The race has tightened significantly since mid-September, when Fetterman’s lead over Oz grew as much as 10 points in a Marian poll, but Fetterman still has solid Democratic voters behind him in Pennsylvania, a state with 666,000 more registered Democrats. by the Republicans. in 2020.
Senate Republican strategists believe Fetterman’s difficulties in the debate effectively ended his chances of winning a race that has tilted toward Oz over the past five weeks.
“It’s hard to imagine any Pennsylvania voter tuning in to this debate seeing Fetterman as their next United States senator,” said one Senate GOP strategist.
“I think we will win there. The public vote is starting to swing in Oz’s direction,” the source added.
Fetterman struggled at times to find his words and needed to use a closed captioning system due to an auditory processing problem related to this stroke. He repeated his statements at times during the debate, including in response to a question about fracking. Some Democrats questioned whether Fetterman should have skipped the debate, but the candidate said in an interview this week that he felt it was important that he did. “I always understood that it wouldn’t be easy. I’m five months into recovery from this, but I thought it was important to show up and I did. And at the end of the day, we made, I think, some important points,” he told CNN’s Don Lemon. Two polls conducted by InsiderAdvantage and Wick Insights since the debate show Oz now holding a narrow lead over Fetterman, though critics say pollsters overstated Republicans and their results should be viewed with skepticism.
The InsiderAdvantage poll conducted on October 26 showed Oz with a 3-point lead while the Wick Insights poll conducted on October 26 and 27 showed Oz with a two-point lead.
Poll watchers expected a new survey to come out of Muhlenberg College on Wednesday that would shed more light on the closeness of the race. A Muhlenberg College poll of 420 likely voters conducted from Sept. 13 to Sept. 16 showed Fetterman leading Oz 49 percent to 44 percent.
Independent pundits and strategists from both parties say the Pennsylvania Senate race is still a toss-up and that Fetterman has a good chance of winning despite the debate.
“It was, to put it mildly, a weak performance,” said Terry Madonna, a longtime nonpartisan Pennsylvania pollster and senior fellow at Millersville University.
But Madonna said Fetterman’s “support base is very solid” and predicted there would be “an empathetic reaction among his fan base.” “Now the big question is does Oz have support, especially among Republicans and independents? “One of the reasons he went after Fetterman is that the support among Republicans was not as strong as Fetterman’s among Democrats,” he added, describing the lingering effect of Oz’s election showdown against hedge fund CEO David McCormick.
Berwood Yost, director of the Franklin & Marshall College poll, said he is looking forward to Wednesday’s Muhlenberg College poll results and expects “the race is close.”
“It’s very clear that the Republicans are going to have a field day given how disaffected people are, and in our polling we’ve shown an overall 5-point advantage for the Republicans,” he said.
Despite the favorable environment for Republicans, Oz failed to capitalize on the success that Fetterman and Democrats had set him up for early in the race.
“The fundamental problem that Oz has is the perceptions that he is viewed unfavorably — minus 19 in our poll — and also the fact that about half of Republicans wish they had a different Republican to vote for,” Yost said. “You may look animated because of this conversation, but I would imagine that if there is any movement, it will probably go back” to where it was before. “Historically, these electoral hits don’t hold,” he said.
Yost said he doesn’t think the debate was a fatal blow to Fetterman because there’s no consensus on what the candidate’s confusing resume means about his fitness for office.
Some voters say “he’s probably not capable” while others say “he’s brave enough to do it” and some voters who are more sympathetic to Fetterman argue that the debate format doesn’t play to his strengths and he’s better in other situations, he explained Yost. Oz didn’t come out of the debate unscathed either.
Democratic operatives attacked his statement that local political leaders should have a say in deciding abortion rights.
“I want women, doctors, local political leaders, to let the democracy that has always allowed our nation to thrive to advance the best ideas so that states can make up their own minds,” she said on stage.
Democrats are reframing this to argue that the decision about whether to have an abortion should be made by a woman, her doctor and local political leaders.
“You could arguably suggest in some ways that the biggest mistake made in that debate was by Oz, not Fetterman, in terms of his comment on abortion,” Yost said.
Strategists from both parties say the percentage of undecided voters who attended the debate was too small to make much of a difference in the outcome of the race. They say what matters most in how the theatrics of the debate feed the ongoing narrative about the candidates and the campaign.
“It felt like there was a huge amount of talk about the debate beforehand, like it was the focus of the campaign and that’s just not the case. The number of undecided voters who are going to attend a US Senate debate two weeks later is so tiny it can’t even be counted,” said JJ Balaban, a Philadelphia-based Democratic strategist.
Some Republican strategists acknowledge that the Pennsylvania Senate contest remains largely a race, even as some other advisers in their party are ready to call it game over for Fetterman.
“It was just uncomfortable to watch, but I think the reality of the situation is that unfortunately the debates don’t have the impact that they might have years ago,” said Vince Galko, who served as executive director of the Pennsylvania state Republican Party. In 2005 and as deputy director of George W. Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign in the state.
Kelly leads by 3 points in Kansas governor’s race: poll The Hill’s Morning Report — Last call to voters: Take charge, extend, act by Tuesday He noted that a large number of Pennsylvanians have already voted through early voting, and people watching debates are more likely to be “partisan” who “already know who they’re going to vote for anyway.” But he argued that two things are working in Oz’s favor.
“Any undecided voter who watched this debate can’t help but walk away thinking that only one of the guys there was fit to be a U.S. senator, and the amount of coverage, then . . .[debate] The coverage was remarkable,” added Galko. “I don’t remember a non-presidential debate getting this much coverage, not just in the state but nationally.”