Bill Bachenberg seeks chair of Pa. Republican Party
Greg Rothman, senator from Cumberland County, also running for post
Bill Bachenberg, the Lehigh Valley businessman who was an unauthorized elector for Donald Trump in 2020 and an official elector in 2024, is looking to steer the Pennsylvania Republican Party as its next chairman.
About 380 party leaders from across the state will gather in Gettysburg Saturday to vote for Bachenberg or state Sen. Greg Rothman from Cumberland County.
The battle comes as state Republicans have much to celebrate, registering twice as many voters than Democrats in 2024, and flipping a U.S. Senate seat and two U.S. House seats, including the Lehigh Valley’s 7th District.
The position opened up when Lawrence Tabas announced in December that he would not seek reelection to the job he held since 2019. His decision came after Ted Christian, a Bucks County man who led Trump’s 2016 campaign in Pennsylvania, said he would challenge Tabas for the job, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. Then Christian dropped out in favor of Rothman, who announced his intentions in December and has the support of Pennsylvania’s new U.S. senator, Dave McCormick.
The race is a contest between the party establishment in Rothman, a 12-year state legislator, and an outsider in Bachenberg, who has not run for any office but has supported Republican candidates with money.
He has hosted fundraisers and political rallies at his Lehigh Valley Sporting Clays in North Whitehall Township, where Donald Trump Jr. appeared in 2020 and 2024. He also served as a co-chair of Sportsmen for Trump in 2020.
He credited efforts by Republicans in groups and organizations for Trump’s victory in Pennsylvania, more so than party leaders.
“This year was a combined effort by so many different organizations, so many grassroots organizations the passion [they had] for President Trump,” he said in a Jan. 8 interview with Ken Layng of Liberty Lens.
Rothman is running on a Unity Ticket with Bernadette Comfort of Upper Macungie Township, who is seeking reelection to the vice chair position she has held since 2017. Bachenberg is running with Lynne Ryan, chair of the Lawrence County Republican Committee.
Comfort also was an unauthorized elector in 2020 and an official elector in 2024; Ryan was an elector in 2024.
Neither Rothman nor Bachenberg responded to interview requests by Armchair Lehigh Valley, which gleaned information for this story from various sources.
Greg Rothman
Rothman, 58 and a former Marine, was elected to the state Senate in 2022 after serving more than 10 years in the state House.
In an interview with Delaware Valley Journal, he said he knows he can help Republican candidates win.
“From 2015 through 2022, I ran in seven electoral contests and won all seven of them,” Rothman said. “I’m an activist. We need more conservative activists to run for office and win.”
In a post on X, he elaborated on one of his plans. “We saw historic gains in 2024 due to tremendous grassroot support across Pennsylvania,” the post said. “To continue that momentum, if elected chairman, the 2025 PAGOP (Pennsylvania Republican Party) will convene a newly formed advisory council aimed at unifying key stakeholders across the state with the goal of winning elections consistently.”
During a Jan. 27 interview with the online publication Broad+Liberty, Rothman said his political experience as a campaign volunteer to his present role as a state senator makes him qualified for the job.
“Everything I've done has put me in a place where I can be the ideal state chairman, unite the party and build on the success of Donald Trump’s election and promote Trump’s America First agenda and turn Pennsylvania into a solidly reliable red state like Ohio and Florida,” he said.
Rothman has received the backing, expressed in social media posts, not only of McCormick but also of Christian; U.S. Rep Dan Meuser from Pennsylvania's 9th District; state Sens. Tracy Pennycuick, Doug Mastriano and Kim Ward, who is president pro tempore of the Senate; Carla Sands, former Denmark ambassador and Pennsylvania native; and Lou Barletta, who previously served as Hazleton mayor and in Congress. The Hispanic Republican Coalition and the Southeast Caucus (Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery and Philadelphia counties) are among several groups that also endorsed him.
Bill Bachenberg
Bachenberg, 66, first vice president of the National Rifle Association and a former board director, has taken a different route to attract supporters in what he calls a “grassroots” effort.
During the Liberty Lens interview, Bachenberg said he had no intention to run for the position. But after Christian dropped out, he said he received calls from people around the state urging him to run. He then established an exploratory committee near the end of December, met with two dozen county chairmen in Centre County on Dec. 28 – all but one supported him – and on Dec. 31 decided to run.
He said the state Republican Party needs a mission statement as guidance. “We need to be open and inclusive of people with like-minded values,” he said. “And I believe voters are hungry for what we have to offer. We just don't bring it forward in a clear message to them.”
He also said, “So we've got a major hurdle to rebuild trust, transparency and integrity – three principles that I'm running on is rebuilding trust with our donors.”
In a Feb. 3 interview on MAGA Kingdom Report, he said the state party has been run like an “old-boys club.”
“If we don't make a change here, we're going to lose the 2026 election, the midterms. And if we lose them in Pennsylvania, the president's going to lose the House. … We cannot brand the whole party [that way]. It's just a very small part at the top there that wants business as usual.”
Bachenberg has occasionally bucked the party’s establishment, providing money in recent years to Republican state legislative candidates in the Lehigh Valley who challenged entrenched incumbents in GOP primaries.
In May 2022, he was a major supporter of Jarrett Coleman, whose only political experience was winning a seat on the Parkland School Board in 2021, as a candidate for the 16th Senate District held by 28-year Harrisburg veteran Pat Browne. Coleman pulled off the political upset winning the nomination by 24 votes. Coleman easily won the Senate seat that November.
Bachenberg loaned Coleman’s campaign $51,000; the campaign repaid $12,000 of the total, leaving $39,000 classified as unpaid debt, according to the most recent campaign finance report. (Bachenberg’s wife, Laura, served as treasurer of Coleman’s campaign for a portion of 2022 and loaned his committee, Patriots for Coleman, $55,000, with $13,000 of the total being repaid.)
In 2024, Bachenberg backed another candidate, 22-year-old Slatington Councilman Zachari Halkias, who took on four-term incumbent state Rep. Zach Mako in the Republican primary. Bachenberg gave Halkias’ campaign $4,000, about half the total amount raised by the campaign committee. Mako won the party’s nomination with 72% of the vote and was reelected to a fifth term that November.
Also in 2024, he supported Kevin Dellicker in the Republican primary for 7th District, rather than state Rep. Ryan Mackenzie, who won the nomination and the general election, defeating incumbent Democrat Susan Wild.
Bachenberg is a defendant in a 2023 civil lawsuit filed in federal court in Michigan by XRVision, a New York cyber security company that was hired to audit voting machines used in Antrim County, Michigan, and Fulton County, Pennsylvania, in the 2020 election. The company said it was not paid for its work after finding no evidence of voter fraud in Fulton County and alleged that Bachenberg agreed to pay for attorney fees and expenses. In court documents, Bachenberg denied the claim. A trial is scheduled for October.
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The process
Party officials from Pennsylvania’s 67 counties will gather in Gettysburg Saturday to vote on the new party chairman. Each county’s delegate is comprised of the county chairman and state committee members who are elected to four-year terms in a primary. Northampton County, for example, has eight members in its delegation. The vote traditionally has been by a roll call, but Bachenberg wants a paper ballot, saying during the Liberty Lens interview that a voice vote can be intimidating.
“I think it should be a secret ballot and let the people vote with their hearts and not worry about what their committee chairman may think or what someone else may think,” he said. “We should have a paper ballot just like real elections and let them, the committee people, vote how they want to vote and not be intimidated or have retribution later on.”
His call for a paper-ballot vote is supported by others, including Charlotte Shaffer, chair of the Adams County Republican Committee.
In a Jan. 30 letter to Tabas, the outgoing party chair, she wrote, ”If we claim to be the party of fair and honest elections, we must lead by example. No member should feel pressured or fearful of retribution when casting their vote.”
The bylaws require that the election is to be held by a voice vote or a roll-call vote.