Union League sticks with Ron DeSantis honor; Mastriano’s plan for winning elections

The Union League of Philadelphia is pressing forward with plans to present its highest honor to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday, despite protests from more than 100 members who want to cancel the event.

DeSantis, a likely contender for the 2024 Republican nomination for president, will receive the club’s gold medal, an honor first awarded to President Abraham Lincoln in 1863.

Clout first told you about the controversy in September after obtaining a flurry of emails to then-club president Craig Mills from angry members, some threatening to resign unless the award was rescinded.

That movement in October grew into the Concerned Members of the Union League, 107 members who signed a five-page letter to Mills, saying the DeSantis event “poses outsized immediate and long-term reputational risk to the Union League” and “appears to confer an endorsement” for DeSantis’ presidential ambitions.

Among their concerns:

Clout hears the Union League responded with a heavy hand, threatening to oust members who dared speak about the event in public.

Mills and Harry E. Hill III, who took over as club president this month, did not respond to requests for comment. A DeSantis spokesperson declined to comment.

The event, with tickets going for $160, is sold out. The Union League, founded during the Civil War in 1862 to support Lincoln and his policies, calls the gold medal something “to be conferred on men who were regarded as deserving well of their country.”

Club members told Clout two demands — cancel the event and put future proposed honors up for a full membership vote — were shot down. But a third demand — that future awards be “nonpartisan in nature” — may be enacted.

The members noted in their letter the Union League has experienced “significant economic/financial challenges” but rebounded in recent years, attracting new members by “being more inclusive.”

That trend could end in a “cascade of consequences,” the members warned, like club resignations, rental events being canceled, and diminished interest, resulting in new financial woes.

At the Union League, it seems, the best argument is the bottom line.

State Sen. Doug Mastriano, the Franklin County Republican who got crushed by nearly 15 percentage points in November’s election for governor, has developed a four-point plan to prevent that from happening again. One problem: Mastriano is not following his own plan.

Writing for the Epoch Times on Wednesday, Mastriano said Republicans need to stick together to win elections, quoting Ronald Reagan’s famous line — “Thou shalt not speak ill of any Republican.”

But Mastriano, who spoke plenty of ill about Republicans last year, repeated many of those complaints in his essay, criticizing the Republican National Committee and Republican Governors Association for not financially supporting his campaign.

He continued that during a Wednesday call with 1210-WPHT.

Mastriano also said his party must “adjust our attitude toward mail-in voting,” embracing the tactic to win.

Mastriano, like most Republicans in the General Assembly, voted in 2019 to approve “no excuse” mail ballots, then claimed without proof that the practice was rife with fraud to mirror complaints from then-President Donald Trump about losing Pennsylvania in 2020.

He is now circulating a cosponsorship memo for a ballot referendum calling to ban the practice.

So much for the embrace.

Mastriano also recommended ending the Republican Party’s practice of endorsing a candidate before the primary, something the GOP didn’t do last year, and said supporters should donate directly to candidates and not to “establishment Republican” political action committees.

He didn’t respond to Clout, but in his radio interview, Mastriano called mail-in ballots “icky” but necessary. He called Tuesday’s inauguration of Gov. Josh Shapiro, which he skipped, “a bit bittersweet” and said he is “praying about” whether to run for governor again in 2026.

Nine declared Democratic candidates for mayor in Philadelphia, plus former Lt. Gov. Mike Stack III, pitched themselves to the party’s policy committee in a three-hour meeting Tuesday.

Not there: State Sen. Vincent Hughes, who is mulling a run.

The party is unlikely to endorse anyone, according to Bob Brady, chair of the Democratic City Committee.

But what fun to watch contenders come and go, circling and greeting one another in the party’s lobby, some at ease, others appearing tense.

The lack of endorsement is more about sticking with standard procedure than a judgment about the candidates. The local party has endorsed a mayoral contender in a contested primary only once in nearly half a century, in 2007, when Brady ran in a five-candidate field.

Still, the candidates assemble before each election to make the ask.

Party ward leaders will decide whether to endorse by mid-February, when candidates start circulating petitions to get their names on the May 16 ballot. That’s also when Stack says he will decide whether he will get into the race.

Clout provides often irreverent news and analysis about people, power, and politics.