Grocery shopping for your Fourth of July barbecue? As you head down the bread aisle, you may want to hit pause before reaching for your favorite buns. The family members behind Martin’s Famous Potato Rolls are major financial backers of Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, who backed former President Donald Trump’s coup attempt in 2020 and hopes to be in place to possibly help decide the fate of the 2024 election.
Mastriano, the Republican nominee to become the Keystone State’s governor, is a real piece of work. As a Pennsylvania state senator, he supported Trump’s plan to have the Legislature undo Trump’s loss in the Keystone State. He paid for six buses of Pennsylvanians to attend Trump’s rally on Jan. 6, 2021, and video appears to show him at the Capitol after rioters breached it.
Jim Martin, then the president of Martin’s Famous Pastry Shoppe and now the executive chairman of the board, donated $11,000 to Mastriano in 2020, WHYY’S Billy Penn newsletter reported. As Mastriano launched his bid to become governor last year, Martin donated $110,000 to his campaign. That included “$10k in May and another $100k in December, just before Christmas.” His daughter, Julie Martin, the company’s social-media manager, also donated $2,000 to Mastriano last year, Billy Penn reported.
Mastriano subscribes to a Christian nationalist worldview, one that believes the separation of church and state should, at most, be a dotted line. Mastriano has “compared himself to Old Testament prophets and the military leaders who commanded the armies of Israel,” The New Yorker reported. “He laces his speeches with an admixture of conspiracy theory and Biblical allusion.”
That worldview likely explains the Martin family’s support of Mastriano. The Martins and Mastriano belong to a denomination that’s an offshoot of the Mennonites, and the candidate’s wife previously worked as a chaplain in the Martins’ factory, New York magazine reported. It’s important to note, though, as New York magazine did, that the Christian nationalism that Mastriano espouses goes against the CMC’s (formerly the Conservative Mennonite Conference’s) theology.
“We are aware of recent criticisms leveled against Martin’s and our business partners,” Julie Martin said in a statement to New York magazine last month. “Like the rest of the country, Martin’s employees, business partners, and customers hold to diverse range of personal opinions, beliefs, and values. Although the stockholders who own the company are members of the same family, they also hold a wide range of views. For these reasons, the company, as a matter of policy, does not support any particular candidate or party.”
— Martin’s Potato Rolls (@potatorolls) May 17, 2022
But it’s pretty tough to unravel the family’s beliefs from the company’s. Especially when Tony Martin, who took over as president from Jim Martin last year, said his father would “still be very involved with the strategic direction of our business, and we look forward to continuing to learn from him.”
Though some restaurants and individual customers are boycotting the company, Shake Shack, its biggest customer by far, has maintained ties. “In regards to the actions of individuals associated with the Martin’s company and their personal political donations — those are the choices of those individuals and do not express the values of Shake Shack,” a spokesperson said in a statement to The Washington Post. “We continue to be in active conversations with Martin’s to express our concern.”
They may want to express to their concerns a little louder, given that Mastriano has shown no signs of repenting his 2020 conspiracies. As recently as April, he railed against the “persecution and oppression” that election conspiracy theorists such as himself have faced.
Pennsylvania’s governor has the authority to appoint basically whomever he wants as secretary of state, which means if Mastriano is elected governor, he will have an unusually strong say in how elections are held in our country’s fifth most-populous state. In April, Mastriano told former Trump adviser Steve Bannon that for secretary of state he has in mind a “voting-reform-minded individual who’s been traveling the nation and knows voting reform extremely well.”
It brings me no joy to tell you all this. I was obsessed with these potato rolls, and they were a staple in my kitchen until I learned the people making them have ties to a Big Lie proponent who wants to handpick the next president, no matter who wins his state. But if the choice is a pillowy bun for my hot dog or American democracy, the answer is clear to me. I recommend you grill your own feelings on the matter, and while it may not be a choice you relish, I think you’ll feel the same.
