Stacy Garrity is ambitious, Trump-endorsed, and experienced. Is that enough to beat Josh Shapiro?

“I was a sacrificial lamb,” she told the audience of a live podcast taping earlier this year. “Of course, I didn’t know that, because I was a rookie.”

That 2020 campaign for state treasurer, in which Garrity took on a better-known, better-funded incumbent Democrat and won, is an essential part of the pitch she’s making to voters as she seeks to win a second, even more improbable upset.

As she has said in interviews throughout the campaign, compared to her opponent, she may have less cash for ads and events, she may not be as polished, but she’s a hard worker.

“I just worked and went to everything,” she told the podcast audience of her 2020 campaign. “I worked as hard as I could, and we squeaked it out.”

But in the 2026 race for governor, Garrity isn’t facing a one-term state treasurer. She’s up against Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is perhaps the most prominent politician to come out of Pennsylvania since Joe Biden.

Shapiro is such a dominant force in his party that no other Democrat challenged him in either of his gubernatorial primaries; few members of his party will even say a critical word about him on the record. As of June, his cash on hand was over 34 times Garrity’s. His reelection bid has garnered national attention only because it is seen as a preview of his assumed 2028 run for president. In those stories, Garrity is an afterthought.

But Garrity is adamant hers isn’t a losing campaign.

“If I thought I was going to be a sacrificial lamb, believe me, I wouldn't run,” she told Spotlight PA. “I don't need the title.”

In her quest to unseat Shapiro, Garrity is leaning into her underdog status and a folksy narrative about her background — often saying she is the first state row officer from a rural county in more than 40 years, and noting she still lives in Bradford County.

But a closer look at Garrity’s time in the military, her career with a global corporation, and her role managing tens of billions in state dollars as treasurer reveals a different picture — of an ambitious politician who has, in a relatively short time, managed to enmesh herself firmly in Pennsylvania’s Republican establishment.

Allies and opponents, from a former Garrity staffer to Democrats familiar with her work, told Spotlight PA that Garrity has been a competent state treasurer who is genuinely committed to fiscal stewardship. Under her leadership, the office received a coveted gold rating for its 529 college and career savings program, returned more than $1 billion in unclaimed property, and has remained scandal-free.

She has also been unabashedly political over the years. Garrity is a committed conservative with beliefs rooted in her Christian faith, and closely aligns herself with President Donald Trump. “Who doesn't want to make America great again?” she asked Spotlight PA in a recent interview.

Garrity sold “Defund Planned Parenthood” T-shirts during her first campaign, and posted on Facebook in 2022 that the end of Roe v. Wade would be “a great day for the sanctity of life.” She told Spotlight PA that the free market should solve environmental issues and that “of course there's climate change, but I'm not sure as to what extent.” She questioned the results of the 2020 presidential election on multiple occasions, saying at one 2022 political rally that Trump defeated Biden.

And she has aggressively sought Trump’s support and association. The public attention the president has paid to the race has been scattered — after Garrity introduced him for a June speech in the Lehigh Valley, Trump didn’t mention her at all; at another recent event he noted that Shapiro is “expected to win.” In early August, however, Garrity was in the Oval Office and appeared in a short video, grinning over the president’s shoulder while he reiterated an endorsement and called her “a spectacular person.”

Garrity has a mixed record of MAGA alignment, pivoting often as she’s nailed down a platform during this run for governor, and backtracking on many previous positions.

“I wouldn't think I have any extreme views,” she said, when asked to define her politics.

She has waved away her comments questioning election results, telling reporters earlier this year, “That was at a Trump rally and those are kind of fun things … So it's easy to get caught up.” She recently told ABC27 that there were “irregularities” in 2020, and when Spotlight PA pressed for specifics, said she was referring to confusing guidance from the state.

She also has said she would “respect” Pennsylvania’s current abortion law. And after saying Trump’s tariffs on other countries could lead to a more prosperous U.S. in the long-term, she told Spotlight PA she “would handle tariffs differently” to allow U.S. manufacturers to more easily get the raw materials they need.

Shapiro is betting that Garrity’s proximity to the unpopular president will hurt her, releasing a round of campaign ads in August — his first to directly acknowledge her — calling Garrity “100% MAGA.”

Garrity is going with the narrative that Shapiro is untrustworthy. Her campaign is teasing an unconventional series of digital videos it says will “expose terrible lies” related to the governor. Its first de rigueur TV ad of the campaign cycle bashed Shapiro for his support for building data centers in Pennsylvania (the governor’s campaign would be quick to point out Garrity’s own record on the issue).

If Garrity’s fundraising continues to be weak, she won’t be able to afford many more ads to get her message out. She told Spotlight PA, she’s banking on some presidential assistance.

“I think he's going to spend a lot of time here in Pennsylvania, because he knows how important Pennsylvania is, and I think that he will get the base, you know, excited to come out,” Garrity said. “I'm told that we're going to get help.”

From Bradford to Bruntál

On a recent summer evening, Garrity stopped by a Dauphin County farm to announce a coalition of agriculture insiders would back her candidacy. Entering a garage, she was greeted by a few dozen people.

As she often does on the campaign trail, she used her speech to emphasize her rural bona fides.

“I'm the daughter of Bradford County, so I care about rural Pennsylvania because you are my neighbors,” she told the crowd. “I will absolutely prioritize agriculture because I know firsthand the impact that you have on our communities, and I relate to our farming communities because I was raised in one of those very small towns.”

Her supporters also tout her rural roots. Samuel E. Hayes Jr., a former state secretary of agriculture, told the audience in Dauphin County that Garrity would have U.S. farmers’ backs by banning international companies or people from buying Pennsylvania farmland.

“She grew up as a country girl, and let me tell you this: She knows the difference between a Hereford and a John Deere,” Hayes said, referring to an English type of cattle and a tractor. “Not every politician, not every governor, knows the difference.”

Growing up in Sayre, a borough of about 5,300 people near Pennsylvania’s northern border, Garrity was a Girl Scout, cheerleader, softball player, track and field athlete, and honor roll student, local newspaper clippings show. She is the oldest of four sisters, two of whom joined her as part of the “Garrity Trio,” traveling with their grandmother and singing at local church functions when they were young.

She had an early interest in politics. Every election cycle growing up, her mother made pizza, and the family would stay up and watch election returns “as long as we could make it,” she told Spotlight PA.

“My parents, we always talked about current events,” she said. “So I would say I always had an interest in what was going on politically. I was just never involved, because you really can't when you're in the military — or it's tricky.”

Garrity studied finance and economics at Bloomsburg University near Wilkes-Barre, where she said she was the first person in her family to attend college. She jokes that while she was in school, her father tricked her into meeting with a military recruiter, which led to her joining the Reserve Officers' Training Corps.

She became an officer in the Army Reserves after graduating college at 22. Soon after, she also started working as a cost accountant at Global Tungsten & Powders, an international metal refinery and manufacturer based in Bradford County.

Her first overseas deployment came in 1991, when she was sent to Saudi Arabia during Operation Desert Storm.

“Everybody was afraid of chemical warfare,” Garrity told Spotlight PA. “I was really young, and I went over, and of course I was nervous like everybody else.”

Garrity assisted in detainee operations, she said, which led to a more prominent role leading the processing of incoming and outgoing prisoners of war at Iraq’s largest internment camp during her second deployment in 2003. It was during this time that she reported one of the most egregious instances of prisoner abuse at the detention facility, Camp Bucca.

In her third and final deployment, Garrity was second in command at Camp Bucca, then took temporary charge of the prison after the leading officer was relocated to another mission. She stayed in the Army Reserves until she said she hit her mandatory retirement age in 2016, having reached the rank of colonel and been awarded the Legion of Merit and two Bronze Stars.

Between deployments, Garrity rose in the accounting and marketing ranks at Global Tungsten & Powders.

By 2010, she was named director of the sales and marketing department. She also helped run the company’s facility in Bruntál, Czech Republic, though she did not live there. Garrity filled those roles, leading her to travel frequently around the world, as recently as 2019.

In her time as director, Global Tungsten & Powders cut the workforce at its Towanda plant from around 950 employees in 2012 to roughly 500 in 2019 through multiple rounds of layoffs. Garrity’s campaign said she was not involved in those decisions.

Then she was named a vice president of the company. Garrity was in charge of governmental affairs, and publicly took credit for advocating for federal lawmakers to adopt a policy that blocked the U.S. from purchasing tungsten products from potential enemies, like China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran.

But Garrity has downplayed her involvement in getting that policy passed — possibly her greatest accomplishment in the private sector — to avert the potential negative perception that she did not formally register as a lobbyist.

While she has mostly left the private sector, Garrity has maintained her membership on the board of ECM, an insurance company. It’s a paid position, and as The Philadelphia Inquirer reported, one that could yield her six figures. She told the publication she would resign from the board if elected governor.

A ‘competitive’ streak drove Garrity as treasurer

If she hadn’t hit her mandatory military retirement age in 2016, Garrity said she never would have run for public office.

Speaking to Spotlight PA after a spring campaign event in Butler County, she recounted the decision, laughing: “My husband looks at me — second weekend home — and he said, ‘Don't you have somewhere you have to be?’”

“About a year goes by and it was great, and then I felt like, wow really being in the military, that public service, I started to realize that made up a big part of my life and I missed it,” she said.

After consulting a longtime friend, state Rep. Tina Pickett (R., Bradford), Garrity said she hopped into a crowded Republican primary for a 2019 congressional special election, in which party insiders did not select her from a field of 12 other candidates.

But her name circulated among Pennsylvania Republicans, some of whom she said soon called her to run for the Treasury seat in 2020.

“I said no for like four months,” Garrity said. “They couldn't find anybody, and so I put it on my church prayer chain — not that I was gonna win and money's gonna come down from heaven — but that the doors would open up if I was going to make a decision.”

The doors did open. Garrity’s husband was on board, and critically, her boss at Global Tungsten gave her the flexibility to mount a campaign.

Garrity focused on her business background when she joined the race for Treasurer, said Democrats had controlled the office for too long — it had been 15 years since the last Republican served — and criticized state leaders for spending money that hadn’t been formally appropriated through the legislative process.

She allied herself with Trump early on. Asked what the president’s most important work had been at a September 2020 Trump rally in central Pennsylvania, she said it was appointing justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. “I’m very excited for a Christian, pro-life constitutionalist on the bench,” Garrity said, referring to Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was then Trump’s newly announced pick.

She also argued her Democratic opponent, incumbent Joe Torsella, was only using Treasury as a springboard to higher office — the same charge she often levies against Shapiro.

When Garrity took office though, former staffers said she didn’t completely overhaul Treasury. For one, she kept Torsella’s chief of staff, a Democrat, among other personnel.

Multiple staffers also said partisanship didn’t seem to be the dominant driver in her work — it was a desire to be the best.

“It is absolutely a foundational element of Treasurer Garrity’s personality that she is competitive,” said Erik Arneson, who worked for Garrity throughout her first term as her communications director and is now a state Senate Republican staffer.

(Shapiro also often describes himself as extremely competitive).

That was a big part of Garrity’s work on 529 college and career savings accounts, according to Arneson. Under her tenure, the program was upgraded to a gold rating — one of just five gold-rated 529 savings plans in the country. Garrity was “very focused” on that rating and on the long-term stability of the program, Arneson said. The office also eliminated the minimum deposit to open a 529 account, lowered minimum contribution amounts, and reduced fees.

Garrity also preserved some of the former Democratic treasurer’s priorities. Pennsylvania’s treasurer sits on the boards of the state’s massive public pension funds, and a major initiative during Torsella’s tenure was convincing those boards to move away from hiring expensive private money managers, who promised market-beating returns but often hadn’t delivered. Garrity said she was skeptical of these outside managers too — after a 2021 meeting at which she voted against paying a private equity firm more money, The Inquirer reported that a spokesperson, Arneson, said she was “very concerned about private equity investments due to the high costs and inherent risk.”

After Torsella was reappointed to the PSERS board, Garrity joined him and state Sen. Katie Muth (D., Montgomery) as a pro-reform bloc. Torsella and Garrity even jointly filed friend-of-the-court briefs in Muth’s lawsuit seeking more transparency from PSERS, and the three were part of a push to replace the fund’s leadership as it faced an FBI investigation in 2021.

(Muth, who is still pursuing that lawsuit, told Spotlight PA she feels Garrity has since become less committed to pushing PSERS to reform; leadership in the fund has turned over in the last several years.)

Arneson worked closely with Garrity as her communications director during her first term.

“Obviously there are partisan things people can say that they like or don’t like about what she did, but nobody could ever make a legitimate claim that she was not focused on being the best effing treasurer she could possibly be,” he said.

Partisanship did enter into Garrity’s approach to the job, however.

From the beginning of her first term, she was an active member of the State Financial Officers Foundation, a national conservative nonprofit that works with treasurers and other public officials. Its priorities include support for the Israeli government and opposition to environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, initiatives — investment strategies in which the goal is to push corporations to change their behavior.

Garrity pursued both of those priorities. After boosting the state’s Israel Bonds investments by $45 million, she campaigned at an Israel Bonds gala. She told Spotlight PA the investments, which came after the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks, were simply a sound financial decision.

“They've never defaulted, they pay an above-market rate of return and, and … if you can get a good return on your investment, and at the same time support our biggest ally, our only ally in the Middle East, then why not do it? It's a win-win,” she said.

In 2021, Garrity’s then-chief investment officer warned her in a memo that Israel Bonds could actually be risky because of political instability and the fact that they aren’t traded on the open market, according to emails obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

Garrity also signed on to a number of letters organized by SFOF and other conservative groups opposing ESG efforts. One urged the Securities and Exchange Commission to discourage shareholders from trying to pressure companies into “DEI practices that erode shareholder value.” Another opposed a proposed SEC rule to require companies to disclose climate-related information, like risks that could affect operations. And another opposed what it called “The Woke 401(k) Rule” from the Biden administration.

During last year’s extended state budget impasse, Garrity inserted herself into the proceedings, an unusual step for a treasurer.

She used unallocated state dollars to set up a $500 million program that offered loans to counties, nonprofits, and some other state-funded entities that had their usual payments frozen. Those loans were on offer at a 4.5% interest rate, and recipients had to pay them back within 15 days of the budget’s signing. The move prompted lawmakers that year to bar the Treasury from doing so in the future.

The Garrity program was widely seen as a political gesture meant to offer a contrast to Shapiro, who at the time was negotiating to end the budget impasse — something Garrity denies.

“It was absolutely not political,” she said, arguing that when it comes time to vote for a governor in November, “Nobody's going to remember what I did last year … and largely, those people I was supporting, they're not going to vote for me anyway. I did it because it was the right thing to do.”

Garrity also initially denied the Shapiro administration’s attempt earlier this year to use public dollars to pay for security upgrades at the governor’s private residence, saying the Treasury didn’t have legal authority to authorize it. She eventually relented “to prevent costly litigation” with vendors, she said.

“She has two kinds of instincts, and sometimes they compete with each other,” Arneson acknowledged. “One of her instincts is, ‘Hey, I'm a Republican, I'm fiscally conservative, I believe in X, Y and Z, and those are important things to me, and so I want to talk about them.’ On the other hand, she knows that 98 — I don't know, some massive percentage of the work at Treasury — has nothing to do with any of that, and it's about running a good program.”

So what is this campaign actually about?

It is possible to be a Pennsylvania row officer and participate minimally in partisan politics. Garrity’s fellow Republican, Auditor General Tim DeFoor, rarely makes public comments that aren’t related to his job.

That’s not Garrity. Charlie Gerow, a longtime GOP strategist who himself ran for governor several years ago, distinctly remembers her entry into the public sphere.

“She was everywhere. She was ubiquitous,” he said. “She showed up at every Republican function, every county fair, every major historical event, every demonstration. You can't imagine how many times I saw her here, there, and everywhere. And I think people took notice of the fact that she was so tenacious in meeting and greeting the people of Pennsylvania.”

It was also immediately clear, Gerow said, that Garrity “enjoyed it, wanted to be part of it, and wanted to advance herself.”

But Garrity’s ambition and connections may not be enough to compete against Shapiro.

Along with a message that Shapiro is untrustworthy, the vision for Pennsylvania that Garrity is trying to promote focuses heavily on the state’s rural areas — speeding up permitting for farmers, increasing natural gas production, and putting a moratorium on data center development, a rapidly growing concern from the Pocono Mountains to small towns and suburbs. Alternatives to public schools are also in the mix.

Some of these priorities overlap with Shapiro’s. The governor has made speeding up permitting a plank of his administration, and described his approach to energy production as “all of the above.” Garrity argues permitting is still too slow, and says the state should allow drilling on public land.

She told Spotlight PA that her “passion has always been the U.S. industrial base” — reshoring jobs and trying to get people to buy American goods — something she got to work on at Global Tungsten.

“With all the blessings that we have in Pennsylvania — the best, hardest working people, the world-class industries, and natural resources, they are truly the envy of the world … we shouldn't be squandering our blessings … we can be so much more,” she told Spotlight PA.

But with little money on hand, it’s hard to communicate that message to voters — a reality members of Garrity’s own party readily admit. For all Garrity’s insistence that the president will help her campaign, running an underdog race is difficult.

Jason High knows that. He was campaign manager for Republican Scott Wagner, a former state senator who unsuccessfully attempted to oust Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf in 2018. The race didn’t go especially well; its culmination, in many ways, was a video Wagner released on his Facebook page a month before Election Day, standing on the side of the road and saying he wanted to stomp Wolf’s face with golf spikes.

It didn’t help. Wagner went on to lose by more than 17 points.

The challenge when running against an incumbent as popular as Wolf or Shapiro is that "everybody thinks you’re going to lose,” High said.

That makes it hard to raise money. Wagner was somewhat insulated from that reality because he was independently wealthy and could self-fund. Asked if she could do the same, Garrity laughed. “You know I’m middle class, right?” she said.

A loss can become “a self-fulfilling prophecy,” High said. “The enthusiasm’s not there. In meeting after meeting, largely with donors, but also at committee dinners and things, you have to find a way to build a case to show people you can win. And sometimes it's very hard.”

When it comes to Shapiro, High said, that’s doubly true. The governor is “uniquely strong, uniquely well-financed, has obvious national aspirations. He’s just a unique character.”

That dynamic has been apparent in campaign finance reports. Overall lopsidedness aside, the kinds of donors the two candidates have attracted are striking, as are the size of their gifts.

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave Shapiro $2.5 million; he has also gotten millions from large Pennsylvania unions. And wealthy business people, including Phillies owner John Middleton, have given hundreds of thousands. Garrity has some big donors — longtime GOP power broker and candymaker Bob Asher gave hundreds of thousands personally and through a PAC he runs — but they are much fewer.

There are some signs within those campaign finance reports that Garrity is winning over select donors who could be helpful.

Her most recent filing shows that she accepted a $33,500 in-kind contribution of a “flight” from Pace-O-Matic founder Michael Pace, dated May 11. Pace-O-Matic is a Georgia-based skill games developer that has poured millions of dollars into lobbying and influencing key Pennsylvania elections amid a debate over regulating and taxing the machines. (The state’s high court found skill games to be illegal gambling devices last month).

In an interview with Spotlight PA, Garrity expressed sympathy with the skill games lobby’s main argument — that the bars, restaurants, and other organizations that host the devices will suffer financially if they’re heavily taxed.

“Now that the Supreme Court has ruled, I think it's important that as legislators decide how they're going to proceed, that they keep in mind it's not just about the skill games operators, it's also about our local businesses, our VFWs, our legions, our Elks [Lodges], and small restaurants that really benefit from games of skill,” she said.

“They do so much to help their community, so I would always put their interests first,” she added.

A weak performance at the top of the ticket could damage Republicans’ chances statewide in a year with a lot at stake. Democrats believe the state Senate, which Republicans have held for decades, is in play. If they’re right, they could gain trifecta control of state government — the first time either party has had it in more than a decade.

That’s on Garrity’s mind.

“I just feel pressure to go out every day and do the best job that I can do,” she said. “I'm still the state treasurer, so I'm basically working 24/7.”

Most polls of the race so far have Shapiro leading Garrity by double-digit margins — something Garrity acknowledges. All the driving she is doing across Pennsylvania’s rural areas, all the hands shaken and picnics and dinners attended, may not be enough.

“Of course I'm an underdog," she told Spotlight PA. “That's OK, I'm used to being the underdog.”

She remains well-liked in Pennsylvania GOP circles. Gerow noted in his conversation with Spotlight PA that even several years ago, it was widely assumed that Garrity would move up politically.

“She clearly had ambitions beyond being the state treasurer, and I wasn't sure exactly what those were. There was some thought that she should run for Congress instead of running for governor, but she chose to run for governor, and here we go.”

Even if governor doesn’t work out, Gerow said, he bets Garrity will stick around. She’ll still have a Treasury term to finish out, he noted. And after that, who knows?

“Two years is a lifetime in politics,” he said.

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