John Fetterman is consistently leading in polling of this year’s U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania.
In new polling from the Trafalgar Group, which is a GOP-leaning pollster, Fetterman is ahead of Republican nominee Mehmet Oz, aka Dr. Oz, by nearly five percent, although independently rounding the candidates’ respective totals leaves a gap of just four percent. Fetterman nabbed 48.4 percent of the total, while Oz had 43.5 percent. Only 4.6 percent of the overall total said they were undecided. A little under two percent of total respondents shared support for a Libertarian contender. This survey, which reflected the responses of likely voters, is the first major poll in the Pennsylvania Senate race since a Public Opinion Strategies survey found Fetterman with a lead of 18 percentage points when excluding those who said they merely leaned towards one of the contenders. Including such respondents didn’t change the overall outcome — Fetterman still led by double-digits.
The Trafalgar polling of this year’s Pennsylvania elections also found Democratic gubernatorial contender Josh Shapiro, who’s the state attorney general, leading Republican nominee and current state Sen. Doug Mastriano, who’s a prominent proponent of election-related nonsense. Shapiro had 48.6 percent of the support, and Mastriano nabbed 44.7 percent. A little under five percent of the overall total said they were undecided.
Mastriano was behind a bill passed by the legislature and vetoed by current Pennsylvania Democratic Governor Tom Wolf that would’ve allowed any Pennsylvania voter eligible for service as a poll watcher to do so in any Pennsylvania jurisdiction, which could allow far-right extremists to use the poll watching guise for targeting communities with marginalized voters across the state because of conspiratorial, unfounded allegations about supposed election fraud. Although that measure was stopped for now, a Mastriano governorship would entail the possibility of that level of recklessness on a routine basis. (Pennsylvania poll watchers serve only in the counties where they’re registered to vote, under current rules.) Implementing the provisions of Mastriano’s poll watchers bill would allow “bad faith partisan operatives to target a specific neighborhood or group of voters in an attempt to challenge the eligibility of voters, make poll workers’ jobs more difficult, and disrupt the counting of ballots,” Wolf said.
Meanwhile, Fetterman is also posting impressive fundraising numbers as the Pennsylvania Senate race proceeds. Last week alone, the Fetterman campaign raised over $1 million after a widely mocked video of Oz began broadly circulating. It shows the multiple mansion-owning candidate wandering around a grocery store and complaining about prices in an attempt at making a point about inflation. In reality, Oz seemed out-of-touch to many viewers: he called the grocery store by the wrong name, misread prices, and griped about the costs for a particular kind of French appetizer — which doesn’t exactly boost the idea he’s some kind of champion for the people. Recently, Oz was asked how many houses he owns, and on camera, he said two. He actually owns ten properties, including two Manhattan condos, a Palm Beach mansion, and — for some reason — a cattle ranch in rural Florida.
