Dem
51
GOP
49
As you probably know, Republicans didn't do so well in Pennsylvania in Nov. 2022. Their candidates for governor and senator were crushed. Now they are conducting an autopsy to try to discover why. The Republicans knew that inflation was roaring, gas prices were sky high, interest rates were rising, and Joe Biden's approval was underwater. They can't figure out what happened. They just know they should have won. Rep. Dan Meuser (R-PA) a millionaire businessman and politician who his helping to finance the $100,000 autopsy, said: "We want the God's honest truth."
The Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies has been hired to unravel the mystery. Some of the areas being investigated are the competence of the state and county Republican Parties, the Party's messaging, the role of the college-educated voters in the collar counties around Philadelphia, and the way the candidates tried to sell their anti-abortion positions. Also a likely suspect is the Republican opposition to early voting and mail-in voting. Andy Reilly, an RNC member from Pennsylvania focused on the latter, saying: "Most folks now on the Republican side recognize that if one party is voting for 50 days and the other party is voting for 13 hours, the party voting for 50 days is going to have a higher turnout."
It looks like they might nail it. The only factor that they don't seem to have noticed is that their candidates were hand-picked by Donald Trump and were anathema to a majority of Pennsylvania voters. Maybe for $100,000, Public Opinion Strategies might discover it. If the Party would just email us, we would tell them for free.
Another minor detail is that if the consultants do manage to uncover the truth (perhaps by asking the voters), what will the state party do about it? Supporting mail-in voting is easy, but if that is not the real root cause of the problem, then what? (V)