GOP women hear candidate for governor
ZELIENOPLE — Dozens of Republican women gathered Wednesday in the borough to talk politics and drink tea with a gubernatorial candidate looking for their support in the May primary.
Laura Ellsworth was the guest of honor as the Republican Women of Butler County hosted the event at the Harmony Lodge.
“It’s called ‘Tea for Friends — Friends for Tea,’ and we’re reaching out to women in the community who would like an alternative look at a women who is running for governor,” said Mary Kaye Soriano, president of Republican Women of Butler County.
“We’re just doing this to reach out to women to let them know that there is a coalition of Republican women and also conservative women that want to affect positive change in the community and to keep the positive values out there that we have,” she said.
Ellsworth, who worked as an attorney in Pittsburgh where she was partner-in-charge of Global Community Service Initiatives at Jones Day, an international law firm with offices in Pittsburgh, mingled with the women and served up her credentials.
“I represented some of the largest companies in the world in some of their biggest matters. So I lost if I didn’t find answers no one had thought of before, for problems no one had seen before,” Ellsworth said. “Businesses were going to go out of business and hundreds of thousands of people would lose their jobs.
“So for almost 40 years that’s the kind of work I’ve done — solving those problems.”
Ellsworth also has worked with veterans, schools and the United Way. She spoke about watching Pittsburgh transform over the decades from an area struggling to recover from the collapse of steel to the prosperous city it is today.
“What I was privileged to participate in … was the process whereby the private sector came together — the private sector, not government — private sector leaders came together in vision and will and purpose and our resources and our business sense and our problem-solving ability,” she said.
“And then we partnered with government to get things done. And it was that using the private sector as the driver and then partnering with government that transformed Western Pennsylvania from dead in the water in 1980 to one of the most livable cities in the country.”
Ellsworth found plenty of support in the group.
“She is everything a candidate should be and she has that added plus of being female, and I think we all know that gives a little unique understanding and way of approaching things,” Soriano said.
Others said the meeting helped them decide who they would support in the primary.
“I think she’s fantastic,” said Lynette Citro. “I just think she’s very informative, she’s up on everything … up until this point I didn’t know who I was going to vote for.”
Ellsworth will face state Sen. Scott Wagner, R-28th, and businessman Paul Mango in the upcoming May primary. The winner will go on to challenge Gov. Tom Wolf in the general election.
In attendance was Kimberly McGinnis, a Seneca Valley High School graduate who did her senior project working with Republicans on the Trump campaign in 2016.
“I was driving through Zelienople one day and saw the big Trump campaign headquarters sign and I was like, ‘That’s pretty cool,’ and I also had to do something for my senior project, and I wanted to make that more career -based than just to do something,” she said.
“I wanted to actually see if I was interested in this enough to make it a career and major in it. I did do my senior project through that and it was fascinating.”
McGinnis is now finishing her freshman year at Roanoke College in Salem, Va., where she is studying political science.
