DOYLESTOWN, Pennsylvania — Paul Martino says he was warned before the cameras ever rolled.
When filmmaker Robert May came to Bucks County to document the school board wars that tore through the Central Bucks School District, May told him something in confidence: No conservative would agree to be in the film. “Every time we’re in a movie,” Martino said, “you just make us look like an idiot.”
Martino sat down anyway. Four years later, Martino, his wife, his son, and his daughter are all on screen in Bucks County, USA, the five-part PBS docuseries directed by May and Barry Levinson and produced with Jason Sosnoff. The backlash that most interests Martino comes from the Left, aimed at the filmmakers for including him.
“The left-on-left crime in this, to me, is actually almost the most amazing part,” he told the Washington Examiner in an interview.
Martino runs Bullpen Capital, the venture capital firm he founded in 2010. Before that, he founded several companies, including the early social network Tribe and the data firm Aggregate Knowledge. During the pandemic, he brought his venture capital approach to politics, backing slates of candidates much as he backs startups.
“I was probably the biggest advocate in the state of Pennsylvania to keep the schools open in ’20 and ’21,” he said. As the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, in 2021 he put $500,000 of his own money into Back to School PA, a PAC that gave $10,000 apiece to dozens of local slates. The day after the election, the PAC said 113 of the 182 candidates it backed had won. CNN reported at least 101 wins among 208 candidates while some races were still being counted.
Critics see his political spending differently. Slate wrote that Martino spent half a million dollars backing “far-right candidates” for school board seats in Bucks County in 2021. The Los Angeles Times noted that the candidates he funded shifted their focus from reopening schools to more contentious culture-war fights. In 2023, his wife, Aarati Martino, ran for the Central Bucks school board as part of a Republican slate he largely financed. Democrats won all five seats, with Rick Haring defeating her.
Martino believes the 2021 wins are the only reason the filmmakers came at all. “We were so effective that we became a national news story because we were getting politically inactive parents to pay attention to what’s going on in the classrooms,” he said. He compares Bucks County to Loudoun County, Virginia, and says the fight brought him close to then-Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA), who called his wife on Election Day in 2023 to wish her luck.
The heart of the series is not Martino. It is his daughter, Vanessa, and her best friend, Evi Casey. The girls were 14 when filming began and remained friends while their parents stood on opposite sides of the district’s fights. Vanessa, now 17 and a high school senior, is “quite conservative,” her father says. Evi is “quite liberal.” Evi’s mother, he says, writes for a local progressive outlet and criticizes him regularly.
Martino says the girls’ friendship demonstrates the kind of relationship across political divides he has tried to build with other adults in Bucks County. “It’s that I’m thrilled that they’ve been able to implement something that I’ve not been afforded the luxury to do with my cohort.” He calls himself a believer in the “old Tip O’Neill rule” and says that over four years he offered to get a drink with anyone on the Left in Bucks County. One person accepted, a schoolteacher, and she agreed only to lunch. Their conversation also exposed the limits of that outreach: In a scene from the film, she presses him on negative ads. “Running negative ads is as American as mom and pop and apple pie,” he told her.
Martino draws a distinction between the campaign attacks he financed and the criticism directed at him personally. What bothers him, he says, is being targeted as a private citizen. “I was not the candidate.”
He repeats a line he uses in the film: “Conservatives think that liberals have bad policies. Liberals think conservatives are bad people.”
Bucks County is often called the purplest county in the purplest state. Martino argues that is exactly why it is so bitter. He points to his business partner, a liberal in Marin County, California, who cannot understand “you crazies in Bucks County.” In Marin, Martino says, one side is in charge and there is nothing to argue over. “In a purple spot of a purple county, there’s something to argue about because every election has consequences,” he said. With county races and school board races in alternating years, “your most vitriolic places are in your purple counties.”
The numbers back him up. Over the past quarter-century, few places in America have changed their minds as often, or decided elections by margins as thin, as Bucks County.
Democrats won Bucks County in every presidential election from 1992 through 2020, though their margins were often narrow. Al Gore won by about 4 percentage points in 2000 and John Kerry by less than 3 in 2004. Barack Obama expanded that margin to nearly 9 points in 2008, but won by just 1.2 points in 2012. Hillary Clinton carried the county by less than 1 point in 2016, followed by Joe Biden’s roughly 4-point win in 2020. In 2024, Donald Trump became the first Republican to win Bucks County since 1988, eking out a victory by 291 votes out of more than 400,000 cast.
Even those presidential numbers hide how often Bucks voters split their tickets. In 2016, the county backed Hillary Clinton and Democrat Josh Shapiro for attorney general, and in the same election chose Republicans Pat Toomey for Senate and Brian Fitzpatrick for Congress. In 2024, the same voters who narrowly picked Trump also narrowly picked Democrat Bob Casey over Republican Dave McCormick for Senate. Statewide races swing even harder: Bucks backed Democrat Ed Rendell for governor with 70% in 2006, then Republican Tom Corbett with 55% four years later.
Part of the reason is that Bucks is really three counties in one. Lower Bucks, along the Delaware River in places like Levittown, Bristol, and Bensalem, was built by working-class Catholics and traditional Democrats who left Philadelphia for the suburbs from World War II through the 1970s. Many raised their children and grandchildren a stone’s throw from where they started. It is also where Republicans have made their biggest gains. Obama won Levittown by 20 points in 2012; Trump effectively tied there in 2024 and flipped Bensalem, Tullytown, and Penndel outright.
Central Bucks, where Doylestown sits, is home to the voters who moved up and out of Lower Bucks. It is an upper-middle-class mix of old-line Republicans and progressive suburban Democrats who are no fans of Trump. It has been moving the other way, toward Democrats.
Upper Bucks has little connection to Philadelphia at all. It is a landscape of rolling farmland, covered bridges, and small towns, and it leans Republican.
As one Newtown mother told the Washington Examiner, “Levittown is surprisingly becoming more Republican, although it’s more blue-collar. Meanwhile, the more affluent parts up here are becoming more Democrats.” The two shifts nearly cancel each other out, which is why the county keeps landing so close to even.
The local seesaw is faster still, sometimes flipping from year to year. In 2019, Democrats won control of the county commission for the first time since 1983. In 2021, the year Martino’s money hit the school boards, Republicans swept the countywide races. In 2023, Democrats won them back and also took the Central Bucks board. In July 2024, Republicans overtook Democrats in voter registration for the first time since 2007. Months later, Trump carried the county.
A year after that, Bucks swung back hard. In November 2025, Democrats won every countywide race, ousting the Republican district attorney and sheriff. They now hold all nine row offices and control the commissioners board for the first time in recent memory. Joe Khan is believed to be the first Democrat ever elected district attorney there. They did it while Republicans still held a registration edge of roughly 10,000 voters.
That is the backdrop for Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick’s (R-PA) reelection race this fall, and in Doylestown you cannot miss it. Walking around this upscale county seat and talking to people, I found the sidewalks lined with campaign signs. The airwaves were flooded with ads in the race between Fitzpatrick and his Democratic challenger, Bob Harvie. Harvie is one of the two commissioners who flipped the county board in 2019. As of August, Republicans still led in registration, 201,889 to 193,900, but Democrats were gaining ground for the first time since 2020.
Some critics have attacked the docuseries for how it portrays conservatives. Slate’s critic wrote that she hated it, calling it “mired in the fatal fallacy that the center lies an even distance from each extreme.” RogerEbert.com faulted the filmmakers for giving equal time to all sides, “even the most dangerous, unhinged, and bigoted viewpoints,” and called Martino’s portrayal of himself as an ordinary guy “disingenuous.” Martino sees those reviews as confirmation of his argument: Some critics object to the filmmakers giving conservatives a fair hearing at all.
Martino told the Los Angeles Times, “Overall, I am pleased,” though “there’s some things I think don’t portray the facts exactly quite right,” and he describes the series as having “a little bit of a leftist slant because the filmmakers are lefties.” But, he said, “we’re in it, and we make good points.”
The fighting followed the film off-screen. A viewing at Bucks County Community College was canceled over unspecified safety concerns. At a public question-and-answer session, Martino says, other participants in the series went after him. “You also gave four years of your life to this project about generous listening,” he recalled thinking. “Did you learn nothing?”
The Bucks County Herald reported that Vanessa confronted May afterward: “This is the third time, having my dad being yelled at and just taking it.”
Martino admits the cost has been real. “Buyer’s remorse is too strong a word,” he said. “There have been real downsides to my family.” But if no one on the Right agreed to appear, he said, “we’re just gonna get bludgeoned. So we almost felt like we were drafted to do this.” He says Vanessa has noticed that in joint interviews, Evi gets easy questions and she gets the hard ones.
Martino’s message is that, at least in Bucks County, the Right is the side still willing to sit down and compromise. He knows people will argue with that in the Trump era, and he grants that “Trump’s bombastic style doesn’t help this.” He also says the roles are probably reversed in other parts of the country. He holds up Fitzpatrick, who he says gets “hollered at” by liberals in the morning and called the biggest RINO of all time at night.
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He expects Fitzpatrick to survive in November because of his local brand, his fundraising, and an unusual endorsement from the Pennsylvania State Education Association, the state teachers union, which backed him in July. At a recent meet-and-greet at Martino’s house, he said, Fitzpatrick called it probably the toughest race of his career. Martino is less hopeful about the rest of his party. “I’m not optimistic too many other people are going to win in November on our team.”
He does not think the division will end soon, but he does not think it is permanent either. “If you go look through the history of U.S. politics, yes, this is cyclic,” he said. “We had prior generations that the differences ended up in duels. So at least we’re not doing that.”
Chris Irvine contributed to this article.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
