HARRISBURG — If Republican Stacy Garrity wins the election for governor in November, it’ll be one of the biggest upsets Pennsylvania has seen in a long time. And she knows it.
Democratic incumbent Josh Shapiro “is definitely a smooth talker, much smoother than me. He's a very polished politician, a career politician. A prolific fundraiser,” she said in a TV interview after launching her campaign last summer. “But you know what? I am a hard worker.”
Garrity, a second-term state treasurer, former Army Reserve officer, and manufacturing industry veteran, is the assumed GOP nominee for governor. She will be the only Republican on the May 19 primary ballot, though a write-in campaign for state Sen. Doug Mastriano is in the works with his support.
She entered politics later in her career after hitting mandatory retirement with the Army and, as she said at a taping of the “Ruthless” podcast in January, being approached to run statewide for treasurer. (She had previously run unsuccessfully for Pennsylvania’s 12th Congressional District in a special election.)
That’s where, she said, she got a taste of running an uphill race.
“I quickly figured out I was a sacrificial lamb — of course, I didn't know that because I was a rookie — and I just worked and went to everything,” she said. “I worked as hard as I could, and we squeaked it out.”
Now in her biggest race yet, Garrity has $1.5 million on hand to Shapiro’s $36 million — a nearly 25 to 1 fundraising disadvantage.
She is currently ramping up her campaign — a spokesperson said a full platform will be available in the coming weeks — and has so far focused much of her messaging on her support for natural gas drilling, desire to help farmers, and framing Shapiro as a ladder-climbing careerist.
What does Pennsylvania’s governor do?
Pennsylvania’s governor oversees a vast state bureaucracy that implements policies and programs on issues ranging from education, human services, and elections to law enforcement and the environment.
The governor also proposes an annual spending plan for the state that sets the tone for debate in Harrisburg and has the ability to sign bills into law or veto them.
Who is Stacy Garrity?
Garrity grew up in Bradford County, close to the New York border, and still lives there today in the borough of Athens. She attended Sayre High School, then got a finance degree at Bloomsburg University.
In her appearance on the “Ruthless” podcast, she said she was the “first person in my family to go to college, [from] very rural Pennsylvania, didn't grow up with a lot, joined the military.”
A retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel, she was deployed three times between 1991 and 2008, in Operation Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Operation Enduring Freedom. Garrity received two Bronze Stars and the Legion of Merit award for her service.
While in the reserves, Garrity also started working at Global Tungsten & Powders — a Pennsylvania-based company that makes powders used in electronics and tools. She began her career there as a cost accountant and rose to vice president of government affairs. According to her campaign, she was one of the company’s first female VPs.
She was also president of the Refractory Metals Association, an industry group, from 2018 to 2021.
Garrity lobbied for legislation as part of her job at Global Tungsten, notably pushing for a successful bill to keep the U.S. Department of Defense from buying certain tungsten products from China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, according to PennLive.
That experience interacting with government, she said at the January podcast event, was part of what gave her “a little itch for politics.”
Garrity’s husband, Daniel Gizzi, is a project analyst at downstate New York-based glass and ceramics company Corning Incorporated, according to a brief distributed by Garrity’s campaign. The couple does not have children. Garrity attends the Christian Life Church in Waverly, New York, which describes itself as an “independent, conservative, evangelical church,” and she is an elected member of its prayer council.
What has Stacy Garrity done as treasurer?
Garrity won her upset victory against incumbent Democrat Joe Torsella by less than a percentage point in 2020, a presidential election year in which down-ballot Democrats did relatively poorly, but Joe Biden carried Pennsylvania.
She went on to win her 2024 reelection campaign easily, racking up the largest vote total of any statewide candidate (and beating a record previously set by Shapiro).
Garrity told PoliticsPA that soon after her first victory, she reached out to Torsella and asked him to speak at her inauguration, then requested that he continue sitting on the state’s public employees pension board.
“Also, I kept his staff,” she told the outlet in a 2024 interview. “I told legislators that I ran a battalion in a war zone with 1,200 soldiers under my command. I think I can pick a staff and, so, half of my senior staff is from the other side of the aisle.”
(More than in many government agencies, staffers at Treasury do tend to stay on from administration to administration. The office’s deputy treasurer and CIO, for instance, has been there since 2010; a deputy chief counsel with the office began working for Treasury in 2005.)
Pennsylvania’s treasurer is responsible for stewarding state dollars, which means both making sure bills are paid and investing savings. The office reported last year that it is overseeing $180 billion in state coffers and directly managing more than $55 billion overall.
The treasurer also sits on the boards of Pennsylvania’s two massive public pension funds.
During her time in office, Garrity has said her focus has been on transparency and cutting costs for Pennsylvanians. In 2024, for instance, she launched a new version of the Treasury’s transparency portal, which began under Torsella, and which lets people track state expenditures.
Garrity also eliminated the minimum deposit to open a 529 college and career savings account and reduced the minimum contribution amount for the account. Her campaign says her office has reduced fees for the program by $22 million overall. The 529 program was also upgraded to a gold rating under Garrity’s tenure, making Pennsylvania one of five states to achieve the rating as of 2025.
She has championed returning unclaimed property to Pennsylvanians throughout her time in office, proposing legislation to allow Treasury to return unclaimed money under $500 without requiring a claim to be filed with the agency. The bill became law in 2024. Her campaign estimates that all told, Treasury has returned more than $1 billion in unclaimed property during her tenure.
Garrity also has control of the state’s savings and investments as treasurer. She divested $3 million in Russian holdings following the country’s invasion of Ukraine, and sold nearly all of the Treasury’s $394 million investments in Chinese-associated securities, citing “human rights violations” and “geopolitical risks.” Garrity also increased state investments in Israel by $45 million following the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by the militant group Hamas.
During last year’s extended state budget impasse, Garrity also took the unusual step of wading into the standoff herself and offering loans to counties, nonprofits, and some other state-funded entities that had their usual payments frozen. The $500 million program used unallocated state dollars to provide loans at a 4.5% interest rate, and recipients had to pay them back within 15 days of the budget’s signing.
What are Stacy Garrity’s positions?
Education
Garrity has firmly supported giving students access to public school alternatives. In a November 2025 appearance on conservative radio host Dom Giordano’s show, she argued that “parents, not bureaucrats, should be deciding the best way to educate their kids, and it shouldn’t matter what their ZIP code is.”
Her campaign elaborated on that position in a statement to Spotlight PA, saying that the state “should absolutely support strong public schools, but families must also have meaningful choices, including charter schools, cyber charters, private schools, and scholarship opportunities.”
“The focus should be on funding students and outcomes, not protecting systems that are failing too many kids,” the statement said.
Garrity has criticized Shapiro for his own handling of the issue.
During his 2022 campaign and early in his first term as governor, Shapiro publicly backed a taxpayer-funded voucher program for private schools. State Senate Republicans said they believed he would support such a program as part of his first budget.
But after receiving strong pushback from state House Democrats, Shapiro ultimately agreed to veto the voucher dollars in exchange for the rest of the budget plan’s passage. That led to a standoff with the state Senate that delayed the budget for nearly six months. Vouchers have not come close to being included in a budget since.
“Josh Shapiro has been all over the map,” Garrity said at a January Press Club appearance. “Josh Shapiro has held not one, not two, but three positions on school choice. I hold one position: parents, not bureaucrats, make the best decisions for their child’s future.”
Garrity also criticized Shapiro for significantly increasing spending on public education “with nothing to show for it.” (Several years ago, a court ruled that Pennsylvania public schools were unconstitutionally inequitable and ordered lawmakers to fix the situation; they are doing so by routing additional dollars to schools they’ve identified as unable to adequately educate students with their current resources.)
Garrity said she would “expand vocational opportunities and secondary education possibilities” to try to prepare Pennsylvania workers for “the age of AI.”
In another appearance on Giordano’s radio show in December, Garrity was asked whether she would have Pennsylvania join the federal government’s fledgling program to route money to families that enroll kids in private schools, and said, “I would a hundred percent.”
The program passed as part of Trump’s sweeping tax bill in the summer of 2025. Much like an existing tax credit program in Pennsylvania, it would allow people to claim a credit of up to $1,700 on their taxes if they donate to a nonprofit that then awards scholarships to students so they can attend private schools. Shapiro hasn’t yet joined the program, saying in January that he was awaiting federal guidance on “key questions.”
Elections
A supporter of President Donald Trump, Garrity has been criticized for speaking at a rally that sought to cast doubt on the result of the 2020 election, a day before the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Garrity later said she spoke at the event to “state that the election process had been tarnished by unelected bureaucrats who ignored the election law as written,” and denounced the violence at the Capitol on social media.
Her campaign said that overall, Garrity wants “elections that are easy to participate in and impossible to doubt.” She supports “strong voter ID requirements, accurate voter rolls, chain-of-custody protections for ballots, timely counting, and consistent standards across all 67 counties,” a spokesperson said.
The campaign also said that clear rules, preparation, and well-trained local officials would expand access for eligible voters, as would “cracking down on fraud, noncitizen voting, and administrative loopholes.”
At a January Pennsylvania Press Club appearance, Garrity said she would cooperate with the Trump administration’s attempts to have Pennsylvania hand over its voter rolls, according to the Capital-Star.
Energy, climate, and data centers
Garrity said Pennsylvania has taken power “off the grid and not added anything new,” when asked by Spotlight PA what the state can do to reduce rising energy prices. “And then at the same time, you know, you have things like data centers exacerbating issues.”
She said the primary solution, in her mind, is natural gas: “We really need to unleash the liquid fuel that we have at our feet.”
In a January speech at the Pennsylvania Press Club, Garrity claimed that the Shapiro administration has a “moratorium on drilling.” (Natural gas drilling isn’t banned in the commonwealth, though there is a moratorium on drilling in most state parks and forests that pre-dates Shapiro.)
“In the recent budget debate, we heard a lot about how to regulate and oversee Pennsylvania’s natural gas industry,” she said. “Under my administration, the debate will not be about what will replace RGGI [the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative], it will be about how we can use our natural gas reserves to amplify Pennsylvania’s role in American AI development and beyond.”
RGGI is a cap-and-trade program that former Gov. Tom Wolf had Pennsylvania join, but in which the commonwealth never actually participated. Shapiro signed off on exiting the initiative in the most recent budget deal and has pushed for an alternative.
Garrity also told Spotlight PA in April that a moratorium on Pennsylvania's gasoline tax would be “wildly popular,” and that there are also other things the state can do to further reduce energy taxes and prices. She said she recently met with representatives from the region’s electric grid and the state Public Utility Commission and is rolling out a plan to reduce electric prices soon.
On data centers, Garrity said she would support “a model where they either bring their own power, or they pay for their own power,” as well as ordinances to make sure they aren’t built too close to residential areas. And she thinks community benefit agreements are a good idea, to allow locals to extract some benefit.
Taxes
Garrity is an enthusiastic supporter of Trump’s 2025 tax bill, writing on X that members of Congress who oppose it are “risking higher taxes, weaker borders, and billions wasted on woke policies.”
In a January Press Club speech, Garrity said her priorities include lowering property taxes for older people and making sure young people can afford a first home. She said she could pay for that by “eliminating burdensome regulations and cutting useless red tape.”
“Pennsylvania is in the bottom tier of states for economic performance and growth and above average for family and business tax burdens, with our effective property tax rate among the highest in the nation,” she said. “We must tear down these barriers to economic opportunity for families and businesses.”
She also wrote on Facebook that as governor, she would lower the state income tax and also “end the death tax so farmers can pass their land onto the next generation headache-free.” The “death tax” refers to the state’s inheritance tax, which applies to any estate after a person dies; exemptions already exist for some farm land.
She has argued against filling state budget gaps with money from the rainy day fund (lawmakers did not do that last year, though they did tap reserves).
“Once we blow through all of this money — which will be in two years, possibly into year three — they’re not going to stop,” Garrity argued in an interview with conservative news outlet Broad and Liberty. “They’re not going to cut programs, they’re not going to stop spending. And so what’s going to happen? Our taxes will go up, and Pennsylvanians simply can’t afford it.”
Garrity has also weighed in on regulating and taxing skill games, slot-like terminals that have become common in bars and gas stations, and exist in a legal gray area. How to handle the machines is one of Harrisburg’s thorniest issues.
“I'd make it very simple, put some sort of dollar amount per machine,” Garrity told Spotlight PA this month. She estimated that kind of fee would generate around $300 million a year for the state.
Economic development
Along with frequently saying that she wants to boost Pennsylvania’s economy by more aggressively drilling for natural gas, Garrity has repeatedly said she cares about bringing manufacturing and jobs back from overseas. “My real passion,” she said at a January podcast taping, “is a U.S. industrial base.”
Helping farmers is another priority of Garrity’s campaign. She says she wants to create a “farmer-focused office” to coordinate permits and otherwise simplify paperwork for them, and has also pitched more agriculture workforce training and cutting borrowing costs for farm businesses with “a Treasury-backed interest rate buy-down of up to 3%.”
She has also said she wants to boost the state by upgrading infrastructure. In a statement, her campaign said she is planning “a two-pronged approach” to do so.
“We will fix what we have by ending wasteful Turnpike transfers, demand accountability from transit agencies, cut bureaucratic delays, and prioritize freight and economic mobility,” a spokesperson wrote. “Second, we will deploy artificial intelligence to predict maintenance needs, reduce congestion, prevent waste, and deliver projects faster and cheaper.”
She said in a Press Club speech that she wants to establish an Office of Innovation that is tasked with finding places where technology and AI can help state agencies be more efficient.
Justice system
During a 2025 appearance in Bucks County, soon after announcing her campaign, Garrity said that she would “partner with President Trump and not be a roadblock to make sure our streets are safe,” according to the Capital-Star.
She has also made a few comments on the federal government’s plan to build two ICE detention centers in Pennsylvania, saying that the proposals “warrant serious review” and that Shapiro’s opposition to them is “posturing.”
She otherwise did not say how she’d handle the issue, beyond a pledge to “work with any president in the best interests of Pennsylvania, regardless of party.”
Spotlight PA’s Kate Huangpu and Jaxon White contributed reporting.