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Republican Doug Mastriano, an election conspiracy theorist, is running for governor in Pennsylvania. | David Siders/POLITICO | Conventional wisdom says that Doug Mastriano, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Pennsylvania, is too far right to win a general election. The 58-year-old former Army colonel is a proponent of Donald Trump's lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. His opposition to abortion rights includes no exceptions for rape, incest or the life of the mother. And as he begins his general election campaign he is generating headlines like, "Doug Mastriano doubles down on comparing U.S. gun control to Nazi Germany." One prominent Pennsylvania Republican says donors fear Mastriano may collapse so quickly that Democrats will be able to redirect money from the governor's race to down-ballot contests. Another Republican says Mastriano "comes across as a cult guy." But Mastriano's surprising primary victory also speaks to deep shifts within the Republican electorate, writes POLITICO's David Siders . Much of his support is driven by anger over Covid restrictions and President Joe Biden's victory in 2020, but Mastriano's appeal is not principally secular. He stamped "John 8:36" on his campaign signs and tells his supporters they are part of a new generation of leaders "raised up" by God. On Facebook, his comment sections fill up with lines like "Doug has Gods blessing! Good wins over evil!" Even if Mastriano falls short in November, the angst he is causing his own party as he eyes the governor's mansion — suggests that the Trump-era religious groundswell on the right may be closer to its beginning than its end. Read Siders' report on the far-right Christian politics behind Mastriano's long-shot bid.
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"Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his."
Can you guess who said this about President Jimmy Carter during the 1980 presidential campaign?
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POLITICO illustration/AP photo | RBG's 'Betrayal' … With the Supreme Court poised to overturn Roe, some women's rights supporters, including longtime peers of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, are turning their frustration on an unlikely target: the late justice herself. "Ginsburg's decision not to step down during the Obama administration looms large in the estimations of some of her admirers, who see it as enabling the destruction of large parts of Ginsburg's legacy," writes Mike Schaffer in this week's Capital City column. "She gambled," says Michele Dauber, the outspoken Stanford law professor, speaking of Ginsburg's apparent calculation that Hillary Clinton would be in the White House to appoint her successor. "But she didn't just gamble with herself. She gambled with the rights of my daughter and my granddaughter. And unfortunately, that's her legacy. I think it's tragic."
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| Matthew McConaughey delivered an emotional speech at the White House this week, advocating for bipartisan gun reform after the shooting in his hometown, Uvalde, Texas. But this isn't McConaughey's first foray into politics. We'll get you up to speed on the actor's political aspirations: — When your friends dismiss McConaughey's flirtation with a gubernatorial run last year remind them that he was serious enough to dial up influential figures in Texas politics, including a moderate Republican energy CEO. — Are they still skeptical? One poll of Texas voters in 2021 found that, in a three-way race for governor, 37 percent supported incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott, 27 percent supported McConaughey and 26 percent supported Beto O'Rourke. — Don't know what party he's a member of? Neither does he! He told comedian Russell Brand that he's "in the middle," criticizing the "illiberal left" but also saying the right "has fake news." — Wondering which McConaughey we'll see on the campaign trail? Here's your guide to what his movie roles could mean for his politics, from the screw-the-rules attitude of David Wooderson, to the manic bluntness of Mark Hanna to the gritty philosophizing of Rust Cohle.
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Politico illustration | Patrick Pleul/Pool Photo via AP | How Elon Musk Became a Republican … Elon Musk blew up Twitter last month when he announced that Democrats had become "the party of division and hate," but it was hardly surprising. Wealthy zillionaire entrepreneur becomes a Republican? Shocking. And yet the conversion of Musk from a sui generis eccentric — an Obama voter who might be the single most important individual driver of commercial renewable energy tech in the world — into a Republican can teach us as much about how our politics and culture have shifted over the past decade as it can about his own frequently baffling mind, writes Derek Robertson . The battle over speech norms on social media and the Trumpian willingness to punish big business when it steps out of line has changed our politics, and Democrats would be wise to pay attention.
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| 50 percent … of Democratic voters have a valid passport. Republican voters aren't far behind, at 48 percent. Every week, The Weekend inserts a question in a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll and see what the crosstabs yield. Got any suggestions? Email us at politicoweekend@email.politico.com.
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Politico illustration/AP Photo/iStoc | The Speech JFK Never Gave ... When JFK arrived in Dallas, Texas on Nov. 22, 1963, he had something on his mind that is all too relevant today: domestic extremism, disinformation and the corrosive effect it could have on the United States. Jeff Nussbaum reports on JFK's final speech — the one he planned to give the day he was assassinated — which was to have been a bold statement and a sharp warning, one that might have altered the contours of our response to today's violent, disassociated rhetoric — had he lived to deliver it.
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President George H.W. Bush at a Delaware YMCA in 1989. | George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum | On March 22, 1989, President George H.W. Bush visited a YMCA anti-drug karate group in Wilmington, Del. After a demonstration, one of the young karatekas asked Bush how he kept drugs out of his life, to which he responded: "Now, like, I'm president. It'd be pretty hard for some drug guy to come into the White House and start offering it up." If Bush did encounter a pusher, however, he hoped he would say, "Hey, get lost! I don't want any of that." Then-senator Joe Biden was also in attendance, pictured sitting on the bleachers wearing a gray suit.
**Who Dissed? Answer: Who else but Ronald Reagan, who would go on to defeat Carter in a landslide victory in the 1980 campaign?
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