Stacy Garrity is a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump. Will that help or hurt her campaign in Pennsylvania?

Following servings of “Mr. President’s Wedge Salad” and “’Trump’ Chocolate Cake” at a fundraiser dinner at Mar-a-Lago last week, Pennsylvania Treasurer Stacy Garrity stood alongside President Donald Trump, shaking his hand and posing for a signature thumbs-up picture.

“I gave [Garrity] an endorsement. She should win,” Trump said on Friday beneath a swirling, wrought-iron doorway at his private golf club where Garrity hosted a campaign fundraiser.

Garrity, 61, is running unopposed in the May 19 Republican primary election to challenge Gov. Josh Shapiro, a popular Democratic incumbent with a rising national star who Pennsylvania Democrats hope will deliver for them up and down the ballot come November.

Shapiro, Trump said at the fundraiser, is “a stiff” with whom he is “very unimpressed with.” The two have had a fraught relationship. Shapiro has frequently criticized Trump and sued his administration, while Trump has publicly attacked Shapiro on the national stage but privately lauded him, according to Shapiro.

Garrity, on the other hand, has been a stalwart supporter of Trump since she emerged on the Pennsylvania political scene in 2020, beating out the Democratic incumbent for treasurer who outraised her 11-to-1 in an upset election. She built on that success in 2024 by breaking the record for the most votes for a statewide office, a record formerly held by Shapiro. If successful in November, she would become the first woman to be elected Pennsylvania governor.

The retired U.S. Army colonel and former manufacturing executive from rural Bradford County has ardently backed Trump, often going out of her way to voice support for his political decisions that have little to do with her job as the state’s top fiscal watchdog — such as supporting Trump’s efforts to nationalize elections and his signature tax cut law, which is expected to result in 300,000 Pennsylvanians losing Medicaid coverage.

In January, that loyalty appeared to pay off. Trump threw his coveted official support behind Garrity, writing in a Truth Social post that she is an “America First Patriot.”

But experts say things have changed since 2024, when support for Trump ushered in a red wave in Pennsylvania and throughout the nation. And whether his nod this year will help boost Garrity to unseat Shapiro remains to be seen.

Amid changing political sentiments and as the party out of power in Washington, Democrats nationwide this year are favored to regain some control. Meanwhile, Garrity’s allegiance to Trump could become a double-edged sword, as the president remains the leader of the Republican Party, but faces sinking approval ratings in the critical swing state that helped elect him to the White House two years ago.

» READ MORE: Republicans were on track to lead Pa. voter registrations for the first time in 30 years. Democrats think they’ve stopped the trend.

“If I’m Stacy Garrity, you have to recognize that largely, your campaign is going to be impacted heavily by where the president is at in terms of his public standing,” said Christopher Borick, a political science professor at Muhlenberg College. “You can do so many things, but at the end of the day, you may rise and fall with the president, because you are going to be attached to him.”

That path will likely unfold in Pennsylvania in November, when control of the governor’s mansion, the U.S. House, state House, and state Senate are all up for grabs. Shapiro is aiming to secure a Democratic trifecta in Harrisburg, with narrow Democratic control of the state House and state Senate control within reach, while Garrity hopes she can help Republicans retain control of four key U.S House seats while maintaining GOP control of the state Senate.

As the Republican candidate in the biggest statewide race this year, Garrity will also be responsible for motivating swing and independent voters to cast their votes. Early polls show she has a lot of ground to make up, as a Franklin & Marshall College survey released this month found that 48% of voters said they’d elect Shapiro, while 28% said they’d vote for Garrity. Another 7% said they’d vote for someone else, and 17% were undecided or refused to answer.

Meanwhile, Shapiro entered the year outraising Garrity in campaign contributions by nearly 30-1. Updated campaign finance reports detailing Garrity’s fundraising since being endorsed by Trump are expected to be made available next week. Matt Beynon, a spokesperson for Garrity’s campaign, said in an email that contributions from the Mar-a-Lago fundraiser are “still coming in” but that it was a “highly successful” event.

» READ MORE: Big-money and out-of-state donors helped Josh Shapiro raise $30 million while Stacy Garrity raised $1.5 million from Pa.’s grassroots

“She’s going to be up against a very experienced, disciplined campaigner with lots of resources and high public approval ratings as an incumbent,” Borick said. “Taking him on with all of that would be a big challenge. Taking him on with a weight around your back [like Trump] is a lot to ask.”

Despite his battered approval ratings, Trump’s endorsements remain influential in races across the country, as his backing can boost candidate name recognition, generate campaign donations, and motivate his base. Garrity told a reporter at Mar-a-Lago that she expects Trump to campaign in Pennsylvania for her and others “like he is on the ballot.”

Jim Worthington, the owner of the Newtown Athletic Club and longtime Trump booster, said Trump’s support is critical for any candidate to win statewide, too. The “die-hard” Trump supporters make up a significant portion of the Republican base now and are necessary to run up the margins in a purple state like Pennsylvania.

“You can’t win without his blessing,” Worthington said, noting that Trump’s endorsement of Garrity cleared the field of any GOP primary competition.

» READ MORE: An ‘America First Patriot’: President Donald Trump endorses Stacy Garrity for Pennsylvania governor

Garrity declined to be interviewed for this story, but said in a statement she was proud to be among 10 gubernatorial candidates to receive Trump’s nod so far this year.

“Under my administration, we will look to partner with the federal government to move Pennsylvania forward,” she added. “We earned the President’s endorsement because he recognized that we had the right message and organization to defeat Josh Shapiro this November.”

Garrity’s time in Pennsylvania politics — and her public support for Trump — dates back to 2020, after a long career in the U.S. Army Reserve and time as a top executive at manufacturer Global Tungsten & Powders.

After Trump lost reelection that year while claiming he had won, Garrity on Jan. 5, 2021 stood on the steps of the Pennsylvania State Capitol and repeated Trump’s lie. The next day, violent rioters would break into the U.S. Capitol, repeating the same lie as members of Congress tried to certify the election results.

She’d again repeat the false election claim on stage at a 2022 Trump rally in Western Pennsylvania. “We know that he won,” she told the crowd of thousands of Trump supporters, while sharing the stage with him.

At the same rally, Trump told his supporters that Garrity said she won because of him, becoming the first GOP state treasurer in decades. “But she said, ‘Sir, you are much more popular and you lost my area [in the presidential election]. You lost and — it’s not possible.’"

Garrity has since tried to walk back those comments, arguing she had just gotten swept up in the moment.

“That was at a Trump rally, and you know, those are kind of fun things,” Garrity told reporters earlier this year. “It’s easy to get caught up in a Trump rally. But I have to tell you that after the 2020 election, I know Joe Biden was the president, painfully aware of it.”

Still, she’s remained staunchly supportive of Trump and his agenda.

Garrity has urged Americans to cooperate with Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations that resulted in federal agents fatally shooting at least two American protesters and has backed his increasingly unpopular economic policies.

She is campaigning for governor on a platform, in part, to increase Pennsylvania’s energy production, new school choice options, and a promise to tamp down state government spending. She has argued that Shapiro has made Pennsylvania mediocre, and is now flailing in national rankings.

Worthington, the GOP booster from Bucks County, described Shapiro as “a strong candidate” but not a great governor. Once Garrity makes that case to voters, she will win over the swing voters any candidate needs to win statewide in Pennsylvania, Worthington said.

“I don’t think Shapiro is nearly what they made him out to be,” he said.

Republicans will have a greater shot at winning up and down the ballot in November if the Pennsylvania Republican Party deploys a statewide mail voting program, he added.

Garrity has also downplayed Trump’s appearance in the Department of Justice’s trove of documents about convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, arguing that Democrats would have released them much sooner if there was clear evidence of Trump partaking in inappropriate behavior.

When Shapiro received more than $2 million in campaign donations from LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who was mentioned in the Epstein files for visiting the financier’s private island, Garrity called on the governor to return the money.

A spokesperson for Shapiro previously said Garrity should “stop playing politics with the Epstein files.”

“Donald Trump is mentioned in the files over 5,000 times. Is she going to ask him to rescind his endorsement?” asked Manuel Bonder, Shapiro’s spokesperson.

Despite her comments on the 2020 election, Garrity’s loyalty to Trump has only appeared to grow since she began her campaign for governor, said Samuel Chen, a GOP strategist who has worked on past GOP gubernatorial campaigns but is not affiliated with Garrity’s current bid.

“You look at her races for treasurer, and you don’t have this kind of fealty to the president that she’s doing now,” he said.

In the past, Pennsylvania voters have rewarded GOP officials who have broken with Trump on some issues, like U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R., Bucks) or U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.), both Chen and Borrick noted.

Similarly, Shapiro, who enjoys steadily high approval ratings, wrote in his recent memoir that he’s proud to dissent at times from other Democrats, citing his disagreements with how former President Joe Biden and then-Gov. Tom Wolf handled the COVID-19 pandemic.

Garrity could benefit from a similar move, both Borick and Chen said.

“Garrity has some potential to move in that direction, but she seems to have decided it’s better to be completely aligned with the president,” Chen said. “People want to elect somebody who represents them in Pennsylvania, not somebody who is just going to pledge loyalty to the president.”

Democrats see Garrity’s support for Trump as a weak point. A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Democratic Party criticized Garrity as a “disastrous candidate who has pledged her complete allegiance to Donald Trump.”

In addition, Garrity, as a member of the party in power, must also contend with political headwinds in November. And in Pennsylvania, they’ve historically been particularly potent.

Over the last 100 years, Pennsylvania voters have usually elected a governor of the opposite party than the president, Borick said. For example, after the nation elected former Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1992, Pennsylvania elected former Republican Gov. Tom Ridge two years later. And when America elected former GOP President George W. Bush, Pennsylvania elected Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell in the midterm.

Garrity captured the Pennsylvania Republican Party endorsement approximately 18 months before the November election, in an effort to coalesce GOP support for her and give her extra time to introduce herself to voters. Now eight months into her candidacy, some voters — including Republicans — say they still have yet to learn her name.

Maureen Connors, 64, a registered Republican in Delaware County who participated in the Franklin & Marshall College poll earlier this month, said she dislikes Trump, but she is unlikely to let her opinion of him sway her decision in November. Last week, she said she was unaware that Garrity is running.

Connors is one of the hundreds of thousands of Republicans who voted for Shapiro in 2022 in his election over far-right State Sen. Doug Mastriano. She says she might vote for him again, but is willing to hear what Garrity proposes to improve the state. Connors said she won’t be tuning into the race until much closer to November, as she tries to avoid politics until it’s time to cast her vote.

“We’ll have to see what she says,” Connors added.

Barbara Haas, 81, of Elkins Park, a registered Democrat who also participated in the Franklin & Marshall poll, said she’s long been a fan of Shapiro.

“I don’t know the other candidate, but it’s unlikely I would not vote for Gov. Shapiro if he’s on the ballot,” Haas added.

Jacob Burris, a 29-year-old from Grove City and a registered Republican, said he doesn’t dislike Shapiro and is happy with the current state of Pennsylvania — though he is most focused on local issues that he sees as having the biggest effect on his daily life. But he’s interested in learning more about Garrity.

“It would be nice to have somebody from a rural upbringing to bring that perspective in, because that’s what a huge chunk of this state is,” Burris said.

On Trump, Burris said he dislikes the way Trump speaks, but “at my core, I would say that I stand for America.”

Will Trump’s endorsement of Garrity play any part in his decision on who he’ll support in November?

“He has endorsed people that I like and people that I dislike so many times,” Burris said. “That’s like seeing an ’organic’ stamp on something. I don’t believe you.”