Two new polls on Pennsylvania’s elections for governor and U.S. Senate reflect familiar returns – the Democratic hopefuls are leading their Republican opponents, in one survey by double digits.
A Franklin & Marshall College poll of 522 registered voters conducted Aug. 15 through Monday shows Democrat Attorney General Josh Shapiro leading Republican state Sen. Doug Mastriano in the gubernatorial race 44% to 33%, with 19% undecided.
The same poll showed Democrat Lt. Gov. John Fetterman ahead of Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz in the Senate race by a margin of 43% to 30%, with 20% undecided.
The poll had a 5.3% sample error. Several third-party candidates garnered slight support in each survey, and 1% of respondents said they didn’t intend to vote.
Mastriano and Oz garnered more support in a survey of 1,034 likely voters conducted Monday and Tuesday by Emerson College Polling. Both candidates, however, still found themselves trailing – Mastriano down 47-44% to Shapiro; Oz trailing Fetterman 48-44%. The margin of error of that poll was 3%.
That’s been the trend all summer. PoliticsPA, an online news site expressly focused on politics in the commonwealth, shows that Shapiro and Fetterman led in each of 11 different polls dating to mid-June.
In those polls, the Democrats both led by double digits five separate times.
“I still think that this is probably going to get closer as we get closer to November,” said Daniel Mallinson, assistant professor of public policy and administration at Penn State Harrisburg.
Mastriano has to broaden his support among the general electorate and also within his own party, Mallinson said. The same mostly goes for Oz, Mallinson said, whose persona as the host of “The Dr. Oz Show” may be familiar, but whose political positions beyond supporting former President Donald Trump are much less so.
Both must overcome the familiarity voters have with Shapiro and Fetterman, as each is experienced in campaigning, and winning, statewide elections.
In Franklin & Marshall’s poll, the Republicans surveyed were less enthusiastic about supporting their own candidates than Democrats.
Across all respondents, the Democrats led when it came to understanding Pennsylvanians’ concerns, along with alignment on social issues such as abortion and gay marriage, and in both polls, Oz and Mastriano were viewed less favorably than their opponents.
“While Mastriano’s unfavorables are not as intense as Oz’s unfavorables, he faces the upward challenge of running against Shapiro, the most popular candidate on the ballot who also holds statewide office,” Spencer Kimball, executive director of Emerson College Polling, said in his organization’s online summary.
The economy overwhelmingly led respondents’ concerns in the Emerson College poll. It trailed only government and politicians in the Franklin & Marshall poll, and Shapiro and Fetterman each polled better than their Republican opponents with respect to improving respondents’ economic situation.
Berwood Yost, who oversees political polling conducted at Franklin & Marshall College, said that between the dissatisfaction expressed in polls with respect to Democrat Joe Biden’s performance as U.S. president and a continued soured position by poll respondents on their own personal finances, the general environment favors Republicans at the moment, if slightly.
“Then you have the campaigns themselves,” Yost said. “To this point, it seems the Republican campaigns haven’t done a good job defining their opponents or in defining themselves.”
The Franklin & Marshall poll showed a majority of respondents oppose the constitutional amendment backed by Republicans in Pennsylvania’s General Assembly that seeks to establish that there is no right to abortion or to public funding…
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