State Treasurer Stacy Garrity launched her bid for governor last year, immediately receiving the Republican Party’s blessing and praise from Republicans across the state who saw her as their best shot at the governor’s mansion.
“This is a gift to the Republican Party,” Peter Quaglia, a delegate from Wayne County told reporters at the Pennsylvania Republican Party annual meeting last September.
Quaglia called her “the only one who can beat Josh Shapiro.”
With days to go until the election, however, Garrity is trailing in the most recent polls by double digits, has only raised a fraction of the funds Shapiro has raked in and may have become a liability to down-the-ballot races.
Chris Borick, professor of political science and director of the Lehigh Opinion Observatory, said that there was “real optimism” about a strong performance at the start of the campaign.
“She had great success in two statewide elections,” he told WHYY News. “She’s widely liked within Republican circles, and there were efforts to clear the slate for her to allow her the opportunity to get this nomination without having to fight a really contested primary. None of this seems to have mattered in her performance to date in this campaign.”
‘Upset of the ages’
A veteran of the Iraq war and former vice president of government affairs at Global Tungsten & Powders in Towanda, Garrity first ran for office in 2019 but lost in the congressional primary to Fred Keller. She ran for treasurer the following year and won, becoming the first Republican to beat an incumbent Democratic row officer since 1994. Pundits lauded it as “an upset of the ages.”
She then sailed to victory in her reelection bid in 2024, breaking the record for most votes in a statewide campaign. That success and her record for winning tough races pushed her name to the top of the list of possible Republican candidates for governor.
State Sen. Doug Mastriano, who ran as the party nominee against Shapiro in 2022 but lost by double digits in what strategists saw as the expected outcome of a campaign tied to conspiracy theorists and election denialists, had expressed interest in running again. However, the state party quickly rallied around Garrity, endorsing her nearly unanimously at the party’s convention last September, a move Mastriano publicly criticized, though he later dropped out of the race.
While Republicans knew unseating Shapiro would be a challenge, they expressed that Garrity gave them a chance.
“There have been bigger upsets than Stacy Garrity beating Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania history, and it can always happen,” Pennsylvania GOP Chair Greg Rotham said last November.
An independent poll released in August appeared to give the campaign boost when it showed Shapiro leading Garrity by only 7 points, suggesting a tightening in the race, a fact Garrity pointed to.
Saving the downballot
Sam Chen, a Republican political strategist, said that Republicans believed that she was probably “the best candidate that they could field,” but that “in closed doors among Republicans … the general consensus early on has been she’s not going to win.”
“I think they felt that she could protect their downballot way more than, say, Doug Mastriano could,” he said. “It’s one of those things where you put your best candidate in, you do the work and you put yourself in the position that if something breaks in your favor, you can win [but] they thought someone like a Doug Mastriano would have put them out of that contention altogether.”
The down-ballot races may be key this year as Democrats believe they are within striking distance of winning an electoral majority in the state Senate for the first time since 1978. Such a shift in power in Harrisburg could give them the power to implement a laundry list of policies including raising the minimum wage, legalizing recreational marijuana and codifying access to reproductive health care.
However, Garrity is now trailing where Mastriano ended the race. While he lost by 15 percentage points in 2022, she is now behind by more than 20, according to every recent poll, with gaps as high as 27 points.
If the goal was ultimately to help prop up downballot races, Borick said that hope has now “dissipated.” Borick attributes the Garrity campaign’s gradual decline to a perfect storm of factors.
“This is a really, really challenging environment for any Republican to run in … and she matched up with a well-funded, disciplined incumbent with a history of electoral success in Pennsylvania that is in the party that’s riding the wave and not fighting the wave,” he said.
Borick added that recent shifting priorities in terms of campaign contributions drew needed financial assistance from Republicans away from the race for governor.
“I don’t think there’s been a recognition that the Garrity race is salvageable, and thus, if you’re looking to direct funds in the home stretch, you’re probably looking to congressional races or other state legislative races,” he said.
Recent campaign finance reports appear to bear that out. While Shapiro has raised roughly $55 million as of the latest reporting period ending Sept. 14, Garrity raised only $5.3 million. That includes $1.8 million Garrity raised over the summer. By comparison, Mastriano raised $3.1 million during the same period four years ago.
Borick said that fundraising disadvantage has hindered Garrity from getting her message to voters while the Shapiro campaign has been able to blanket the airwaves with ads. That may be why in a Franklin & Marshall poll released this week, 44% of voters said they didn’t know enough about her to form an opinion, including 44% of Republicans.
The Trump effect
In 2024, Donald Trump carried Pennsylvania and Republicans swept statewide contests. The presidential-year turnout and Republican enthusiasm provided favorable conditions for Garrity during an election cycle where Trump also captured the record for the most votes won by a Republican candidate in Pennsylvania. His presence at the top of the ticket likely helped her secure her own record-setting 3.5 million votes.
Two years later, Trump appears more likely to be a liability in her campaign for governor. A Quinnipiac University poll released Oct. 7 found that 60% of likely Pennsylvania voters disapproved of his job performance, while 37% approved.
Chen gave what he calls an “unpopular opinion” that it’s not Garrity dragging down downballot races, but it’s Trump himself.
“When he’s not on the ballot, he still motivates people who are against him to come out and vote against the Republicans, but he does not motivate his supporters to come out and vote for the Republicans,” he said. “And so it’s a net negative during a midterm election.”
That didn’t stop Garrity from going to the White House to accept Trump’s endorsement. Chen said that Garrity made the mistake of speaking out in favor of the president’s pet policies, such as the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill Act” and border security rather than focusing on issues more relevant to commonwealth residents.
“Talk about illegal immigration, it’s a problem in Pennsylvania, but when you’re talking about the southern border, you’re giving the impression that you are essentially tied to what the president wants to do,” he said. “I would’ve left the national politics entirely off of it.”