by Marley Parish of Spotlight PA State College and Jaxon White of Spotlight PA

HARRISBURG — While Pennsylvania’s two major party candidates for governor are both prioritizing helping rural communities, their approaches to some major issues — like how to handle broadband installation and federal program cuts — could lead to significantly different results for the people who live in the state’s more remote areas.

Rural communities in the commonwealth are home to more than 3 million people, and face different challenges compared to more populated areas as existing residents age and limited resources — health services, jobs, and other essentials — make it hard to attract new faces and businesses.

Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, who hails from a Philadelphia suburb, has made a point to visit and speak with voters in rural areas, as he did in his 2022 campaign. Earlier this month, he met with Democrats in Centre, Clinton, and Lycoming Counties.

Shapiro is running unopposed in the Democratic primary.

Republican Treasurer Stacy Garrity often flexes her Bradford County roots to argue she understands rural voters’ hardships. She claims in stump speeches that she’s the first statewide office holder from a rural county in more than four decades.

Garrity is her party’s endorsed gubernatorial candidate and has no primary challenger on the GOP ballot, though there is a write-in campaign for state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R., Franklin), with his support.

Daniel Mallinson, an associate professor of public policy and administration at Penn State Harrisburg, said the candidates need to appeal to rural voters directly because they tend to hold “higher levels of distrust” toward elected officials.

“They’re in communities that for a long time have felt left behind by government,” Mallinson said. “They’re in places that get a lot of attention every four years in presidential elections, and then … don’t hear from anybody, any other time.”

Here’s how Shapiro and Garrity are approaching some key issues for rural Pennsylvanians.

Broadband access

Pennsylvanians in rural areas have a disproportionately difficult time accessing high-speed internet — especially in areas near the Central Susquehanna Valley, portions of the Pennsylvania Wilds in the north-central part of the state, and northeastern Pennsylvania, according to a 2022 study from the Center for Rural Pennsylvania.

There is $711 million in federal money available to the commonwealth to increase internet speeds. However, that money has been repeatedly delayed, due in part to shifting federal guidelines and a related dispute over how much fiber optic cable installers should be paid.

The broadband program falls under Pennsylvania’s prevailing wage law, which sets minimum rates for workers on large, publicly-funded construction projects. The Shapiro administration has been classifying fiber technicians as electrical linemen under the law.

The federal government and industry stakeholders like Verizon have said Pennsylvania’s classification artificially inflates fiber technicians’ wages by about $20 an hour and doesn’t reflect the work they’re actually doing. State officials counter that there’s plenty of money to accomplish all the broadband upgrades necessary, even with a higher wage.

A federal official had said Pennsylvania couldn’t access broadband funds until it changed its classification structure, but the Shapiro administration said in an April statement that its final plan was approved by the federal Department of Commerce without any stipulations related to prevailing wage.

Garrity said she would have handled that dispute differently than Shapiro — likely in a way that would have led to the fiber technicians being paid less.

In a statement, she said that her administration would’ve altered how Pennsylvania classifies electrical lineman and those who install fiber-optic cables to fall in line with the federal government’s initial demands.

She said she supports Republican-sponsored bills in the state House and Senate that would create new classifications for fiber technicians. They would still get the prevailing wage under those proposals, but they would have the state Department of Labor and Industry set a different, likely lower rate for their work.

“These jobs require different training and take on different risks and demands,” Garrity said.

Garrity also noted her administration would use federal funds to prioritize the “hardest” to reach communities first, then work on the least costly areas.

Economic development and data centers

An ongoing wave of data center development is at the center of economic policy debate in the state Capitol.

The commonwealth is home to more than 100 active or proposed data centers, and Shapiro and Garrity are aligned on one major question of how to handle them. They want data center developers to either build or pay for their own power generation, rather than hit local communities with the higher electricity bills that are expected to stem from the facilities’ enormous energy demands.

The two candidates also agree that local residents should have more knowledge about and sway over the proposals.

Shapiro has been bullish on data center development, helping secure tens of billions of dollars in investments from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft for related projects. He has adjusted his tone in recent months, pitching in his budget address an environmental and transparency framework that he said must be met before projects qualify for expedited permits.

Garrity said in January that rural areas are well-suited for data centers.

In April, she told Spotlight PA that the state should promote developers entering community benefit agreements with local governments, which often include pledges to hire local workers and improve infrastructure.

Another of Garrity’s major campaign trail pledges is to increase the amount of natural gas extracted in Pennsylvania. She said doing so would lower energy costs statewide and create “generational wealth and opportunity in communities that have been left behind.”

She also told Spotlight PA that a moratorium on Pennsylvania’s gasoline tax would be “wildly popular,” and has been an enthusiastic supporter of President Donald Trump’s 2025 tax bill.

In a January speech to the Pennsylvania Press Club, Garrity said she wants to lower property taxes for older adults and make sure young people can afford a first home, proposals she said the state could fund by “eliminating burdensome regulations and cutting useless red tape.”

Shapiro has meanwhile claimed credit for a 2025 Moody’s Analytics finding that Pennsylvania is the only state in the Northeast with a growing economy.

Earlier this year, he announced that pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly would invest $3.5 billion in Lehigh County to build a manufacturing plant, bolstered by $100 million in taxpayer dollars.

The administration created a 10-year plan for growth in five key industries, including agriculture, energy, and life sciences. The Shapiro campaign noted the governor’s work to “streamline the permitting process and speed up government” — last year’s state budget mandated faster response times for some air and water quality permits.

Hospitals and health services

Pennsylvania’s health systems have long warned that rising costs, insufficient insurance reimbursements, and a patient base that overwhelmingly relies on Medicaid and Medicare have strained access to care in rural areas, which have been losing services and facilities.

And because of deep Medicaid cuts approved in a sweeping federal budget package that slashed spending by roughly $1 trillion over the next decade and tightened eligibility requirements, health experts anticipate even more pressure on providers in rural communities in the coming years.

Pennsylvania officials estimate the state will lose about $20 billion in federal Medicaid funding over 10 years starting in 2028, and the $50 billion, five-year federal Rural Health Transformation Program isn’t enough to offset those cuts.

The Shapiro administration was a vocal opponent of the federal cuts, cautioning that Pennsylvania wouldn’t be able to make up for the lost funding, while Garrity has been largely supportive of the spending package.

Under Shapiro, the state budget has maintained funding for rural and critical access hospitals, though advocates hope for more to help address longstanding challenges in the field. He has also said he supports using state funds to raise the rate at which care providers are reimbursed when they care for patients on Medicaid, which hasn’t kept pace with inflation, so hospitals are often paid less than the cost of providing care.

“Look, we have seen, unfortunately, the federal government cut over a billion dollars out of just Pennsylvania’s state Medicaid allotment,” he said during an April press conference. “In addition to that, I’ve got forces on the other side of the aisle that are pushing me every budget cycle to cut money out of Medicaid. … We have resisted that.”

His campaign did not respond to a question about how much of an increase to Medicaid reimbursement he would support or why this wasn’t included in his 2026 budget pitch to lawmakers. Additionally, the campaign did not say how the governor plans to win support from Senate Republicans.

Garrity said Pennsylvania should create a policy to provide rural Medicaid reimbursement rates for specialities like maternity care.

Additionally, she said the state should route money it got from settlements with major opioid manufacturers toward “perinatal care, maternal addiction treatment, or OB-GYN recruitment in fragile rural health systems.”

She also said she would call for a “Rural Health Emergency” to get federal funding for signing bonuses, salary support, and higher Medicaid reimbursement rates for rural OB-GYN providers, and added that she would consider passing medical liability reform to protect rural doctors.

Agriculture and land use

Agriculture contributes about $132 billion to Pennsylvania’s economy and supports 1 in every 10 jobs in the state, according to the state Department of Agriculture’s most recent economic impact report, from 2021.

Although farmers are used to fluctuations within the industry, federal policies — such as tariffs — and rising gas prices due to the war in Iran have hit the sector hard and added more volatility to an already challenging job.

In June 2025, Shapiro filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture for terminating Pennsylvania’s $13 million Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, which supplied fresh products from local farms to 14 food banks. He has also criticized the Trump administration for embracing tariffs and engaging in the war with Iran.

Garrity, on the other hand, has jabbed at Shapiro for his lawsuits against Trump and generally supported the president’s tariff policies, arguing that in the long term they will bring jobs, revenue, and economic development to the United States.

Both gubernatorial candidates have backed initiatives to support farmers.

Shapiro often cites the state’s Agriculture Innovation Program — a first-of-its kind initiative created with $10 million in the 2024 budget — as a way to support farmers through new technologies that boost efficiency.

He told a room full of industry insiders at a Pennsylvania Farm Show luncheon that the agriculture sector is to thank for the commonwealth’s economy.

“Putting ag at the center of the conversation on economic development has made all the difference in our collective success over the last three years,” Shapiro said.

His campaign also pointed to the Shapiro administration’s continuation of grants for nonprofits working to expand the sale and export of Pennsylvania-grown agricultural products, including beef, dairy, hardwoods, and vegetables.

“From Day One, the Governor has focused on the issues that impact rural Pennsylvania the most,” Shapiro’s spokesman Manuel Bonder said in an email, “and he has delivered results: from investing in rural schools, main streets, small businesses, and agricultural innovation, to repairing roads and bridges, to funding the state and local law enforcement agencies so many rural communities rely on.”

Garrity told Spotlight PA she would create a “one stop” office for farmers under the Department of Agriculture to coordinate permitting and compliance across various state agencies. Its staff, she said, would also focus on three areas: streamlining environmental permitting for barns, manure storage, water use, and on-farm upgrades; simplifying rules surrounding nutrient management and manure paperwork; and eliminating “duplicate reporting requirements across state agencies.”

“Right now, by my count, farmers deal with five state agencies and too many other state boards and commissions to count,” Garrity said. It’s unwieldy, unmanageable, and prevents farmers from doing their job, she added.

Garrity also wrote on Facebook that she wants to “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.

Both Shapiro and Garrity, according to their campaigns, support using state funds to ensure farmland is preserved from development plans.

Shapiro’s campaign noted that through the state farmland preservation program, in which the state teams up with local governments to buy the development rights to farms, his administration has made sure 555 farms and more than 46,000 acres of farmland stay dedicated to agriculture. The state, since before Shapiro entered office, has allocated $25.5 million annually from cigarette taxes toward the program, along with a portion of the Environmental Stewardship Fund.

Garrity told Spotlight PA that the commonwealth must further “lean on and rely on our farmers” to improve the state’s economy.