered ourselves five times in 33 years…massive changes. And if we hadn’t, we would have perished. And our party is about in the same position now. President Trump came along and offered the citizens of the state and the country a different image of what we could  be.”

“Good politicians listen to their constituents,” said Bachenberg. “I listened to our committee members, and they’re frustrated.”

Bachenberg and his wife–who served 21 years in the Air Force and National Guard and was deployed to Iraq and Bosnia–run Camp Freedom, a charity for disabled first responders an veterans so they can experience time in the outdoors.

Rothman said he knows how to help Republican candidates win.

“From 2015 through 2022, I ran in seven electoral contests and won all seven of them,” said Rothman. “I’m an activist. We need more conservative activists to run for office and win.”

The chairman should unite the activists, committee people, donors and candidates, he said.

“I’ve had success at all four levels,” he said. Republicans just won all the statewide races and need to build in their success.

And he believes, in 2026, Republicans can win the governorship.

“Josh Shapiro can be beaten,” said Rothman. “But we’re not going to beat him if we say we can’t beat him.”

Former Bridgewater CEO and possible 2024 U.S. Senate hopeful Dave McCormick slammed what he said was a “decade” of bad monetary and fiscal policy from government leaders that led to recent bank meltdowns.

McCormick made the claim during a DVJournal podcast interview regarding the historic collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and the federal government’s scrambling efforts to contain the fallout.

Acknowledging that “anybody that’s predicting too much” about the crisis “probably is too confident” about the “dynamic situation,” McCormick—who is widely viewed as a likely Senate challenger to incumbent Democrat Sen. Bob Casey next year—argued there are “a set of root causes” that led to SVB’s collapse.

“We’ve had a decade or more of misguided fiscal policy and misguided monetary policy,” McCormick said. “We’ve had fiscal policy that has been enormous spending, and that spending has accelerated dramatically under Joe Biden.

“Discretionary spending has gone up by about 40 percent,” he continued. “You’ve had the three big pieces of legislation, which have added something like $18 trillion of new spending over the next 10 years, and that’s a huge driver of inflation.”

McCormick further argued that “very low interest rates” have driven financiers to adjust their spending and investment practices accordingly, driving them to “lock in long-duration treasuries and things like that in search of yield.

“And when the Fed raised rates to essentially offset the inflation that they helped create, that created a crisis at SVB because those treasuries that they held in their balance sheet went down in value,” he said. “They had to sell capital to try to close the hole, and that spooked their depositors and their depositors started to take out money.”

McCormick called the present chaos “the tip of the iceberg in terms of the problem,” one that “[won’t] go away until we get our fiscal house in order and back to our normal monetary policy.”

McCormick, who is promoting his new book “Superpower In Peril,” is increasingly being viewed as a favorite for the 2024 Senate race, with many analysts and strategists balking at the prospect of another bid by state Sen. Doug Mastriano, who lost his gubernatorial bid against Gov. Josh Shapiro last year.

However, a Public Policy Polling survey this week showed Mastriano with a sizeable lead ahead of McCormick in a potential 2024 GOP primary matchup.

Last week’s anticipated Red Wave wasn’t even a Red Puddle, and it could be argued, Pennsylvania was the GOP’s biggest disappointment of them all.

Pennsylvania Republicans didn’t flip a single seat in Congress, they lost a U.S. Senate seat, weren’t competitive in the governor’s race, and even handed over control of the state House of Representatives. All this at a time when Democrats were defending an unpopular president and a struggling economy.

I have three major reasons for the losses here in Pennsylvania and some solutions Republicans must adopt.

The first reason is spelled out in just two words: Doug Mastriano. Mastriano lost so badly that if you removed Philadelphia and Pittsburgh from the voting, Democrat Attorney General Josh Shapiro still beat him by 195,000 votes. How is that even possible?

In Lancaster County, Republican registered voters outnumber Democrats by 64,453. And yet Mastriano only beat Shapiro by 4,399, the smallest margin of any Republican gubernatorial nominee in modern history. Even Scott Wagner, the previous Republican nominee who got drubbed by Gov. Tom Wolf (D), won the county by a 6,189 margin.

In Bucks County around 40,000 fewer voters supported Mastriano than voted for winning Republican candidate Brian Fitzpatrick.

I got the first area radio or TV interview with Mastriano and eventually interviewed him five times during this election cycle. I liked the style of debate he proposed with Shapiro, in which each side would pick a moderator for each debate and basically allow the candidates to debate without the usual rules.

However, I had to beg Mastriano to bring his campaign to our area. It was also clear to me that there was no infrastructure to take on a force like Shapiro. When Mastriano announced he would not support any exceptions to a total ban on abortions in Pennsylvania, I knew any hope of a victory was dead, and I said so at the time.

No one will win a race for statewide office in Pennsylvania demanding a ban on all abortions without exception. Dave White, a candidate for governor who lost to Mastriano and someone I saw as a potential bridge to moderate Democrats, also says no exceptions should be allowed under an abortion ban.

If he maintains that position, he cannot win statewide.

The solution to the Mastriano problem is for the Republican State Committee to endorse candidates for statewide offices. That does not mean we can’t still have open primaries. But an endorsement and discussion might give the public more information and dissuade some candidates from staying in the race.

Pennsylvania Republicans should take a page from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) who allows for exceptions in the case of rape, incest, and the life of the mother under any abortion laws, and also move toward supporting a time limit on how many weeks an abortion can be performed within and be legal.

DeSantis might offer an antidote to the second major reason for Republican losses: President Donald Trump. What do Mastriano, Dr. Oz, Don Bolduc, Blake Masters, and Herschel Walker have in common? They all came in second last Tuesday, and they were all boosted by Trump. At a critical phase of the election, Trump inserted himself in our races and allowed Democrats to run against him. It worked.

DeSantis has gained tremendous traction against Trump due to his stunning victory in Florida. I’m not adverse to the two of them squaring off in the 2024 presidential primaries.

Finally, mail-in ballot issues are a major problem in Pennsylvania. I think Republicans have done a pretty good job in the last two years of stopping Democrats from exploiting flaws in the system around things like drop-box security, undated ballots, and counting procedures. However, they have given up the advantages of early voting entirely to the Democrats. Historically Republicans were at least as likely to vote by absentee as Democrats. It allows the parties to “bank” votes and focus their GOTV efforts on others.

In the Trump era, Republicans were attacking the idea of early voting — and now are paying the price for it. I think they have to do better to get more of their vote to effectively use mail-in balloting.

The reforms I’ve suggested are not monumentally hard to put into place. The first step is to acknowledge that these are significant issues. I don’t think abortion be the top issue in 2024, but again no statewide candidate will win if they don’t follow my method of addressing the issue.

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