Mehmet Oz and Doug Mastriano, the GOP’s nominees for U.S. Senate and governor, beat their Democratic opponents in Lancaster County, a historically rich — and necessary — source of votes for Republicans seeking statewide victory.
But Oz far outperformed Mastriano here. Mastriano's margin in Lancaster County, of only 4,399 votes over Democrat Josh Shapiro, was the smallest of any Republican gubernatorial nominee in modern history. Mastriano's narrow margin of victory only became clear overnight, when the county elections office published updated counts of mail ballots.
Mastriano, a state senator from Franklin County, won 111,117, or 50%, of all in-person votes and mail ballots counted here in Tuesday’s election. His opponent, Shapiro, the state attorney general, won 106,718, or 48%, of the vote.
Mastriano’s margin of victory fell short of Republican Scott Wagner’s in his failed race against incumbent Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf four years ago. Wagner emerged from Lancaster County with a 6,189-vote margin over Wolf. Wagner won 50.5% of the vote here to Wolf's 47.5%.
Mastriano's performance in Republican-rich Lancaster County also fell far short of the margin enjoyed by the GOP’s last successful gubernatorial nominee, Tom Corbett, in 2010.
Oz, a celebrity surgeon from suburban Philadelphia, well outperformed Mastriano in the county. He won 123,747 votes, or 56%. His opponent, Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, won 93,137 votes, or 42%.
Oz's strong showing in the county nearly rivaled that of the Republican U.S. senator retiring from the seat, Pat Toomey, in 2010 and 2016. Oz’s performance here helped him remain competitive in the statewide race, which was undecided late Tuesday night before Fetterman declared victory early Wednesday morning.
That Oz and Mastriano carried Lancaster County is unsurprising given the Republican Party’s large voter-registration edge here. Only two Democrats running in statewide races have won Lancaster County since the Civil War.
But the disparity between the two statewide candidates here — Oz won 12,630 more votes than Mastriano in separate races that drew a similar number of total votes — suggested that Republicans, particularly those in more moderate suburbs such as Manheim and East Hempfield townships, rejected positions held by the state senator they considered too extreme.
The disparity also suggested that some Democrats may have been concerned about Fetterman’s health and voted instead for Oz.
Republicans running statewide traditionally have counted on large victories in Lancaster, York and other central Pennsylvania counties to help them offset large Democratic sweeps in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Failing to do that spells electoral doom statewide.
Lancaster offers Republicans running in statewide elections the largest potential prize among Pennsylvania’s 67 counties: a whopping 64,453-vote edge over Democrats. The only county with a similarly large Republican margin is York, where GOP voters outnumber Democrats by 61,685, according to Department of State data.
Republicans made up 50.8% of the electorate in Lancaster County for this election, according to Department of State records; Democrats made up 32.6%. Voters registered with third parties or who are not affiliated with any party made up the remaining 16.6%.
The last gubernatorial race without an incumbent took place in the 2010 midterms, during Democratic President Barack Obama’s first term. Corbett won nearly 71% of the vote in Lancaster County, walloping Democrat Dan Onorato by 63,162 votes here on his path to victory statewide. Corbett, a popular state attorney general, cruised to victory statewide by nearly 358,000 votes, or 10 percentage points.
It was the largest margin here of any gubernatorial race in at least several decades. And it was the largest of any of the counties he won that year. Only York, where Corbett won 54,449 more votes than his opponent, came close.
Four years later, though, Corbett lost his re-election bid against Wolf and won Lancaster County by only 25,585 votes, or about 18 percentage points.
Oz’s large margin of victory here helped his campaign remain competitive against Fetterman.
In the last midterm contest for U.S. Senate during which a Democrat was president, in 2010, Toomey trounced Democrat Joe Sestak in Lancaster County, winning more than 68% of the vote here and racking up a margin of 54,464 votes on his path to victory for the open seat.
Toomey won re-election in 2016 with 59% of the vote and racking up 52,852 more votes than his Democratic opponent, Katie McGinty.
The last time a Democrat running in a contested statewide race carried Lancaster County was 1990, when Gov. Robert P. Casey defeated Republican Barbara Hafer, the state’s auditor general at the time, by a two-to-one margin to win a second term in what was seen as a monumental sweep in this Republican bastion.
Prior to Casey’s win here, Democratic presidential nominee Lyndon Johnson narrowly defeated Republican Barry Goldwater in Lancaster County on his way to a national landslide victory in 1964. He was the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the county since before the Civil War. (James Buchanan won the popular vote here in 1856, and Andrew Jackson won the county in 1828.)
