Will he or won’t he?

That is the question of the day as state Sen. Doug Mastriano is hinting that he is up for another run for governor of Pennsylvania.

The Franklin County Republican lost by 15 percentage points to Gov. Josh Shapiro in 2022 but says he has learned from that campaign’s mistakes.

In a conversation with NewsTalk 103.7, Mastriano reiterated many of the points he made during an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer about his concept for adopting a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the Commonwealth.

“Of course, they slipped in a question about that,” he said about the potential 2026 run for the governor’s mansion. “It’s really wide open on what the Republicans are doing. I said it’s definitely on the table. Some people are like, hey, you already tried and lost. Well, Daddy Casey, Bob Casey governor, not the Senator, it took him four times to win. It’s not going to take me four times.

“If we do it, we’re going to win the second time around, because we learned from our mistake. The biggest mistake was not embracing no-excuse mail-in voting. I mean, we didn’t do it in ’22, Trump didn’t do it in ‘20 and had catastrophic consequences. My people voluntarily knocked on half a million doors and had we had this mail-in ballot applications in hand, that could have boosted our vote by a million.”

Shapiro had a nearly 800,000-vote victory over Mastriano which is slightly smaller than his advantage in mail ballots (833,000).

The second-term state senator also pointed to education and energy as two issues that would favor him as the Republican standard-bearer.

“If everyone remembers the outstanding rally we had with Donald Trump in Wilkes-Barre in early September of ‘22 and he came out, and I came out with separate polls in our hands, having Josh and I tied, neck and neck,” he remembered. “It was on two large issues, the first one being education, school choice. The second was my plan to expand our energy sector here, to bring prosperity and a lot of money to Pennsylvania.

“On the school choice thing, within a week of that poll, Josh Shapiro came out, and he started sounding like me on school choice. The parent should have the right to pick schools. They shouldn’t be condemned to zip code with a bad school, and what did he do after the race was over? He completely flipped. He can’t support school choice. He won’t ever, because school unions bankroll his campaign. The unions don’t bankroll me, and I’ll be looking out for the parents. So on that issue alone, we’re going to blow him out of the water.”

Mastriano said during the interview that had he been elected governor, “my (energy) pipelines would have been built to Philadelphia and to Lake Erie. We’d be exporting billions of dollars of natural gas, LNG, liquified natural gas, to our European allies and NATO, especially in northern Central Europe. You’re rolling in billions of dollars of money. We would not have this catastrophic economy. Josh Shapiro, he is a coward, because he refused to debate me, but I don’t think he has the wherewithal to go to war with Donald Trump. So he is carrying on as if nothing happened in ’22. We’re going to see his schools defy Donald Trump on sports, oppressing women with boys on girls teams. We’re going to see the DEI crap still and his war on energy here. If he’s going to take on Donald Trump, that’s just going to bring him down quicker.”