Running for U.S. Senate can be a bit disorienting for first-time candidates.
One night, it’s a televised debate before a national audience on the conservative cable network Newsmax. The next, it might be a series of cozy meet-and-greets with 20 voters in a suburban restaurant.
But for candidates like former U.S. Ambassador to Denmark Carla Sands, who – if the polls have it right – needs to make a big late surge to capture the Republican nomination for Pennsylvania’s open U.S. Senate seat, every voter contact at this stage in the race is the most important.
Sands, a 61-year-old Cumberland County native whose family has run a longtime Camp Hill chiropractic practice, started in the family business until making an attempt to turn an acting sideline into a full-time career in the late 1980s.
Sands eventually gave up the acting career, but she stayed in California when she married Los Angeles real estate mogul Fred Sands in 1999. Sands became a mom and migrated into her husband’s highly successful residential and commercial real estate businesses and philanthropic activities, ultimately taking over their management when Fred Sands died in 2015.
She also dabbled in Republican politics and contributed mightily to conservative GOP candidates and causes, including holding a fundraiser for then-candidate Donald Trump at her Bel Air mansion in his 2016 run, and giving $100,000 to his inauguration.
It was those connections that led to her nomination to the diplomatic post in Denmark in 2017, which she held through the end of the Trump Administration.
Now, back from Copenhagen and back in Cumberland County, Sands told a small crowd at Sophia’s at Walden Saturday that she is running as a constitutional conservative, but one with real world business and foreign policy experience that will enable her to hit the ground running if elected to the Senate.
While everyone else in the seven-candidate GOP field says they’re running to support the America First agenda, Sands said, she’s the only won who actually helped deliver on it during Trump’s first term, highlighting her work in helping get Denmark to increase its financial contribution to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s defense commitment, opening a U.S. consulate office in Greenland, and helping encourage a 43 percent increase in U.S.-Danish trade.
The question is, can Sands get that message of accomplishment to enough voters to leapfrog those in front of her by May 17.
The average of polls compiled by RealClearPolitics shows Sands currently in fourth place. But with at least one-third of voters undecided, and many more than telling some of those pollsters that they’re not necessarily locked in to their first choice, candidates like Sands feel the race is still very much in play.
And as voters dial in on their final choices over the next week, Sands said Saturday night during a campaign stop in Silver Spring Township, she’s hoping that authenticity will matter.
“They’re not conservative Republicans,” she said of the big-spenders in the race, daytime television personality Dr. Mehmet Oz and former Wall Street executive David McCormick. “And Republican primary voters, they elect conservative senators. If you look at Republican senators in the last 12 years, we have had Rick Santorum, and we’ve had Pat Toomey. And both of them are conservatives. Now Pat Toomey unfortunately made some statements and decisions that disappointed a lot of us. But it was only at the end of his tenure. He has been a fiscal conservative and a social conservative. And so was Rick Santorum….
“So my hope and my expectation is that Republican voters are going to elect a conservative senator to represent them, and there’s nobody else in this (field) ready on Day One other than me.”
Sands overlooked former U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, a moderate Republican who actually won election to his last term more recently than Santorum, though it’s also true that Specter switched to the…
Read More: Carla Sands works the home turf in closing stretch of Pa.’s GOP Senate primary