A controversial far-right Republican has secured his party’s nomination for governor of Pennsylvania, one of a group of Donald Trump-backed nominees to win his primary race on an otherwise mixed night for candidates backed by the former president.
Doug Mastriano, who marched on the US Capitol building with other Trump supporters on January 6 last year, won convincingly despite concerns among many party leaders that he will prove too divisive to beat the Democratic candidate Josh Shapiro in November.
Mastriano’s victory underlined the influence of Trump, who gave his endorsement just four days before the vote. But signs emerged from the five states that held primaries on Tuesday night that the former president’s endorsement has not carried the weight with the party’s voters that he might have hoped.
Two of the most high-profile Republicans he has backed — Janice McGeachin for governor of Idaho and Madison Cawthorn for a House seat in North Carolina — conceded defeat. A third, Mehmet Oz, was locked in a dead heat for the Republican Senate nomination in Pennsylvania with rival David McCormick, the former hedge fund boss.
“The party is still driven by fealty to Trump, but Tuesday night showed that his endorsement is not a silver bullet,” said Jessica Taylor, an analyst at the Cook Political Report. “It is more about whether the money comes pouring in on the back of that.”
Mastriano, a state senator in Pennsylvania, led the polls for several weeks before the primary, having run a campaign focusing on false claims of fraud at the 2020 election as well as his view that abortion should be banned after six weeks. Local party leaders had reportedly tried to get other challengers to back out of the race and throw their support behind Mastriano’s main opponent, Lou Barletta, but failed to do so.
Experts at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics said Mastriano’s victory made it more likely that Democrats would win the governorship in November.
Oz, a doctor and television star who received Trump’s endorsement in the Senate primary, had encountered scepticism from conservative voters for his previous statements in favour of tighter gun control and against hardline curbs on abortion.
With more than 95 per cent of the vote counted, Oz had a lead of just 0.2 percentage points over McCormick, a former chief executive of Bridgewater Associates. If the race is won by less than half a percentage point, it will trigger an automatic recount.
“President Trump, after he endorsed me, continued to lean into this race,” Oz told his supporters on Tuesday night.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump urged Oz to declare victory. “It makes it much harder for them to cheat with the ballots that they ‘just happened to find’,” the former president wrote on Wednesday.
In North Carolina, Cawthorn, a freshman Republican who fell out spectacularly with his party’s leadership after claiming that he was invited to an orgy in Washington and saw people take cocaine, lost his attempt to secure a spot on the ballot despite Trump urging voters to give him a “second chance”.
Cawthorn had later rowed back some of those allegations but was beset during the race by embarrassing leaks.
In Idaho, Trump failed to secure victory for Janice McGeachin over the incumbent Brad Little. McGeachin made a name for herself during the coronavirus pandemic when, as the state’s lieutenant-governor, she attempted to overturn Little’s pandemic mitigation measures while he was out of the state on business.