Democratic state House candidate Marcy Dubroff, of East Hempfield Township
If you’re keeping score at home, Democrat Marcy Dubroff’s successful write-in campaign for state House in Pennsylvania’s April 24 primary means there will be five contested legislative races in November here in Lancaster County. There are nine local seats in the General Assembly up for election.
Here’s a look at who’s who, after the jump:
President Barack Obama has opened up a solid lead over presumed Republican nominee Mitt Romney in Pennsylvania, according to a Quinnipiac University poll. In March, Obama held a 3-point lead here in the same statewide survey.
“The good news for the president is that he has an 8-point lead in Pennsylvania, approaching the 11-point margin he had in carrying the Keystone State in 2008,” said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
Romney, however, has closed Obama’s leads in Ohio and Florida to the point that those two states are “now essentially tied, a turnaround from the end of March when the president enjoyed leads in those key states,” the poll of swing states found.
The context here is obvious: No candidate has won the White House without carrying at least two of the three swing states of Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania in more than 50 years.
And other notes this Friday morning …
Megan Totino Consedine has been named acting secretary and parliamentarian to the state Senate, effective May 21. Pending confirmation by the full Senate, she will be the first woman in Pennsylvania to serve in that position.
Totino Consedine, a former Ephrata resident and one-time law clerk to former county Judge Wayne G. Hummer Jr., most recently served as a deputy general counsel in the Governor’s Office of General Counsel. She also served as an assistant counsel to the Department of the Navy and a special assistant to former Gov. Tom Ridge.
Totino Consedine will be paid a salary of $139,500.
Democratic congressional hopeful Aryanna Strader raised $50,286 from Jan. 1 through April 4, according to her recently filed campaign finance report. Here’s a look at who’s giving to her campaign, in map form. Strader is running against U.S. Rep. Joe Pitts for the 16th Congressional District seat in the fall. She is unopposed in Tuesday’s primary.
Former Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum. (Jae C. Hong/The Associated Press)
And here I thought there was a chance Rick Santorum was going to endorse Mitt Romney sometime soon. Wrongo. The Des Moines Register reports that Santorum, who quit the presidential race last week, is claiming in a letter that hit mailboxes Monday: “It truly frightens me to think what’ll happen if Mitt Romney is the nominee.”
Reports the newspaper: “The blunt message quickly had Republicans here speculating: Did Santorum order up the mailer right before he suspended his campaign on April 10, so its timing was just a simple and understandable mistake? Or did Santorum, who still is raising money and possibly not quite ready to come to grips with his loss, send this wording out deliberately?”
Republican state House candidate Steve Black of Elizabeth Townships
Republican Steve Black and his wife Gloria L. Black poured $15,000 into his campaign for state House in the 37th Legislative District, new finance reports show. The contributions represent more than a quarter of all the money the Friends of Steve Black campaign took in Jan. 1 through April 9.
Black raised nearly $40,000 from contributors besides himself and his wife, and spent $24,535, leaving him with $30,275 to spend during the last two weeks of campaigning. His campaign took in $5,550 in small contributions — those of $250 or less. That’s about 10 percent of the money given to his campaign. Black raised the bulk of him money, $49,260, from large contributors, including $18,500 from political action committees.
The three largest PAC contributions to Black were:
Three other PACs — Fulton Financial, Eckert Seamans and the York Builders Association — contributed $500 to Black’s campaign.
Black’s report is posted in full after the jump. We’ll also post reports for Republicans Mindy Fee and Barry McFarland, who are also seeking the nomination for retiring state Rep. Tom Creighton‘s House seat on April 24, when we get them. Fee’s Cycle 1 report is already online.
Coverage of Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on April 17, 2012. Rick Santorum, who quit his presidential campaign last week, backed out of his scheduled appearance. You can read more about the background of this event here.
Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum speaks in western Pennsylvania after losing three primaries Tuesday. (Jae C. Hong/The Associated Press)
NOTE: This post was updated at 2:20 p.m. to reflect confirmation that Santorum has indeed backed out of his planned Tuesday night appearance in Lancaster.
Rick Santorum, who quit his campaign for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination last week, has backed out of Tuesday night’s banquet being held by the Lancaster County GOP, the party’s executive director said this afternoon.
The Santorum campaign’s Pennsylvania director, Brian Nutt, notified county GOP chairman Ethan Demme in an email this afternoon that the former candidate would not attend, confirming news first reported by The Morning Call’s Colby Itkowitz. “I can tell you that while we’re disappointed that he can’t make it to our event, we’re more disappointed at the lack of communication,” the county GOP’s executive director, Justin Quinn, said. “We had to make a bunch of calls today to get an answer from what’s left of the campaign.”
Nutt’s email to Demme did not give an explanation for Santorum backing out.
Presumed nominee Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich are still scheduled to appear at event, being held in the Lancaster County Convention Center in downtown Lancaster. An estimate 1,100 people are expected to attend. “We still have a great lineup. We have Mitt Romney, we have Newt Gingrich, and we’re going to go forward with two fantastic speakers,” Quinn said.
As of this morning, the Republican Committee said that neither Santorum nor his campaign has notified it that he will not be coming to event that has been in the works for weeks. “If that’s true, they haven’t told us, and I think they would have told us,” Quinn had said previously. Santorum campaign officials could not be reached for comment.
Republican Steve Black's campaign is mailing these negative ads to Republicans in the 37th Legislative District.
A Republican state House candidate from the Lititz area has gone negative on one of his primary opponents, Mindy Fee, for being a registered Democrat more than a decade a ago. In a new mailer, Steve Black’s campaign claims Fee was a “Bill Clinton-Al Gore Democrat” in the late 1990s, and that “real Republicans can’t trust liberal Mindy Fee.”
[NOTE: This post was updated at 1:15 p.m. to include comments from Black after the jump.]
Fee, reached for a response Thursday, confirmed that she was a registered Democrat from 1996 through most of 2000. But she called the ad “misleading.” “I don’t know why he went on the attack. I don’t know if he’s desperate to win the race, or if he’ll say anything to win the race,” Fee said.
“The truth is I’m a member of the Lancaster County Republican Committee and the Manheim Central Republican Committee, and I never voted for Bill Clinton or Al Gore and I would never do so,” she said.
Black’s mailer marked the opening salvo in the three-way race for the Republican nomination for the 37th Legislative District seat. Rep. Tom Creighton is retiring at the end of 2012 after 12 years in office.
