As goes Pennsylvania in 2022, so goes America

 

By:  Stephen Collinson and Shelby Rose

One reason why American elections drag on so long compared with those of other countries is that most states actually hold a two-stage process. First come the primary elections, in which the most committed Democratic and Republican voters often choose the candidates each party will field in the big fights in November for various local, state and national political posts. That’s where we are now, and state by state there are elections most Tuesdays throughout the spring and early summer. 

One of the most intriguing slates of races is in Pennsylvania, a state that does a passable imitation of the wider United States, with its liberal cities like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, sprawling suburbs, shrinking industrial hubs and vast rural areas that trend conservative. The Keystone State is especially fascinating this year, since it’s a petri dish for political battles that will dominate the fall elections, and its competitive Senate race could decide which party controls the chamber in Washington. The ideological struggle raging inside each party burns especially strongly there.

Among Republicans, the primaries are proving the extraordinary power of Donald Trump. The ex-President has endorsed celebrity surgeon Mehmet Oz in the party's Senate race, once again displaying his weakness for a TV star in his own image. The price of Trump's support is familiar. Oz has embraced the lie that the 2020 election was a fraud. The problem for Oz is that some voters doubt he’s a conservative, despite him projecting his conversion to the "America First" cult.
 
One of his opponents, former hedge fund titan David McCormick, is still smarting from not getting Trump’s nod despite his own considerable genuflections to the godfather of GOP politics. The race has turned nasty, and in a Trumpian flourish, McCormick has enlisted former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to question Oz’s patriotic loyalties, given that he’s a dual US and Turkish citizen. Pompeo’s proxy war in Pennsylvania with Trump is intriguing in itself since he’s mulling his own 2024 presidential campaign.
 
The GOP’s extreme turn is also rocking the party’s search for a gubernatorial candidate. Hard-core Trumper Doug Mastriano, the front-runner, is comparing the anti-abortion movement to the push to abolish the slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries by William Wilberforce, a British politician. His potential Democratic opponent, state Attorney General Josh Shapiro, says he’s the only thing standing between Pennsylvanians and a state ban on abortion if the US Supreme Court overturns the constitutional right for a woman to end a pregnancy in the coming weeks.

The Democratic Senate primary is revealing the party's duel between progressives and moderates. The front-runner is Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, whose muscular blue-collar liberalism has drawn comparisons to independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Rep. Conor Lamb, a moderate Democratic congressman, is following Biden’s centrist 2020 playbook and styles himself as the candidate who can win in Trump country and keep his party in power in DC. 

Pennsylvania, the state where US democracy was born, is writing America's political future again. Its primary voters go to the polls on May 17.

Congress has enough trouble getting things done on planet Earth. So the chances of lawmakers making an extraterrestrial breakthrough seem one giant leap.
 
But as CNN's Devan Cole writes for Meanwhile, a House committee will seek answers to help satisfy the American public's longtime fascination with UFOs next week with its first public hearing on the issue since the early 1970s.
 
The House Intelligence Committee's subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation will feature testimony from Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security Ronald S. Moultrie and Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott W. Bray. CNN’s Alex Rogers notes that the public hearing will be followed by a closed, classified hearing about a Pentagon program focused on the issue. Oh, to be a fly on that wall.
 
“The purpose of this hearing is to give the public an opportunity to hear directly from subject matter experts and leaders in the Intelligence Community on one of the greatest mysteries of our time, and to break the cycle of the excessive secrecy and speculation with truth and transparency,” House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, said in a statement.  
 
Notably, the committee’s witness list doesn’t include any little green men.  
 
But the two US officials are sure to discuss an intelligence community report released last year that examined 144 reports of what the government terms "unidentified aerial phenomena." Investigators found no evidence that the sightings represented either extraterrestrial life or a major technological advancement by a foreign adversary like Russia or China, but acknowledge that is a possible explanation.  
 
Though UFO fanatics will be watching next week’s hearing closely, some critics have bemoaned the lawmakers’ focus on UFOs at a time when Americans are facing a slew of more pressing issues, including the war in Ukraine, rising inflation and the potential reversal of a nationwide right to an abortion by the Supreme Court.  
 
“Can we instead have a hearing about the extreme weather changes? Can we instead hear about unemployment and how it’s almost impossible to get a job DESPITE open positions? I don’t care about UFOs anymore I just want to live,” one disgruntled Twitter user wrote on Tuesday.