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Last year, Murrysville’s Aryanna Berringer was the first Democrat to step up and say she planned on running against Lt. Gov. Mike Stack in 2018. Stack was mired in controversy last year, when he and his wife were investigated for poorly treating state-funded employees assigned to tend to the lieutenant governor’s home, as well as state police assigned to protect them.
Berringer is a progressive Dem and an Iraq War veteran, and she wanted to serve her state.
Honestly, I was likely to vote for her in the primary election. Unfortunately, neither I nor anyone else in the state will get that chance. Crippled by the lack of commonsense campaign-finance laws, Berringer just couldn’t continue.
She was trying to run a grassroots campaign, but her opponents — Stack and Braddock Mayor John Fetterman — were, she told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “bankrolled by their mega-wealthy families.” When he ran for the U.S. Senate last year, Fetterman received more than $50,000, as a gift from his parents. Stack recently disclosed a $60,000 loan from his mother and another $25,000 from a PAC with ties to Vincent Fuomo, a corrupt state senator who spent a lenient 55 months in prison for a host of charges, including wire fraud, conspiracy and obstruction of justice.
Facing that kind of money in a campaign is akin to scaling Everest in flip-flops.
“All this money, they’re going to dump that into TV ads, and people like me are going to get drowned out,” she told the P-G.
That’s the problem with our campaign-finance system. Berringer may be the best person to serve in this position, and she doesn’t get the chance to even have her voice heard because her parents don’t have a spare $100K lying around. That’s not how it should be. The days of the citizen legislator, if they ever existed, are long gone. It’s been replaced by a system that rewards candidates who are either wealthy or willing to be beholden to special interests, in order to afford massive TV-ad buys.
Regardless of your feelings on how good a governor Tom Wolf is, that’s how he got elected. Family fortune was also the reason that Kathleen Kane won the attorney general’s race. Her tenure was a dumpster fire that ended with a two-year prison sentence for perjury.
Aryanna Berringer and others like her don’t get a fair shot to show what they can bring to the table. Her situation is a stark reminder, as if we needed one, that our political system is rigged for the wealthy.
This article appears in Mar 28 – Apr 3, 2018.
The lietanant goverrnors office is a waste of taxpayer money and should be done away with, but since were stuck with it, I think its worth discussing a few things.
The article fails to mention that Ms. Berringer actually had the largest amount of family support in both terms of dollar amount as well as percentage to total raised, other than Nina Ahmad who wrote a check for $500,000 to herself. That would have been a great point to add to the article if the author had done some research.
I also wonder why the author didnt ask her why she didnt run for a local office or state rep that would establish a base rather than going statewide in her first ever campaign. Im not sure why the author thinks Ms Berringer is more qualified than a county commissioner of one of the largest counties in the state.
Harkin, her husbands in-kind support of managing her campaign isnt actual money. 1. She didnt have to report it. 2. She did because she has ethics. 3. Why does she have to run for school board first? Thats awfully sexist. I mean the Governor didnt run for County Commissioner first he ran for Gov because he was qualified. She was qualified. THE MOST qualified and Fetterman isnt. Hes a trust-fund fraud. Dude has never had a job. Hes daddy and mommy still pay his way.
Aryanna is a bitter asshole. Shes doing herself no favors with this awkwardly public trashing of Fetterman. So what if his family gave some money? He still has an impressive grassroots donor base that makes up the majority of his funding. And anyone who chooses to use their wealth for the betterment of people is exactly what we need more of.
To think you could just jump into a statewide race without any money or name ID at all is frankly naive and stupid. Start building a base of donors and support with a local or regional office and work your way up from there.