A left-wing Democrat has a clear lead over the Republican candidate in Pennsylvania’s Senate race. The Republican candidate was nominated rather than more electable candidates because Trump endorsed him in the Republican primary.
Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D) has a 9-point lead over his Republican rival, celebrity physician Mehmet Oz (R), in the Pennsylvania Senate race, according to a new USA Today-Suffolk University poll. The poll shows Fetterman with 46 percent support among likely voters in Pennsylvania, while Oz is only supported by 37 percent. Another 13 percent remain undecided.
Oz, a moderate Republican, narrowly won the Republican Senate primary, with only 31% of the vote, due to the endorsement of Donald Trump. Trump’s support enabled him to win in a crowded field. He got barely more votes than the more conservative and better-liked Dave McCormick, who also received about 31% of the vote. McCormick had been expected to win the Republican primary before Trump endorsed Oz.
But because Trump endorsed Oz, Oz won the Republican primary for U.S. Senate, and now is the Republican nominee, where he trails the Democrat. By contrast, a past poll had shown McCormick running neck-and-neck with the Democrat, John Fetterman.
Other statewide races in Pennsylvania, such as the governor’s race, are too close to call, according to the polls. But the Trump-endorsed Oz is well behind his Democratic opponent.
As a conservative web site laments,
There’s no such thing as an “unelectable Republican” in swing states this year … except, maybe, Mehmet Oz. A generic Republican running against a generic Democrat for Senate in Pennsylvania would almost certainly win. But Fetterman is the opposite of generic, and Oz is generic in all the wrong ways from the standpoint of grassroots Republicans. It may even be that Fetterman’s getting a bit of a sympathy vote (for now) due to his health crisis. Whatever the explanation, 46/37 is shockingly weak polling in a year when a red tsunami is about to crash down.
Oz will be less behind as the November election approaches, because Republican voters will have nowhere else to turn, and the 24% of Republican voters who don’t currently support Oz will have no choice but to support him after they learn about all the radical left-wing policies the Democrat, Fetterman, supports. Fetterman has a blue-collar tough-guy vibe, but in reality, his politics are well to the left of Joe Biden’s, whether the issue is taxes, crime, or the economy. Fetterman is further to the left than anyone Pennsylvania has ever sent to the U.S. Senate.
So Oz won’t lose by 9% when all votes are counted. It will be a fairly close election. But Oz could still lose by 5%, because he trails Fetterman among independents, and has very high unfavorability with independents, even those who can’t stand Biden. Oz’s favorability with independents is only 17% — 57% of them disapprove of him — while Biden’s favorability is 35%, with 60% disapproving.
Oz’s favorables with all voters are grim: 28% favorable, 50% unfavorable. Compared to 45% favorable for Fetterman and 43% favorable for Biden.
So Oz has only about a one-in-three chance of winning the November election, and the Republicans are thus likely to lose a Senate seat they currently hold.
Trump’s decision to support Oz in the Republican primary, over more electable candidates and more conservative candidates, was a political blunder.
Trump himself is not very popular. Most voters disapprove of both Trump and Biden. Biden’s policies are much worse, but he pays less of a price for them, because the progressive media prefers Biden.
Swing-state Republican governors have much higher approval ratings than Trump does. Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin has a 53% approval rating; Trump has only a 34% approval rating in Virginia.
According to a poll, New Hampshire’s Republican governor would beat Biden in a landslide — by 17% — in 2024, if he were the Republican nominee. By contrast, Trump would lose narrowly to Biden in New Hampshire.
The Never Trumpers at the Lincoln Project want Donald Trump to be renominated in 2024 so that Republicans will lose the general election, leaving progressives in charge of everything. It’s not surprising, because these Never Trumpers are mostly Beltway grifters, and people who live inside the Beltway have selfish reasons for wanting the Democrats to win. When Democrats win, the government gets bigger, which means more government jobs and contracts in the Washington metropolitan area. That increases the home values and wages of Beltway grifters.
They may be mistaken to assume Trump would lose a rematch to Biden. He might not. Biden’s policies are so much worse than Trump’s, especially on the economy, that Trump might beat Biden in 2024, even though most Americans disapprove of Trump in public-opinion polls. The most recent polls show that if there were a rematch between Trump and Biden, Trump would win, although a generic Republican would beat Biden by a bigger margin than Trump would.
In 2020, Republicans in down-ballot races generally got a bit more of the vote than Trump did, as a percentage of votes. Trump was so unpopular with Americans as a whole, that he became the first Republican president since Herbert Hoover to not just lose his race for reelection, but also cost his party control of Congress, too.
