During the 2022 gubernatorial race, the Pennsylvania GOP (PAGOP) decided not to endorse an alternative to Trump’s candidate, the far-right state senator and prominent election denier Doug Mastriano, a decision that some within the party see as the reason key Republicans lost that year.
For the 2024 election cycle, the state GOP has regrouped to focus their efforts on winning, revising their strategy to follow Trump’s lead and reverse course on their previously staunch objection to mail-in ballots. “After last year’s experience, where the mail-in ballots just overwhelmed our votes at the polls, our party has really wrapped around this and is taking it on very strongly,” GOP Chairman Lawrence Tabas told NBC10 in December 2023.
The party also formally endorsed election deniers in two statewide races and a Republican Senate candidate involved in the fake elector plot. Meanwhile, several fake electors have remained in top positions of leadership within the Pennsylvania GOP, including the vice chair and both national committee members. In July 2024, the state party sent three of its fake electors to represent Pennsylvania at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
The following are among the state GOP leaders who express unfettered loyalty to Trump and his ongoing claim that any election he doesn’t win is “rigged”:
- Lawrence Tabas | Chair
Even before Election Day 2020, Lawrence Tabas started stirring up controversy about the presidential election when he told The Atlantic that he had spoken with the Trump campaign about the possibility of Republican-controlled legislatures in battleground states like Pennsylvania directly appointing electors if the popular vote was not resolved quickly—a scenario that would have led to Trump “winning” Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral college votes, and likely the election. Although Tabas had planned to serve as one of the state’s 20 fake electors, others stepped in to replace him in that role. - Bernadette Comfort | Vice Chair
Bernie Comfort was one of Pennsylvania’s 20 fake electors who attempted to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election by submitting fake Electoral College documents to Congress as part of the January 6, 2021, certification process. In addition to her role as GOP vice chair, she was the state’s Trump campaign chairwoman in 2019 and served on the National Women for Trump Advisory Board. - Elizabeth Preate Havey | PAGOP Secretary
Elizabeth Preate Havey has questioned the safety of ballot drop boxes and in 2022 asked the county district attorney to investigate a video that purportedly showed a Democratic committee woman putting 30 ballots into a drop box. “There are so few security measures in place right now that getting rid of the one or two ones that we have makes the election less secure and makes people believe that there’s an opportunity for fraud and that fraud has occurred,” she told DV Journal. Havey also testified at a December 2020 legislative hearing chaired by election denier and state Senator Doug Mastriano in which she claimed a number of voting irregularities had taken place in the November election, including voting by dead people. Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani testified after Havey, and the president called in. - Marcela Diaz-Myers | Deputy Chair
As deputy chair and a member of the state GOP’s Hispanic Advisory Council, Marcela Diaz-Myers was one of Pennsylvania’s 20 fake electors who attempted to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election by submitting fake Electoral College documents to Congress as part of the January 6, 2021, certification process. - Andy Reilly | National Committeeman
Andy Reilly was one of Pennsylvania’s 20 fake electors who attempted to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election by submitting fake Electoral College documents to Congress as part of the January 6, 2021, certification process. Described as the “behind the scenes” manager of local, state, and judicial campaigns, he has also served as the state party’s secretary, as chairman of the Delaware County Republican Party, and as a two-term Delaware County Council member. - Sam DeMarco III | Allegheny County Chair
Sam DeMarco, who also serves as a county councilman overseeing elections, voted against certifying the 2020 presidential results in Allegheny County and attempted to subvert the outcome of the presidential election that year by serving as one of Pennsylvania’s fake electors. In June 2022, the FBI questioned him about his role in the fake electors scheme. - Patricia K. Poprik | Bucks County Chair
Pat Poprik was one of Pennsylvania’s 20 fake electors who attempted to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election by submitting fake Electoral College documents to Congress as part of the January 6, 2021, certification process. - C. Arnold McClure | Huntingdon County Chair
C. Arnold McClure has praised election denier and state Senator Doug Mastriano as “the one guy who’s been fighting from the beginning.” In February 2021, Reuters reported that McClure “wants to punish fellow conservatives who have turned against the former president” and was among those pushing the state GOP to censure U.S. Senator Pat Toomey (R) for voting to convict Trump during his second impeachment trial for inciting the attack on the U.S. Capitol. - Harry Haas | Luzerne County Chair
Harry Haas has spread disinformation about the 2020 presidential election online, and after the election he refused to certify the results until “officials are provided with ‘a full accounting of all votes, including write-in votes, provisional ballots and ‘spoiled’ ballots surrendered by voters who received a mail-in ballot and decided to vote in person instead.’” In 2020 he also pushed to investigate the role of Dominion Voting Systems in Pennsylvania despite lacking any indication of wrongdoing by the company. On December 5, 2020, he tweeted that Democratic Governor Tom Wolf “decertified voting machines in 2019 to coerce the purchase [of] $4M new ones” and committed “election violations” by approving Pennsylvania’s 2020 election results. Haas is also listed as an election denier on whyy.org.