The first post-debate poll in the hotly contested Pennsylvania Senate race shows Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz ahead of John Fetterman by nearly 3 percentage points.
The Insider Advantage poll surveyed 750 likely voters in the Keystone State one day after Oz, a former heart surgeon, debated the state’s Democratic lieutenant governor, Fetterman, who is recovering from a stroke he suffered in May.
Oz took a 47.5% to 44.8% lead over Fetterman in the new poll, which has a margin of error of 3.58 percentage points.
It is the first major poll to show Oz leading Fetterman in the Senate race.
The same poll showed Fetterman and Oz tied last week.
Democratic pollster Tom Bonier discredited the poll in a Twitter post on Thursday, noting that he believes it undersamples younger voters and oversamples the heavily GOP demographic of people between the ages 40 and 64.
“Well, this is the first poll of the cycle that actually made me laugh out loud. The likely voter sample has voters under the age of 40 at 14%. They were 25% of the electorate in ’18 and 28% in ’20. This poll should be entirely ignored,” Bonier argued.
Oz has closed a gap between himself and Fetterman that was as wide as 8.7 points in July, according to RealClearPolitics’s average of polls, which now shows a 0.3 percentage point advantage for Fetterman. Despite Fetterman’s narrow lead, the polling data aggregator predicts that Pennsylvania will be won by Oz in November.
If Oz can hold the Pennsylvania Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Pat Toomey (R) for the GOP, the party will only need to flip one seat in order to gain control of the Senate.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was caught on a hot mic Thursday telling President Biden that the Senate race in Georgia is “going downhill” for Democrats.
Polls also show tight Senate races in Nevada and Arizona, with RealClearPolitics calling Arizona a “GOP pick up” state and Nevada Republican Senate candidate Adam Laxalt leading incumbent Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto in the Silver State by an average of half a percentage point.