Lou Barletta isn’t quite done with politics. At 65, he is far from retiring as he begins his bid to become the governor of Pennsylvania in 2022.
Barletta is a republican, catholic, Italian-American from Hazleton, PA who has served as the U.S. representative for Pennsylvania’s 11th congressional district from 2011 to 2019 and the Mayor of Hazleton for 10 years before that.
His most recent political bid was in 2018 when he ran against Bob Casey Jr. for the U.S. Senate seat and lost with 42.6 percent of the vote compared to Casey’s 55.7 percent. Though he was the heavily favored republican in the primary, beating out Jim Christiana by 27 percentage points.
The Tribune-Review ran his op-ed announcing his candidacy on Sunday May 23 where Barletta had a little ink to make his case to be PA’s next governor. He starts it by telling the story of the business he and his wife, Mary Grace, started 37 years ago (which wasn’t mentioned in the article, but a quick wikipedia search yielded it being a ‘pavement marking company’ called Interstate Road Marking Corporation which he sold for an undisclosed sum in 2000).
Right after he sold his business, he ran for Mayor of Hazleton and won handedly after failing to win a council seat two years prior. Hazleton, for those unfamiliar, is a fairly large city out in Luzerne County in the north eastern part of the state with a population of just over 25,000 — about the size of Monroeville for a western PA comparison.