The battle for the 9th Congressional District is heating up.
Earlier this month members of the Franklin County Republicans Committee announced they would rather resign that support incumbent Congressman Bill Shuster.
April’s Primary Election was a nail biter between Shuster and Art Halvorson. It came down to nearly 1,000 votes. Halvorson was able to get enough write-in votes on the democratic ballot. Even though Halvorson is a longtime Republican and Tea Party member he agreed to run in November as a Democrat.
Franklin County republicans who support Halvorson released a statement to make no doubt they are still members of the GOP.
Recently there were four of us who resigned from the Franklin County Republican Committee (FCRC) in order to openly endorse Art Halvorson for Congress. However there is a lot of confusion about this whole situation. The main point that I want to emphasize in this letter is that we are still Republicans and Art Halvorson is still a Republican.
The Republican Party has committees in each county in Pennsylvania and they are the core of political activities. Members of these county committees volunteer their time to be special ambassadors for the Republican Party. The FCRC is a good organization but anyone who joins must realized that they are obligated to support official candidates for the November election. Even though Art Halvorson won Franklin County and four other counties, Bill Shuster outspent him 15-to-1 with millions of lobbyist dollars on mailers and television ads enabling Shuster to edge out a 1% win overall. Still we knew that Art Halvorson was the preferred choice of both Franklin County Republicans and us. So we were compelled to resign from the FCRC in order to be free to openly endorse him.
The four of us and Art Halvorson remain registered Republicans and we still intend to vote for other Republican candidates on the ballot. The reason that Art Halvorson will be listed as the Democratic candidate in November is because more than 1,000 Democrats wrote him in during the Primary Election. There was no write-in campaign like the failed “Democrats for Shuster” campaign in 2010. This was organic victory.
When both Republicans and Democrats send Art Halvorson to Washington, DC to end the 44-year Shuster Dynasty, he will caucus with Republicans but will also be able to reach across the aisle in a way that powerful lobbyist donors never permitted Bill Shuster to do.
Darren Brown
Chambersburg, Pennsylvania
