If Polls Are Accurate, Tuesday's Pennsylvania Senate Primary Promises to Be a Barn Burner

As Rod Stewart sang, “Tonight’s the Night!” In terms of some highly charged primary races, it definitely will be.

Idaho, Kentucky, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina are the States voting on Tuesday. North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn, who skirted a number of political hits, as well as an attempt to wipe him off the ballot, tweeted his final bid to his constituents:

Western North Carolina, today is the day.

Today’s the day we send a message to the Establishment and the Swamp: you have no power over the people.

America first will win.

I ask for your vote today. Polls are open now!

I’ve only just begun to fight for you.

🇺🇸

— Madison Cawthorn (@CawthornforNC) May 17, 2022

The same people that don’t think Disney is doing any sexual grooming of children, and that drag queen story hour is perfectly normal, are outraged by videos of Cawthorn fooling around in a sexual way with his cousin.

Make it stop.

We’ll see if Cawthorn’s MAGA creds will outlast the attacks from within the Republican Party and from the Left.

One of young Cawthorn’s latest bills submitted is to have abortion deaths included in CDC infant mortality deaths.

Today, I introduced legislation requiring the CDC to include aborted children in death rate statistics.

This preventable cause of death (abortions) would rank in the top 5 causes of death if they were included in calculations.https://t.co/6KwlrhoaX6

— Rep. Madison Cawthorn (@RepCawthorn) May 12, 2022

And speaking of Abortion, Ron Faucheux over at Lunchtime Politics had some interesting stats to the poll question,

Which comes closest to your view on abortion—abortion should always be legal, should be legal most of the time, should be made illegal except in cases of rape, incest and to save the mother’s life, or abortion should be made illegal without any exceptions?

Always legal: 37%
Legal most of the time: 23%
Illegal, except in cases of rape, incest and to save the mother’s life: 32%
Illegal without exceptions: 5%

Really, when you combine the “Illegal” totals, it comes to a tie with “Always Legal.” But then, you have the “Legal most of the time” at 23 percent, so the numbers weight toward support for keeping abortion.

According to a January 2022 Gallup survey:

Americans grew more dissatisfied with the strictness of abortion laws in the nation during the Trump presidency, likely reflecting concerns about the increasingly conservative Supreme Court as well as a host of abortion restrictions that were adopted at the state level in those years. After a dip in concern in 2021, that discontent has surged again in 2022.

Heightened alarm about the security of reproductive rights could help the Democratic Party in upcoming elections if it spurs their supporters to vote, or if the issue influences more independents than usual to support the Democratic candidate.

The problem with this poll? The question is based on a faulty premise. If Roe v. Wade is overturned, it will not make abortion illegal, so the responses would probably reflect differently if the question had been crafted in terms of restrictive or less restrictive, rather than legal or illegal. The decision on what to do with abortion will revert back to the States, and those states can choose to a) keep the abortion laws they have in place; b) make the laws less restrictive; c) make them more restrictive; or, d) remove them altogether.

The pro-life organization Live Action has also called out this flawed polling. When people are given accurate information and that information is crafted into the poll questions, the numbers skew differently:

But polling has consistently shown that Americans largely support such restrictions on abortion when they are educated about what they entail.

In the April 14 piece for the Post, writer Amber Phillips argues that most Americans support abortion access, based on a 2021 Washington Post-ABC News poll asking U.S. adults, “Do you think the Supreme Court should uphold Roe v. Wade or overturn it?” That poll appears to show that most Americans want Roe v. Wade to be upheld (60%), but it failed to explain what it would mean for Roe v. Wade to be upheld versus overturned.

Most Americans don’t realize that Roe v. Wade doesn’t simply “uphold a woman’s right to abortion up until about 24 weeks of pregnancy” as Phillips claims, but that, along with its sister case Doe v. Bolton, it allows abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, for any reason — including financial reasons. Overturning it wouldn’t outlaw abortion but would allow states to make their own abortion laws. A previous analysis showed that when poll respondents are asked about Roe v. Wade, the majority don’t even understand what Roe v. Wade actually allows regarding abortion. Therefore, asking the public whether they support a court case they don’t even understand accomplishes little.

So, much of the current polling is tainted by the noise and deceptive crafting of language by the pro-abortion Left, which ultimately is part of their plan.

Now back to the primary election night stakes: the race that has everyone chomping at the bit is for the Pennsylvania Senate. As far as I am concerned, it’s an actual horse race, where primaries usually tend to be formalities. That will no doubt be the case on the Democrat side, where Lt. Gov. John Fetterman is having some health issues.

John Fetterman, Pennsylvania's lieutenant governor and the frontrunner in the Democratic primary for a U.S. Senate seat, will have surgery to implant a pacemaker, his campaign said Tuesday afternoon. https://t.co/vbca57eYG3

— NBC10 Philadelphia (@NBCPhiladelphia) May 17, 2022

So, Fetterman will be anointed for the mere fact that he survived. As usual, the Democrat bar remains impressively low. However, on the Republican side, you have a grassroots candidate who is giving the establishment nags a run for their money—and there’s been A LOT of money burned.

The Pennsylvania Senate Republican primary on Tuesday could be one of the most expensive races in the 2022 election cycle, with candidates and political action committees spending more than $55 million on television and radio ads, according to ad tracker Medium Buying.

Data shows that the campaigns of former Bridgewater Associates CEO Dave McCormick and veteran physician Dr. Mehmet Oz spent more than $20 million, combined, on attack ads and other advertising. Honor Pennsylvania, a super PAC backing McCormick, has spent just over $17 million for its candidate, while the pro-Oz American Leadership Action PAC has invested over $3 million in the race. Oz, McCormick and their allied super PACs have combined to raise over $50 million, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

But shock and awe may win the night. Kathy Barnette could be the one that does more with less:

Despite all that money, Kathy Barnette, a conservative political commentator running for the same Senate seat, has surged in recent polls to nearly tie Oz and McCormick. All three are among the candidates vying for Pennsylvania’s open Senate seat that is being vacated by retiring Republican Sen. Pat Toomey.

The article references a Fox Poll that shows Barnette neck-and-neck with Dr. Mehmet Oz. Lunchtime Politics sampled all the available polls, and came to similar conclusions:

PENNSYLVANIA
REPUBLICAN PRIMARY
Suequehanna/ Trafalgar (R)/ Emerson = Average
Mehmet Oz: 28%/ 29%/ 32% = 29.7
Kathy Barnette: 27%/ 27%/ 27% = 27
David McCormick: 11%/ 22%/ 26% =19.7

RON’S COMMENT: The Trafalgar (R) poll was taken May 14-16, the Susquehanna poll was taken May 12-15 and the Emerson poll, which we reported yesterday, was conducted May 14-15.

This new Susquehanna poll shows McCormick collapsing, while Oz and Barnette are nearly tied. It also shows Barnette beating Oz 45-33 among voters who made up their minds “in the last few days,” which, if accurate, would give her a chance to overtake the TV doctor’s small polling lead. On the other hand, it can be argued that Barnette has a ceiling of about 27% that she won’t rise above. We’ll see this evening what’s what.
The Trafalgar (R) poll also shows a close contest between Oz and Barnette, but it has McCormick doing much better (22%) than the Susquehanna poll (11%). The Emerson poll has McCormick still in the hunt with 26%.