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In this different election, some reasons to vote

As should be obvious to most people, this midterm election is unlike any other. The country is so emotionally and politically divided that voting decisions come down to which group mindset, rather than individual candidate, you trust more.

That’s regrettable and we hope the state and nation can return – sooner rather than later – to elected officials whose votes represent constituents and what they believe is the right thing to do, issue by issue.

But that’s not the reality in 2018,

With that in mind, you, the voter, will cast a ballot for governor without an endorsement from us.

We have not been thrilled by the stewardship of Gov. Tom Wolf.

We’ve seen embarrassingly protracted budget dilemmas that have not been worth the delays, a lack of business friendliness that has the state lagging behind the nation’s robust economy, and a penchant for unnecessary regulation and a valuing of a few special interests over the majority of Pennsylvania’s populous.

If Wolf has a different second term in mind, he hasn’t made it clear and has purposely avoided public debate.

But we are somewhat wary of Wagner and are hardly endorsing the entirety of his plan. We are not comfortable with the possibility of him being the state’s chief executive.

In either case, we are hopeful a GOP majority in the Legislature can help engineer coming budgets on time and more in line with fiscal sanity that recognizes the state’s taxpayers, needed reforms, and businesses and industries more clearly than plans of the past four years.

Don’t misunderstand. We want you to cast a ballot for governor. Do your due dilligence looking into Wolf and Wagner and vote according to who you believe is best for the state in the next four years.

On the national level, we have seen a Wolf-like mindset and performance from Sen. Robert Casey. Sen. Casey is a soft-spoken man who espouses a more bipartisan Washington.

But his votes speak of a senator who has simply fallen in line with the ordered resistance to President Trump the past two years, voting against changes that have clearly improved the country. Sen. Casey’s job is to represent Pennsylvanians, not Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s wishes.

His opposition of Judge Brett Kavanaugh before he was even nominated to be Supreme Court justice and then his rejection of a chance to meet with Kavanaugh amounted to insubordination. His attack ad against opponent Lou Barletta falsely accusing him of stripping health care from kids with cancer was egregious even by political ad standards. Barletta has never advocated that and has a grandson undergoing cancer treatment.

We do not agree with the whole of Barletta’s platform, but a more controlled immigration policy and a continuation of tax cuts and more business friendly economic policies of the past two years are a good start.

On the House side, we favor Rep. Tom Marino in the revised 12th Congressional District, courtesy of a late-to-the-game redistricting map. We have not agreed with everything Marino has done but do believe he more closely fits the needs of our region.

His opponent, Marc Friedenberg, is pushing for a $15-an-hour minimum wage that would strangle most small businesses in our region, overly aggressive policies on the environment and economic initiatives that might blunt the role the nation is on.

We haven’t seen much evidence that, were they elected, Casey or Friedenberg would part from the House and Senate promises to basically resist President Trump’s administration at every turn.

Trump is not your typical president, to be sure, but his policies have yielded positive results to date and we prefer a continuation of that rather than two years of contrived resistance and unnecessary impeachment hearings.

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