Posts Tagged → Lycoming County
Anatomy of a primary election
On May 20th, Pennsylvania held its primary election. Mostly local seats and judgeships were on the ballot, which are definitely important, but the real prizes were the PA Commonwealth Court and the PA Superior Court. As has come to be usual here and in many other states, the conservative/ independent-minded grass roots fielded their candidates and the state Republican Party fielded its candidates.
And as usual, the PA Republican Party was directly involved in the selection of the primary election candidates, their endorsements, their negative attacks, funding, etc. When a political party gets in between The People and their choice of candidate, the party always loses in the long run. When The People believe the party does not share their views or values, and is only pursuing the selection of certain candidates who will be malleable and loyal to the party, then The People lose faith in the party.
Here in PA there is real animosity between grass roots conservatives and the PA GOP establishment.
This election we had grass roots candidate Maria Battista vs. PAGOP candidate political establishment-endorsed Ann Marie Wheatcraft for Superior Court judge. Battista had run before as the GOP endorsed candidate, and had lost to the grass roots candidate. This time around, for whatever reason, she was on the outs with the PAGOP and on the in with the grass roots groups, like Lycoming Patriots. Wheatcraft had the PAGOP endorsement and money.
For the Commonwealth Court we had well known Second Amendment attorney Josh Prince vs. unknown state bureaucrat attorney Matt Wolford. Bureaucrat Wolford was mysteriously endorsed by the PAGOP, even though he has worked most of his career at the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection, an agency that no matter which incarnation it embodies, and regardless of which political party is running it, nonetheless is associated with heavy-handed regulations and lawless bureaucrats who routinely beat up on private landowners and businesses. Not exactly a likely place to give birth to a solid Republican candidate for any office, much less a judgeship.
The long and short of these two races is that Battista the outsider defeated Wheatcraft the moneyed insider, and Wolford the party endorsed yet unknown bureaucrat and mystery “Republican” defeated grass roots favorite Prince. Moreover, Prince was endorsed by numerous organizations, like Gun Owners of America, Firearms Owners Against Crime, etc.
These are strange results.
Normally voters align with outsiders or insiders, but not with one candidate here and not that one over there. And yet that is what happened in this election. Normally, big endorsements gain big traction for candidates, but we saw no evidence of that in the Prince vs Wolford race. Despite his many big endorsements, Prince was utterly crushed even in very conservative rural counties, like Lycoming and Elk, where he was known, liked, and should have won handily. And yet, in these same counties, Battista blew off Wheatcraft’s doors.
Aside from a crooked vote tallying scheme, I have no explanation for this odd outcome that defies all odds and conventional thinking. Except for one possible variable that tends to get overlooked these days, and that is ballot position. That is, where does the candidate’s name fall on the ballot – top, middle, or last.
Studies have shown that ballot position does matter, or it can matter, but much less so when voters feel compelled to look up candidates on the internet. With its easy information access, the internet has been the great leveler of campaigns everywhere. Big campaign money cannot always defend a candidate’s bad record, which will be all over the internet, visible to the voters who but follow a few clicks on a search engine.
Battista had top and Prince had bottom on their respective ballots. Meaning that the 3/4-4/4 super voters who make up the primary election electorate, were unsure of who to vote for and simply and superficially chose the first name they saw for each position. That could explain the opposite results we got for both candidates, Battista and Prince.
As we see here, the voters have to want to know something about the people they are voting for in order to defeat the ballot position factor, as well as overcome often superficial campaign advertising. And so we learned a hard lesson here: The vaunted and lauded super voters did not necessarily do super research into the candidates. They apparently did not bother to look up the candidates before walking into the voting booth. They simply saw a name at the top and made their choice.
And that is the gory anatomy of Pennsylvania’s 2025 primary election, God help us all.
Does ballot position really determine who a lot of primary election super voters choose? From this election, it would seem so.
Elk County is a very conservative rural place where DEP bureaucrats are hated like poison ivy. The 2025 results there make no sense, unless ballot position is the primary factor.
Doesn’t it seem mean spirited to not even mention candidate Josh Prince? Doesn’t it further alienate his supporters? What is that all about?
I have never seen election results like this. If conservative rural Lycoming County super voters feel so strongly about conservative candidate Battista, they for sure would have felt just as strongly about conservative candidate Prince. And yet…the results seem to prove that ballot position is the most important determinant
Dauphin County
Dauphin County
Yeah, PA’s lame bear season in one picture
Pennsylvania is about to have one of its lowest bear harvests in decades. And like so many policies of any sort, the story of this failure is told not just by the data, but by a picture of the data (see below).
In sum, this year’s early bear seasons of archery and muzzleloader resulted in roughly 1200 bears being taken by hunters. These are predominantly individual hunters in elevated stands, not crews of drivers pushing bears to standers.
By the time the real firearms “bear season” arrives in late November, much of the steam has been bled out of the system, so to speak. The demand has been met. Many serious bear hunters have already taken their bear and they won’t be going “to camp” to participate in punishing bear drives through thick mountain laurel on steep mountains in the northcentral region. And when the most ardent hunters pull out of a camp, that loss of energy and excitement affects everyone else. We noticed many empty camps across the entire northern tier this past week.
Again, the 1,217 bears taken in the early season so far are 200 bears ahead of the roughly 1,000 bears on record for the “bear season” as of tonight, which is the end of the formal “bear season.” In other words, bear season wasn’t. It is actually producing behind the early season.
So is the early season the real bear season now?
Add a poor acorn crop to the situation, and whatever bears were roaming around in October’s early season have gone to den for the winter now in our “bear season,” or have moved southward by the time November arrives, because all of the available wild food has been eaten up. We are now in our third year of a failed acorn crop in the northern tier, and the silence of our woods shows it. No food means no wildlife. Hunters saw no poop, no deer rubs, no squirrels, no nothing. Hunters scouring rugged northern tier landscapes that are the historic high producers of bears are encountering woods devoid not just of bears, but of deer and turkey, as well.
Yesterday was a classic example of this dynamic. Our guys put on a drive across a NW Lycoming County mountaintop area that usually holds bears. I was the lone stander in the primo spot, a saddle between two hills with a stream running through. I could see far in every direction. There were no other drives happening anywhere around our guys, which is unusual. But another and much larger drive was going on behind me, and pushing toward the area we had hunted the day before. And half a mile down the forest road several long range hunters were set up looking across a canyon. If there were bears around, or even deer, the two drives would push them past the long range guys, at least.
And yet, by the time dusk arrived and our men had slid and tumbled down the mountain side to gather at the truck, no one anywhere had seen a bear or a deer, nor heard a shot. The long range guys were packing up as we were driving out, and they told us they had seen several deer on Sunday, but nothing else any other day, including that day that had so much activity.
The Pennsylvania Game Commission is a government agency, and agencies make mistakes. Sometimes the best-intended and carefully considered policies have unintended consequences. Maybe the Saturday opener (as opposed to the long-time Monday opener) to bear season is part of the failure we are seeing. Maybe it’s the acorn crop failure making a bad situation worse. Maybe it’s the early season stealing all of the thunder from the regular rifle bear season. I don’t know the entire answer why, but the numbers don’t lie, and this 2023 bear season was a flop. Yes, we will see another 100-200 bears taken in the extended season that is concurrent with deer season in some Wildlife Management Units. But overall, PA has not seen a bear harvest this low in a long time. And as I recall, last year wasn’t that great, either.
Something is wrong and something needs to change. A lot of small businesses in rural areas depend on these big bear and deer seasons to make their end-of-year financial goals. Let’s hope the PGC staff and the board are up to the task of fixing it.
Harvest results as of the last night of regular rifle bear season, 2023. Not final, but not going to change much. The early season was the best season.
The GOP is the moderate wing of the Democrat Party
If there is one clear message resulting from all of the activity and inactivity surrounding the stolen 2020 election, it is that the Republican Party, on the whole, is filled with individual people who see themselves more as the moderate wing of the Democrat Party than as a separate political party that either exists to advance a core set of values, or, in the alternative, to at least seriously oppose the Democrat Party’s communist takeover of America.
Recall that the GOP was established as the abolitionist party to fight Democrat Party slavery. That is some pretty tough stuff, because America ended up fighting a bloody civil war over the issue. But somewhere after that, the GOP stopped standing for anything except early golf games, short hair, crisp blue blazers, and money…lots and lots of money. To the point where the GOP culture is so weak that few of its members will even stand and fight the other political party over their theft of the national election in 2020, the theft of the presidency, the theft of America.
In essence, the Grand Ol’ Party Republican Party is really just the moderate wing of the Democrat Party. The two political parties are two sides of the same coin, there really is that little difference between them. The GOP sees itself as existing to mouth a few different-sounding ideas than the other guys, and then leave their offices for the fundraisers and cocktail parties that make holding elected office or their staffer positions worthwhile.
Despite having deep GOP establishment roots, for many years now, my own involvement in Pennsylvania Republican Party politics has been as the self-imposed outsider. Like some other activists still working hard today for change that benefits We, The People, by late 2008 I was disgusted with the GOP’s shallow fawning and or weak cowering before the great impostor, Barack Hussein Obama. In 2009 into 2010 I ran in a Republican congressional primary to challenge then-congressman Tim Holden. At that point, the grass roots reaction to what has become known as the DC Swamp was informally called the Tea Party. As a so-called Tea Party candidate, at our many debates and public meetings I honed my own message: “We grass roots Republican voters want a bar-room brawl with the Democrats, while the GOP establishment wants at most a gentlemanly duel with them and chummy drinks together afterwards. Dear GOP, lead, follow, or get out of our way.”
Last month I had the great enjoyment to personally participate in the public political dismemberment of one of Pennsylvania’s great RINOs, State Senator Gene Yaw. Yaw represents everything that is wrong with the GOP. At a public meeting in Montoursville attended by a hundred impassioned voters, Yaw demonstrated his absolute lack of care for the citizenry, his contempt for his voters, his disgust with patriots and constitutionalists, and his serious resistance to actually rolling up his sleeves and doing the work needed to save America from pending doom. Full of weak excuses and a laughable reliance on “We held fourteen hearings,” Yaw was the equivalent of a defiant and lazy teenage boy who just won’t get his damned family chores done.
After an hour of increasing catcalls, hisses, boos, jeers, and earnest questions from the audience, newly re-elected Senator Yaw stood up, collected his things, and without a word stalked out of the meeting with his toadies in tow behind him. Gene Yaw is the state of the Pennsylvania GOP, which is the state of the nationwide GOP – weak, shallow, zero fight for his constituents, zero push-back against openly communist activists in his Lycoming County district, unremarkable, uncharismatic, boring, low-T, egocentric, and unrepentantly an enabler of Democrat Party treason and insurrection.
Yaw is, in effect, a perfectly representative member of the moderate wing of the Democrat Party.
So, here we are, two more political campaigns that I ran in and eleven or twelve years later after the Tea Party revolution of 2008 – 2009, which is an eternity in politics, and the GOP STILL will not lead, follow, or get out of the way of the grass roots American voters. It is difficult to tell which political party is more resistant to a transparent 2020 election, the Democrats or the Republicans. Some call them the uniparty, and why not; the two political parties are obviously joined deeply together in common interests that clearly exclude the best interests of the American people.
But it is probably more accurate to call the GOP what it behaves like, which is the moderate wing of the Democrat Party. No fight, no spirit, no guts, no passion, no opposition, just some feel-good mouthing of platitudes and then go home early. Let the Democrats do whatever they want, what me worry (Alfred E. Newman’s famous line from Mad Magazine).
What kind of patriotic pro-America voter wants this kind of bad performance from their chosen political party and its elected members?
Today’s GOP Republican Party mascot – Alfred E. Newman, late of Mad Magazine. “What me worry?”