Opinion: What Each Candidate is Counting on in Pennsylvania’s Senate Race
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WRITTEN BY: Jadon George
On Tuesday, Pennsylvania’s voters will finish choosing who will take the retiring Senator Pat Toomey’s seat in the 118th Congress: Either Democratic Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman, or Republican cardiologist and TV host Dr. Mehmet Oz.
Oz’s years in the media have made him a familiar face with voters who don’t traditionally back Republicans, and he’s betting his invective against the failures of the medical establishment will strike a nerve with Black voters whom that establishment has often betrayed.
When Suffolk University’s poll first picked up on his surge in October, Dr. Oz was polling at 20 percent with Black voters. (Republicans usually hover in the middle single-digits.) And Oz’s autumn stops in Philadelphia are no fluke, either. When he met with Black pastors in Germantown to talk about gun violence and posed for pictures while taking two Kensingtonians to rehab, he was betting that he could do something no other Republican could—namely, win enough votes in Philadelphia to make it worth the trip.
Fetterman is counting on an unusual coalition himself. By uniting the interests of young voters in places like Philly with those of working-class whites in places like Braddock, where he served as mayor for much of the 21st century, Fetterman is betting that he can reverse Democratic losses among the latter. That’s the playbook that has historically worked for Pennsylvania Dems, from Obama’s remarkable wins in 2008 and 2012 to Senator Bob Casey, Jr.’s reign as a three-term senator. And everyone from Bernie Sanders to David Brooks, has praised him for opening that playbook again, declaring him to be a “real fighter for the working class” who is “scrambling the identity war playbook,” respectively.
But each candidate’s proposed coalition asks them to strike a balance unseen in modern politics.
For Oz, that would have meant keeping Black support despite his coziness to former president Donald Trump. That’s a tall order for the centerpiece of any Republican administration, but it’s made taller by the fact that Trump’s political career has been littered with racist commentary and entanglements. From his now-retracted claim that Obama wasn’t born stateside to his marshalling of white power militias on January 6, this nation’s 45th president has given Black voters plenty of reason for pause. Add to that Oz’s own decision to take the racially charged law-and-order tack in his criticisms of Fetterman, and it’s not surprising that his numbers have dropped to 8 percent among Black voters in Suffolk’s November poll.
Keep in mind that while reaching outside his coalition, Dr. Oz has to be wary of putting off Republicans, too. It’s their decision to warm to him that has drawn Oz level with Fetterman to begin with, and Republicans need most of their core voters in the rural parts of the state to stay onside—even as Dr. Oz tries to patch together a coalition in the city and the suburbs.
Fetterman’s coalition, historically grounded as it may be, poses a challenge of its own: White working-class voters have been drifting farther afield of Democrats’ coalition with each passing year. “No county left behind” might well have worked during the days of Obama, but a dearth of jobs, an opioid crisis, and… let’s be diplomatic about this… anxieties about a changing country sent working-class whites into Trump’s coalition in 2016 and 2020.
In an October interview, former President Obama himself said that Fetterman’s authenticity could be key to reversing that trend. The former president described feeling as “if that guy walked into a diner, sat down and you started just talking about whatever issues came to mind,” voters would see an honest, open-minded down-to-earth candidate, with “a point of view that was informed by his real-life experiences.”
But the trend that those numbers represent isn’t confined to Pennsylvania. Across the country, Democrats are having a harder and harder time winning voters in rural areas to their side. In the 2018 midterms, Sens. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Claire McCaskill of Missouri both lost their jobs in a wave year for Democrats, and Alabama Democrat Doug Jones came a cropper in 2020. Biden’s playbook in 2020, and Hillary Clinton’s in 2016, ran through Philadelphia and its suburbs, with the rest of the state providing only peripheral support to supplement their hauls in the Delaware Valley.
The candidates themselves may have already given up on their crusade against our modern political re-alignment. Fetterman, Obama, and President Biden elected to rally supporters right here in Philly on Saturday night, while Dr. Oz hightailed it to Latrobe to stand beside Trump and far-right gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano. Even Oprah Winfrey, who launched and scaffolded Dr. Oz’s career for the first eight years of his daytime talk show, endorsed Fetterman over the weekend, albeit without inveighing against Oz.
But the headlines of this race—and what it means for modern politics—have basically already been written. For Fetterman, a win would prove that Obama’s style is not dead, that Democrats can still appeal to white working-class voters in places like Pennsylvania. A win for Dr. Oz would suggest an alternative: That nonwhite voters in cities and suburbs are willing to lend an ear to the Republican party, provided those Republicans aren’t too dramatic in their, shall we say, denunciations of demographic reality. It wouldn’t be the first time someone has claimed to have fixed the GOP’s post-Trump playbook (Glenn Youngkin has entered the chat), but it might be the first time that Republicans were telling the truth about it.
Pennsylvania, in some ways, is far too important in politics for the results there to be anything less than instructive. But on a Tuesday night that Democrats expect to be a bumpy ride, in a state where Republicans are struggling to close the deal, the Keystone State might provide even more insight than is typically the case.
