Playing the Trump card
A restless, dissatisfied electorate.
A state government lurching from one financial crisis to the next. A Democratic governor with an approval rating stuck underwater.
It’s a grim starting point for any incumbent. But before the GOP takes on Gov. Tom Wolf next year, it must settle on its own standard-bearer.
The fight for the nomination is playing out as the Republican Party continues to struggle with its own radically changed internal politics. As established leaders fend off relentless attacks from the ascendant insurgency that selected Donald Trump, the Party of Lincoln is, for the next few months at least, a house divided against itself.
The three candidates who’ve entered the race can lay credible claim to outsider status: Scott Wagner, a farm-raised business owner and bombastic first-term Senator who’s fit himself into Trump’s mold; Paul Mango, a graduate of West Point and Harvard with a 30-year business career who’s never held public office; and Laura Ellsworth, a Princeton graduate with decades of civic leadership and one of the most successful lawyers in Pittsburgh.
From the margins, House Speaker Mike Turzai is peering in, waiting until the Legislature sorts out how to pay for the budget it passed before he decides whether to join the fray.
The race has already attracted interest from national figures who’ve been fighting to steer the party.
Steve Bannon, architect of Trump’s surprise November win and chairman of the right-wing news site Breitbart, has given campaign and messaging advice to Wagner, who is using the same fundraising firm Trump used last year.
U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., endorsed Mango, a fellow veteran and former business colleague.
Ellsworth, whose campaign manager, Mike Lukach, ran Trump’s Minnesota operation, argues politicians aren’t getting anything done because they’ve abandoned the collaborative approach of the past in favor of the visceral pleasure of bomb-throwing.
The test
Trump won Pennsylvania by 44,292 votes, becoming the first Republican presidential nominee to carry the state since George H.W. Bush in 1988.
“Like so many things with the 2016 election, there’s a question of whether it was an outlier,” said Chris Borick, a political science professor at Muhlenberg College. “Is Donald Trump somebody who, by himself, defies a lot of other political rules, or could his model be replicated?”
The test, Borick said, is Wagner, the York Republican who owns a waste management company and a trucking company. Wagner once bought and gave away 10,000 Trump yard signs after he couldn’t get any from the campaign.
“I don’t agree with everything (Trump) does. Personally, I think his style is borderline terrible. But he’s right that there’s a swamp in Washington and the swamp has to be drained,” Wagner said.
That includes Republican incumbents who spent seven years crowing about the evils of the Affordable Care Act, and then failed to make good on their promise of repealing it after voters gave them control of Congress and the White House.
“They talk a good game, and finally it’s their day and everybody goes to the closet and the closet’s bare. Nobody has a plan,” Wagner said. “You go around shooting off your mouth, and nothing’s been done.”
Failure to deliver on their promises spawned the uprising that’s roiling the party, Wagner said. The GOP establishment is fighting an insurgency comprised of people they courted.
“How do you shut up Steve Bannon? Do your job. How do you get Scott Wagner to shut up? Do something,” Wagner said, summarizing a recent opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal.
Wagner shares Trump’s penchant for the kind of public statements and behavior that, not long ago, tended to end political careers, not boost them.
This year, he forcibly confiscated the camera of a campaign tracker from a liberal advocacy group, incorrectly claimed global warming was influenced by people’s body heat and the earth’s dwindling distance from the sun, and called liberal billionaire George Soros a “Hungarian Jew.”
Sound and the fury
Wagner says that’s all just noise.
“Are you more concerned about what I said about climate change, or are you more concerned about having to pay more taxes?” Wagner asked.
But those distractions are part of the reason people feel fed up with their government, said Ellsworth, who runs the Pittsburgh office of the global law firm Jones Day.
Ellsworth, who has served on the boards of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development and Greater Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce in addition to several charities, said she met “hundreds” of people across the state before deciding to get into the race.
“They just want to get things done. They are so tired of — and this is not just the Republican Party — they are tired of people who are supposed to be getting things done in this country calling people names, obsessing about labels, showing all of this angst and emotion over all of these symbolic issues but not paying attention to getting things done for the people who vote,” Ellsworth said.
“I think they are tired of the noise. I think they are tired of the talk. And I think they are looking for someone whose only mission is to get done what needs to get done in this state,” Ellsworth said.
She felt the same way, she said.
“I was so tired of people who talked and talked and talked, or studied and studied and studied but never actually did anything to address the problems we face,” Ellsworth said.
Then she realized she was doing the same thing.
“I said, ‘Listen to your own voice. … You’re just talking about the paralysis in government, talking about the fact that people just don’t get things done for the people of Pennsylvania. So do something about it,'” Ellsworth said. “I decided to do something, rather than talk. That’s why I’m running.”
The men she’s up against both tout accomplished private-sector resumes.
The companies Wagner started made him a wealthy man, and he shared that wealth with conservative causes and politicians. He ran for Senate in 2014, he said, after feeling he was being treated like “an ATM” by politicians who always seemed to have an excuse for why they didn’t do what they’d promised.
“Politicians — smart politicians — know where the money is,” Wagner said. “They’ll give you a line of crap. They’ll say, ‘We’ll get it done next time.’ This is how it works in Harrisburg. This is how it works in Washington. I want accountability. I want to see results.”
His first results made history: Wagner won his seat as a write-in candidate in a special election in 2014, the first person ever to do so in Pennsylvania.
Mango, who lives in suburban Pittsburgh, served in the 82nd Airborne Division after graduating from West Point, then got an MBA from Harvard. His long career advising health care companies for McKinsey and Co. took him to 35 countries, he said.
In that role, he said he lead a team that developed a half-billion-dollar company over several years and helped others that were out of touch with their customers or “too culturally restrictive.”
Harrisburg needs a taste of his leadership, he says.
“No one else has the leadership experience, the training, the business experience and the plan to turn around the commonwealth,” he said.
In his months of campaigning, Mango said he’s gathered close to 200 volunteers around the state and put 50,000 miles on his car since January as he’s begun to court donors and voters.
That effort’s also taken on a national angle as he’s used his network of Harvard and West Point classmates and executives he’s worked with over 30 years in business.
“There’s nothing tighter in this world than the bond of West Point graduates,” he said.
Before Wagner got Bannon on his team, Mango had secured Cotton’s high-profile endorsement. The pair of veterans have been friendly for six years, since Cotton left the Army and joined McKinsey.
Though they never worked together on any business projects, they bonded as veterans within the company and Mango became a “very early and generous supporter” of Cotton’s successful House bid in 2012, the senator told The Caucus.
Mango took on the role of a health care adviser once Cotton went to Washington.
“Paul was a very trusted adviser on health care policy with me as we were going through all the problems with Obamacare in my early days in Congress,” Cotton said.
Cotton said Mango’s inherent challenge will be increasing his name recognition, but Cotton believes voters will “rally by his side” once they hear about Mango’s middle-class upbringing, military service, dedication to the “working people of Pennsylvania” and his outsider status.
“Paul will appeal to a lot of those voters who looked to Donald Trump, who wanted an outsider and wanted a change in direction,” Cotton said.
First things first
Mango almost completely avoids talking about the primary.
“Our entire campaign is focused on defeating Tom Wolf,” he told The Caucus. “We’re not running to win the primary. … This is not about the primary. This is about preparing ourselves to become the next governor, not just the next candidate.”
There are a couple of steps between here and there, though. One is taking himself from an obscure first-time candidate to a familiar name for millions of Pennsylvania voters. Mango says he was the first and only candidate to release a detailed agenda and the first to hit the airwaves with a few hundred television commercials this summer.
He said he doesn’t know what his GOP opponents’ ideologies are and, in The Caucus interview, sidestepped questions about them to focus on Wolf.
“The big difference between Governor Wolf and me is he believes the biggest injustice in our state is income inequality. And I believe the biggest injustice is the lack of economic mobility,” said Mango, who believes business regulations, the education system not preparing students for the right jobs and welfare programs that “lock people into poverty” are responsible for the state’s economic woes.
While Mango parries questions about his opponents, Wagner thrusts.
“Paul Mango was not a businessman. He was an executive with McKinsey & Company. He didn’t start a company. He didn’t borrow money. He didn’t take risks. I didn’t hear about Paul Mango until November of last year,” Wagner said.
He added that he doubted an outsider with no experience in government could understand the problems well enough to fix them.
“I’ve been on the inside for three and a half years,” Wagner said.
Of Ellsworth, the most recent addition to the race, Wagner said, “We don’t need another lawyer in the Governor’s Office. Lawyers don’t go to school to take business classes. They don’t go to take relationship classes. They go to learn about the law.”
But building relationships is exactly how good lawyers do their jobs, Ellsworth said.
“I am not a politician, but one of the things I have done for my entire career, whether it was in my professional life, whether it was my civic life, is disengaging from the echo chamber, redefining the problem and going off with a small group of talented people and coming up with the solution,” Ellsworth said.
“I have seen so many instances — and it’s not just a political thing; it’s true in every aspect of business and life — it is easier for people to get together and restate the problem with increasing degrees of angst and outrage,” she said. “That doesn’t make up for not doing something about it.”
Like a business
Lack of action in Harrisburg is a recurring theme among the candidates, who criticize Wolf as an absentee executive, a leader who doesn’t seem to be leading anyone anywhere.
“He has been, to my eye, one of the most disengaged governors I have ever seen since I’ve been in Pennsylvania,” said Ellsworth, who moved to Pittsburgh in 1980.
“He’s not a leader. He’s not leading at all. The guy is in so far over his head he should actually consider resigning,” Wagner said. Harrisburg “is so screwed up. It needs somebody who has business experience and knows what to do in turning (a company) around.”
Wolf said the same during the 2014 campaign. Wagner, however, rejects the comparison.
“Gov. Wolf has a completely different background,” Wagner said. “We grew up on different sides of the railroad tracks.”
Wagner contrasted his upbringing on a farm, brief stint in Williamsport Community College and early forays into real estate investment with Wolf’s birth into an affluent family, multiple college degrees and decision to buy into an already-established family business.
“I started from scratch. I took risks. I borrowed money. I didn’t have family money as a backstop,” Wagner said.
But success in one arena doesn’t automatically translate to another, Ellsworth said.
“Governor Wolf came in saying, ‘I’m going to run government like a business.’ You can’t run government like a business,” Ellsworth said.
For one thing, the governor can’t fire legislators who get in his way.
“Gov. Wolf, as a Democrat serving with Republican majorities in the House and the Senate, has passed medical marijuana, reformed our pension system, brought our liquor system into the 21st century, and restored the $1 billion dollar cut to education made in the previous administration,” said Beth Melena, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. “And now, thanks to Gov. Wolf’s leadership, a severance tax is close to becoming a reality despite Scott Wagner conspiring with Republican leaders to kill the tax on oil and gas companies because he thought it would hurt Governor Wolf’s re-election efforts.”
Turzai has far more experience working within the political system than any of the announced candidates. The trick for him could be in selling that experience as something positive to an electorate angry at the political establishment.
“Mike is someone who never lost a sense of what it’s like to live in the real world,” said Jeff Coleman, founder and principal of Churchill Strategies, who’s working for Turzai as he decides whether he’ll run for governor.
“My sense is the field doesn’t have a comprehensive conservative in the race. Mike fits that bill,” Coleman said.
Outside in
The two primary candidates who actually talk about the primary – Wagner and Ellsworth – have different approaches to avoiding the pitfalls that have stumped Wolf, who had never held elected office before this one.
“You have to have a leader who has backbone. Gov. Corbett was a nice guy. He never ran a business. He was a nice guy,” Wagner said.
But the give-and-take of governing and the generational growth of a political class combined to create the financial mess in which state government finds itself, he said.
Someone, he said, has to stand up to it.
Ellsworth took different lessons from her time as an executive.
“There is one school of leadership that says you should be bombastic and go through walls and be very confrontational. In my experience that is not the most effective way to bring along with you a large group of people who are used to running their own show,” Ellsworth said.
Trump’s tough talked served him well during the campaign, but the president’s legislative agenda has stalled in part because of his attacks on some of the lawmakers whose support he needs.
Members of his own party — as in Harrisburg, Republicans control both chambers in Congress – have become some of Trump’s harshest critics and biggest obstacles.
That complicates the calculation for Republican candidates. A Franklin & Marshall College Poll released in September found 53 percent of Republican voters believe Trump is doing a good job.
“In Republican circles, to win a Republican primary, having the president on your side can be key,” said Muhlenberg’s Borick.
But the winner will then have to face the general electorate, where just 29 percent of registered voters rate Trump’s job performance as “good” or “excellent,” according to the poll.
“That’s the peril,” Borick said.