Garrity accuses Shapiro of a 'massive flip-flop' on data centers. Her own record: 'We need to deregulate,' 'Ohio is kicking our butt,' and a pause she can't explain — 'We pause for as long as we need the pause.'
In June, Garrity introduced Trump at a Pennsylvania rally and he never said her name — he praised Dan Meuser and name-checked Josh Shapiro instead. On August 4 she stood beside his desk for the endorsement. Trump's approval in Pennsylvania is 39%.
Asked whether Pennsylvania should join Trump's new federal private-school tax credit program, Garrity answered: 'I would a hundred percent.' She also wants Lifeline Scholarships — all in a state a court found unconstitutionally shortchanges poor districts.
Supported Trump's Tariffs Knowing They'd Raise Prices for Pennsylvanians
Trump's tariffs are raising prices and hurting Pennsylvania families and small businesses. Stacy Garrity knew that — and supported them anyway.
Days after Trump's April 2025 tariff announcement — which set off the worst week for the U.S. stock market since the pandemic — Garrity told a conservative conference in Camp Hill that the tariffs were "common sense measures" that were good for the American people, adding that Trump was "restoring fair trade balance."
She acknowledged the pain and backed the tariffs anyway. "It's a very short-term pain but with a very long-term gain," she said in an April 2025 interview. By February 2026, an analysis by the economic research group Trade Partnership Worldwide found Trump's tariffs had cost Pennsylvanians $4 billion in a single year — and Garrity's campaign did not respond when asked about it.
Stacy Garrity chose Trump's tariffs over Pennsylvania families even knowing the harm they would cause. We deserve better.
In Pennsylvania alone, the congressional Joint Economic Committee estimated the cuts would cost 451,000 Pennsylvanians their insurance across the state's 17 congressional districts — about 174,000 losing Affordable Care Act coverage and 277,000 losing Medicaid.
When given the chance to say Congress should restore the expiring Affordable Care Act premium tax credits, Garrity said congressional Republicans were "absolutely correct" to let them expire.
Pennsylvanians found out what that meant. After the credits lapsed on January 1, 2026, the average Pennie enrollee's premium doubled — a 102% increase to keep the same plan, and roughly 85,000 Pennsylvanians — one in five — dropped their coverage entirely. In Northeast Pennsylvania alone, more than 28,000 people had been relying on those subsidies.
The same bill would add so much to the national debt that it could force nearly $500 billion in Medicare cuts beginning in 2026, Congress's nonpartisan budget office reported.
Stacy Garrity supported ripping health care away from hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians. We deserve better.
Nearly 2 million Pennsylvanians rely on SNAP to put food on the table. Stacy Garrity opposed restoring food aid — and cheered the bill that cut it.
At the Pennsylvania Press Club in January 2026, Garrity said she would not have supported Gov. Shapiro's lawsuit to make the Trump administration restore federal funding for food banks, saying the commonwealth already has too many people receiving food benefits. At stake was $13 million under a three-year contract the USDA had already signed — money Pennsylvania planned to use buying food from its own farms to stock food banks, schools, and child care centers.
Cheered the Law That's Raising Pennsylvania's Electric Bills
Pennsylvania electricity prices are climbing while demand outruns supply. Stacy Garrity championed the federal law that made it worse — and her own plan for the state is to drill more of the gas she collects royalties on.
Garrity called Trump's budget bill a "historic plan" that would deliver "real relief and real results for everyday Pennsylvanians." The same law gutted the clean-energy tax credits driving new power generation in the commonwealth: two of the largest — for building clean energy projects and for generating low-emission power — now expire at the end of 2027 rather than nearly a decade later. Experts told Spotlight PA the rollback would slow renewable growth, cut the amount of power generated in the state, and raise bills — one analysis projected an annual increase of $130 per Pennsylvania household by 2030.
Developers told Spotlight PA the added construction costs would be "baked in" to electricity prices for consumers for "several years to come." The law also killed the 30% residential credit for homeowners who install solar after the end of 2025.
The damage is already landing. Pennsylvania's bipartisan Solar for Schools program was designed around those federal credits, and a group of schools has had to abandon their solar plans outright — some after state grants proved insufficient without the federal match, others never applying at all. Pennsylvania already ranked 49th in the nation in 2024 for share of energy generated from renewables.
Garrity's answer is more drilling. In a June 2026 speech to the natural gas industry group Marcellus Shale Coalition, she pledged to sign an executive order on "day one" lifting state limits on new drilling sites, call a special session to fast-track gas permits, and "reform or eliminate renewable energy and efficiency mandates." She reports income from two natural gas companies herself.
Stacy Garrity cheered on a law that is raising Pennsylvania's power bills. We deserve better.
Cheered on DOGE While Pennsylvanians Lost Jobs and Benefits
Pennsylvania is home to roughly 75,000 federal workers and nearly 3 million Social Security recipients. Stacy Garrity cheered DOGE on anyway.
At an April 2025 conservative conference, Garrity worked the crowd on Elon Musk's cuts: "Who here is excited about what Elon and DOGE are doing?" When they applauded, she added: "Well, guess what? My office is doing that right here in Pennsylvania."
Before the layoffs, Pennsylvania was home to around 75,000 federal workers. Hundreds of them lost their jobs — from a Pittsburgh-area Energy Department research lab to the National Park Service staff at Gettysburg — and the administration ordered agencies to prepare for still larger cuts.
The cuts also degraded service for the nearly 3 million Pennsylvanians who collect Social Security. When the Social Security Administration cut off phone applications for retirement benefits, its own internal memo estimated the change could drive as many as 85,000 people a week into already backlogged field offices.
Spent Two Years Pushing Data Centers, Then Discovered a Campaign Issue
Communities across Pennsylvania are fighting data center projects over water use, power demand, noise, and farmland. Stacy Garrity spent two years demanding deregulation to build more of them — and now says she'd pause them, without saying how or for how long.
In the summer of 2025, Garrity told KDKA's Big K Morning Show that Pennsylvania was "playing around the fringes" compared with other states. "We need to deregulate," she said. "Pennsylvania is not an easy state to do business in and our neighbors are kind of eating our lunch." In July she told Breitbart the state needed more energy production to fuel "a rebirth of Pennsylvania as a national AI and tech hub."
Once it became a campaign liability, the tone changed — but Garrity insists nothing did. "I know there was some headline and you guys want to infer that my position has 'evolved,' but it hasn't," she told reporters in June 2026. "I've said that from day one."
Her actual proposal is close to empty. Garrity has called for a "pause" on new development but has provided few details, would not answer Spotlight PA's questions about specifics, and it is unclear whether she could even impose one without the legislature. Asked how long it would last, she said only: "We pause for as long as we need the pause." Meanwhile roughly two in three Pennsylvanians surveyed this spring called data centers a crisis or a problem.
Stacy Garrity spent two years demanding deregulation, then found a poll. We deserve better.
In April 2026, Pennsylvania's Commonwealth Court ruled that the state constitution protects a fundamental right to abortion and struck down the state's ban on Medicaid coverage for it. Stacy Garrity called the decision "immoral."
When Roe v. Wade fell in 2022, Garrity celebrated it on Facebook as "a great day for the sanctity of life" and declared "justice has prevailed." A month later she posted an image reading "Roses are red, violets are blue, defund Planned Parenthood," then sold merchandise carrying the phrase, along with a hat that said "Baby Lives Matter."
Denied the 2020 Election and Undermined Pennsylvania's Votes
Stacy Garrity is an election denier who has signaled she would let the Trump administration into Pennsylvania's elections.
Within days of the 2020 election, Garrity's own campaign committee signed on to Trump's petition to throw out 2,177 Bucks County mail-in ballots over envelope technicalities — missing dates, missing addresses, unsealed privacy envelopes. The petitioners stipulated in court that they did "not allege, and there is no evidence of, any fraud" in connection with the ballots. On November 19, 2020, the judge denied the petition and ordered every one of them counted.
On January 5, 2021 — the day before the Capitol attack — Garrity stood before a Trump-flag-waving crowd at the Pennsylvania Capitol, at a rally its own organizer said was meant to get lawmakers to decertify the state's presidential results, and told them "The election from this November is tarnished forever." Years later her campaign claimed she had really been talking about a state senate race — but the only available video of her speech never mentions that district.
As the Capitol was under attack the next day, Garrity replied from her personal Facebook account to commenters defending the rioters: "I am proud of our Patriots." In another reply she wrote, "I spoke at the rally in Harrisburg yesterday condemning the election and lack of integrity."
Long after January 6 she kept it up. At a May 2022 rally in Greensburg with Trump and Senate candidate Mehmet Oz, Garrity took the podium and said of Trump, "We know that he won." Pressed on it in January 2026, she said "that was at a Trump rally and those are kind of fun things," and that "it's easy to get caught up at a Trump rally."
She kept the fraud claims going long afterward. In an August 2024 radio interview she said, "I think that there's probably always been fraud in Philadelphia, and there always will be fraud in Philadelphia. It's just a matter of what, to what degree." Multiple lawsuits and independent investigations affirmed the 2020 election was fair, and Biden carried Pennsylvania by more than 80,000 votes.
In January 2025, after Trump pardoned every one of the January 6 rioters on his first day back in office, Garrity told the Philadelphia Inquirer she didn't have an opinion on the pardons.
A governor decides how far Pennsylvania cooperates with federal immigration raids. Stacy Garrity has already answered: all the way — and she thinks the people who object are being paid.
At a McKean County Republican Party meet and greet on February 9, 2026, Garrity was asked how she would handle a surge of immigration enforcement in Philadelphia. She called for "coordinated cooperation at every level of law enforcement," praised states where ICE can walk into a local jail — "there's no protest, there's no drama, there's nothing" — and then dismissed the Pennsylvanians who would object: "I think a lot of them are paid protestors. They all look the same, and they have, it's very well coordinated."
She said it days after a federal agent shot and killed Alex Pretti, a Veterans Affairs nurse, in Minneapolis. Asked about the killing, Garrity said she had not watched the videos and was "going to withhold any judgment until the investigation."
Her enthusiasm predates the campaign. In a March 2025 radio interview she said she was "so proud of what ICE is doing," and at the April 2025 Pennsylvania Leadership Conference she called it "utterly insane and un-American" that certain immigrants had not been deported sooner. In January 2026 she put it plainly: "It's always good to cooperate with ICE."
When ICE moved to convert warehouses in Berks and Schuylkill Counties into detention facilities holding an estimated 9,000 detainees, Garrity's campaign refused to say whether she supported them — offering only that they "warrant serious review" and attacking Gov. Shapiro's opposition as "posturing" and "grandstanding." State environmental regulators had found the facilities could drain local drinking water sources and overwhelm sewage systems, and ICE responded by asking Pennsylvania to loosen its water and sewage rules.
Stacy Garrity would put Pennsylvania's police at ICE's disposal and calls the objectors paid actors. We deserve better.
Won't Stand Up to Trump Deploying Troops in Pennsylvania
A governor's job includes protecting Pennsylvanians from federal overreach. Stacy Garrity has shown she won't.
In September 2025, after Trump sent the National Guard into Los Angeles and Washington and announced he intended to send federal troops to Chicago and Baltimore, Gov. Shapiro said Pennsylvania was preparing for the possibility. Garrity's campaign would not say whether she favored a Guard deployment in Pennsylvania — or whether she would send Pennsylvania guard troops to police other states, as Republican governors in Ohio and West Virginia had. Instead her statement said "President Trump has shown that making America safe and cracking down on crime is a top priority."
Never Registered as a Lobbyist — and Would Regulate the Company That Pays Her
Stacy Garrity's pitch is that a businesswoman would clean up Harrisburg. Her own record is a string of conflicts she won't explain.
Before becoming treasurer, Garrity was vice president of government affairs and industry liaison at defense contractor Global Tungsten and Powders, where she managed hundreds of thousands of lobbying dollars pushing policies that benefited her employer — tariffs on foreign competitors, and tariff exemptions for her own company. She has taken public credit for moving legislation. She never registered as a lobbyist. Craig Holman of Public Citizen told WHYY that "even the title she had as vice president of government affairs is a code name for lobbyists," and called the failure to register "a big red flag." Her campaign says she never crossed the threshold, but declined to provide her job description or any breakdown of how she spent her time. From 2010 to 2019 she was also listed as a director of the Munitions Industrial Base Task Force, which spent $1.09 million lobbying Congress and federal agencies.
In 2024 Garrity joined the board of ECM Insurance Group, a Bedford County firm that says it is the fourth-largest farm-owners insurance underwriter in Pennsylvania. She was paid $57,290 for the seat in 2025 — and if a pending acquisition by Old Republic International closes, corporate records show she would be paid $195,000 a year for five years on an ECM advisory board. As governor she would oversee the Insurance Department that regulates ECM. A former state insurance commissioner told the Inquirer, "The governor has a lot of opportunities to influence what the insurance department does."
Garrity also reports income from two natural gas companies. Her campaign calls it "modest royalties," refuses to give a figure, and says she would keep collecting it as governor because "it is part of her private property" — while she campaigns on ending state drilling restrictions on day one.
In 2022 Garrity rewrote the state's Investment Policy Statement to end the practice of weighing the environmental and social impact of Treasury's investments, a change observers said would directly benefit the natural gas industry. When the Pennsylvania Democratic Party filed a Right-to-Know request in April 2026 for her communications about that revision, her Treasury office took more than a month and then refused, calling the request a "fishing expedition" that was "akin to political opposition research." Pennsylvania's open-records law does not permit agencies to deny requests for political reasons.
Stacy Garrity lobbied without registering, sits on the board of a company she'd regulate, and stonewalls the records request about it. We deserve better.
Also at the fundraiser: John Strand, convicted by a jury for storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, sentenced to 32 months, and later pardoned by Trump. Strand gave Garrity's campaign $1,500 and posted a photo from the event: "Great to see Stacy Garrity (candidate for PA governor)... We have so many patriotic conservative women in the ranks for our fight to reconquer America."
Garrity's ground game belongs to Cliff Maloney, whose Citizens Alliance of Pennsylvania has given her $16,000 since 2020 and pledged to knock 750,000 doors for her. Maloney was charged in 2022 with drugging and raping a woman; a jury acquitted him on four counts and deadlocked on two more, which a judge dismissed. He nonetheless surrendered his teaching license because he had been "criminally charged in relation to allegations that he engaged in sexual activity with an adult female without her consent," and Young Americans for Liberty removed him as president in 2021 after women there accused him of covering up sexual misconduct. Garrity has appeared on his podcast and at his events, and said in a March 2026 video with his group that their canvassing "is going to be incredibly important to declaring victory."
Maloney is also the canvasser who, in October 2024, publicly accused a Pennsylvania monastery of voter fraud — posting the names of the 53 voters registered at the address and claiming "NO ONE lives there." The address was the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, home to 55 nuns continuously since 1970. Told so, Maloney replied: "Once we have proof, we will be content."
Stacy Garrity took the money and kept the company. We deserve better.
