How state Sen. Jake Corman’s lifetime in Pennsylvania politics led him to the 2022 governor’s race

Jake Corman stepped to the podium in the ornate Pennsylvania Senate chamber, his hands shaking just slightly as he adjusted his glasses and mask emblazoned with the Keystone State’s coat of arms.

Twenty-two years had passed since he first swore his oath of office, the day he placed his hand on the same Bible his father had used 22 years before that to take the same pledge.

Now, a generation after one Sen. Jacob Doyle Corman passed the baton to another, emotion crept into the younger Corman’s voice.

“Over those decades, my fondness, respect and, yes, love, for this institution has grown tremendously,” Corman said after his colleagues elected him Senate president pro tempore in early January.

But Corman’s rise to the most powerful position in the Pennsylvania Legislature also came at a precarious moment in state politics.

The Republican-led General Assembly was still fiercely at odds with Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf over the worst public health crisis in a century. Cash-strapped local governments were pleading for another round of stimulus money. And an outgoing president of Corman’s own party was on the eve of making a desperate attempt at overturning his loss, leaving behind a faction of his party ready to pounce on any political leader who didn’t join the fight.

Not even a year into trying to navigate those problems, Corman has his sights even higher now.

The 57-year-old Republican from Centre County is running for governor.

Jumping into the crowded GOP primary, Corman brings not just a year’s worth of experience atop the legislative ladder but a lifetime in Pennsylvania politics and a nearly 23-year legislative record.

Aide to a U.S. senator. Compromising, even-handed Republican legislator. Fundraising powerhouse with ties to a mysterious dark-money group. Transparency advocate with transparency issues within his own office and campaign. Partisan leader fueling the flames after a presidential election.

Corman’s worn many hats over his long career, creating a political profile for a statewide candidate whose strengths and weaknesses will be blurred and debated in 2022.

History isn’t on his side, either. The last Pennsylvania governor elected from the Legislature was Gov. George Leader, who had been a senator from York County, in 1954.

“It’s always a challenge for a caucus leader to transfer that power to a statewide campaign,” said Christopher Nicholas, a Republican consultant and former campaign manager for the late U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter. “If anyone can do it, I believe Corman can.”

A FAMILIAR NAME

In the spring of 1998, Jacob Doyle Corman III was 33 years old and making his first push for elected office. But an unknown political neophyte, he was not.

“Many of the people who answer his knocks are already familiar with him,” The Centre Daily Times reported a week before that year’s primary.

Corman “didn’t want to run away from the name recognition,” as he put it, while also telling voters not to pick him just because his father, who went by Doyle, had served in the seat since 1977.

Newspaper archives during that campaign tell the story of a Corman who was inspired by the public service of his father, whose willingness to “roll up [his] sleeves and get dirty” is what made him so popular, he told the CDT.

His career had been intrinsically linked to his father up until then, too. After graduating from Penn State with a degree in journalism, he worked as a real estate agent for Century 21 Corman Associates, a family business. In 1995, Corman became the top staffer for central Pennsylvania for U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, who had previously served as an aide to the elder Corman in Harrisburg (Santorum has also credited Becky Corman, Doyle’s wife and Jake’s mom, who ran several campaigns, as the political mind of the family and taught him the ropes of grass-roots campaigning). In the years before his run, Corman also worked as a lobbyist for the Pennsylvania Builders Association.

Corman won the three-way primary, defeating an incumbent county commissioner who, according to newspaper accounts at the time, faced a backlash after she unearthed Corman’s arrest and conviction of DUI in 1995. Corman owned up to the arrest, calling it “stupid” and a teaching moment. The other candidate ran ads calling him “not mature enough and ‘not qualified’ to make the important decisions a state senator has to make for our families.”

In the run-up to the general election, Corman outraised Democrat Scott Conklin $156,260 to $14,290, records show. (Conklin would later win election to the state House.) Corman’s largest donation — $30,000 — came from his father’s political action committee. The largest contribution from an individual was $7,500 from Rick Corman, a cousin from Nicholasville, Kentucky, who amassed a fortune in the railroad business.

Rick Corman, who died in 2013 from cancer, and his company RJ Corman Railroad Group, went on to donate $47,300 to Jake Corman’s PACs over the years. In 2011, the company secured a meeting with Gov. Tom Corbett to talk about its tracks in Pennsylvania after donating to his campaign, including $50,000 on the same day as the meeting, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported in 2015. Doyle Corman, who by then was consulting for the company, denied there was a “quid pro quo.” A good-government advocate, however, said it appeared the company bought access to the governor, whose administration went on to increase grant funding for them in the following years, the PG reported.

THE LEGISLATOR

Corman entered the fray in Harrisburg pushing for more state funding for Penn State, which is in his district, and trying to fulfill campaign promises of reducing state income taxes, phasing out the inheritance tax and creating a charitable tax credit.

He led the Senate’s technology committee in those early years, pushing for faster implementation of universal broadband access and against policies like a cell phone gross receipts tax.

He was also “Harrisburg’s most eligible Republican,” the Centre Daily Times quipped in June 2000 after Corman got engaged to Kelli Lopsonzski. They met the previous fall at a Penn State game and “hit it off” during the annual Pennsylvania Society weekend in New York City. The engagement was a “cross-party union” between the burgeoning Republican legislator and the Democratic Lopsonzski whose cousin was a state representative.

Corman’s clout grew over time.

After surviving one of the largest Pennsylvania government controversies of his lifetime — the 2005 middle-of-the-night pay raise, which he voted for — he became Appropriations Committee chairman in 2009 and majority leader in 2015.

As a leader in the majority caucus, he was among the Republicans who served as a firewall against Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s massive tax shifts while also working with the governor to increase state spending on schools and social services. He compromised on a natural gas severance tax and increasing the minimum wage, only to have his counterparts in the House kill both. And his 2017 state pension reform bill aimed at reducing long-range costs was supported by both parties. In 2018, after a fraternity tragedy at Penn State, his anti-hazing bill was signed into law, putting parameters on initiation rites for Greek Life and penalties for violations.

His accrued years in the Senate give Corman far more state government experience than anyone else in 2022’s gubernatorial field.

That strength may also be a weakness.

Opponents are likely to call out his support for the 2013 law that hiked state gas taxes as a way to pay for Pennsylvania’s crumbling infrastructure and his support in 2019 for the law that implemented widespread mail-in voting rules that his party now deplores. Some have already started re-posting images and videos online of a furious Corman on the Senate floor in 2019, when he shouted for several minutes at Lt. Gov. John Fetterman for failing to shut down Democratic Sen. Katie Muth in a debate. Fetterman later acknowledged he didn’t follow the rules, but Corman ultimately lost the optics battle. The video went viral.

TRANSPARENCY

When Corman succeeded former Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati as the chamber’s top institutional officer in January, he said there was one word on his mind: transparency.

It should be at the heart of every aspect of legislators’ jobs, from filing office expenses to their relationships with lobbyists and their campaign fundraising, he said.

But Corman’s own track record — and that of the caucus he was now leading — on those topics had been more talk than action in recent years, as detailed in a series of stories by The Caucus and Spotlight PA.

In 2020, Senate officials used an obscure provision in the state constitution to claim a “legislative privilege” that allowed them to redact details about how they spent some taxpayer money -- mainly who legislators met with and why during meals and travel. In one open records request, officials scrubbed all descriptions about the Senate expenses. While House Republican leaders said they would change their redaction practices, the Senate made no moves to do the same.

Another series of stories on the spending records in 2021 noted Corman was among a small portion of legislators who voluntarily posted their expenses online but who also had left out anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars worth of expenses. Corman’s own website hadn’t been updated in six years.

A few months later, Corman led his chamber in automatically releasing monthly Senate expense reports online for the first time. Though the reports still lack some spending details, their now-routine publication by the Senate goes beyond anything the House has done to date.

On the campaign side, a 2019 investigation by the news organizations revealed legislators over three years had spent $3.5 million that could not be fully traced because of vague disclosure rules. Corman’s campaign had spent more than $73,000 from 2016 through 2018 that were described in public reports broadly as credit card expenses, reimbursements or gifts. Receipts showed those payments included about $2,000 per year for liquor during the holidays and $200 for a limo during a Pennsylvania Society weekend.

Earlier this year, Corman also expressed an interest in imposing more disclosure rules on nonprofit 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organizations, some of which get involved in political work but are not required to disclose their sources of income. Additional scrutiny of these so-called dark-money groups came after The Caucus and Spotlight PA revealed Corman helped raise money in 2020 for one such nonprofit founded by his campaign manager, Ray Zaborney, who was also a lobbyist.

The Growth and Opportunity Fund was a little-known group; its website and social media had been inactive until the news organizations began asking questions. Corman served as the featured guest at its March 2020 fundraiser at a resort in California, within a day of another fundraiser Corman held for his own campaign there. Leaders for the nonprofit denied any coordination between the fundraisers.

They also did not specify much about the nonprofit’s goals or activities. They said the organization was preparing a “series of digital advertising campaigns” for that fall but it’s unclear if that ever happened. Any tax disclosures for the group have also not been made available for the last three years, making its financial status and activities completely opaque.

Its organizers did not return requests for comment for this story.

‘THE SPIRIT OF HAPPY VALLEY’

Corman’s most significant step toward building statewide name recognition before this year came in 2013, when he sued the National Collegiate Athletic Association over the $60 million fine it imposed on Penn State during the Jerry Sandusky child sex-abuse case.

The fine was part of a consent decree that included a handful of severe punishments for the football program. Corman’s suit morphed into one that resulted in most of the consent decree being thrown out. It restored the 111 wins previously stripped from Joe Paterno, once again making him the winningest coach in college football history.

Penn Staters across the state were relieved, and Corman got a profile in The New York Times that featured photos of a Paterno-signed Wheaties box, miniature Nittany Lion statue and model of Beaver Stadium that sat in his Senate office.

During Corman’s next re-election campaign, in 2018, the legal victory inevitably found its way into his campaign literature. An “open letter” that he ran as a full-page ad in the Sunday CDT before the election said his effort “restored the spirit of Happy Valley” and won “when our community’s values were under attack by the NCAA.”

But for some, questions remained about Corman’s relationship to the case to begin with.

Corman had been a board member of The Second Mile, Sandusky’s youth charity, at the time of the charges in 2011. Along with other board members, he claimed he never knew anything about the allegations before the grand jury presentment. Nobody from The Second Mile was ever charged.

An internal review led by former Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham fizzled out and left many questions unanswered.

Corman became part of the group that decided to sell The Second Mile’s remaining assets to a Texas-based organization.

COURTING THE TRUMP VOTE

Corman’s fate in the gubernatorial primary may ultimately rest on Donald Trump, the man who pushed the Centre County Republican’s name to prominence, welcomed or not, once again.

In a statement in June, Trump asked whether Corman and his fellow Republican, Sen. David Argall, were “stupid, corrupt, or naive” for not fighting for a “forensic audit” of Pennsylvania’s 2020 election results.

“I feel certain that if Corman continues along this path of resistance, with its lack of transparency, he will be primaried and lose by big numbers,” Trump said.

Less than two months later, Corman was in a rare public feud with Trump’s most fervent supporter in his caucus, Sen. Doug Mastriano, the Franklin County Republican trying to launch the audit by himself. Corman ousted Mastriano, who had just said leadership was blocking his efforts, and said it was Mastriano who had “retreated” from the investigation.

Corman went on the offensive on conservative media outlets. He said he was committed to an investigation of the 2020 results, but many of Mastriano’s supporters weren’t buying it. Months later, subpoenas in the investigating committee are moving through the legal process, and it’s unclear what form any “investigation” would take now. An “Arizona-style” audit — like the one that spent millions and uncovered no serious evidence of fraud — is likely out of the picture.

Former Pennsylvania Democratic Party Chairman T.J. Rooney said Corman avoided a “freak show” like the display in Arizona.

“He handled it deftly,” said Rooney, a former state House member. “It was an example of leadership.”

Now, with a nasty primary race featuring Corman and Mastriano going head to head, the question will be whether Trump’s grip on many Republican voters leaves room for a candidate with institutional experience who has tried to walk a fine line in the era of reality-show politicking.

He’s “a very formidable candidate,” said Rooney. “He is very impressive because he has experience in, and he understands, statewide politics.”

Berwood Yost, director of the Center for Opinion Research at Franklin & Marshall College, put it this way: “Corman has deep ties to the Republican Party… I think you have to consider him one of the front-runners due to his political pedigree.”