Businessman David McCormick leads in Pennsylvania’s GOP Senate primary while celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz has crashed with GOP voters, a second survey exclusively obtained by Breitbart News shows.
The survey, conducted by Osage Research for the pro-McCormick Super PAC “Honor PA,” shows McCormick is now leading Oz in Pennsylvania’s GOP U.S. Senate primary.
McCormick, at 24 percent, leads Oz’s 21 percent in the poll of 825 likely GOP primary voters conducted from Feb. 13 to Feb. 16. That lead is inside the survey’s margin of error of four percent. No other candidate comes close to either of them, with Carla Sands down at 11 percent, Kathy Barnette at 7 percent, and Jeff Bartos at 6 percent—meaning this race is a two-man race between McCormick and Oz. Twenty-eight percent of respondents were undecided.
A previous survey conducted for the pro-McCormick Super PAC by Osage Research back in late January and early in February, from Jan. 31 to Feb. 2, had shown a very different race. Oz led in that poll with 29 percent—meaning he lost 8 points in just two weeks—and McCormick was down in second at 19 percent. That means McCormick jumped 9 percent in those same two weeks that Oz crashed—a total change in the state of the race.
During this timeframe over the course of the past six weeks, Honor PA has run millions of dollars of television ads in the Keystone state framing Oz as a Hollywood liberal—and those seem to have worked according to this pair of tracking polls. Back in the first one, Oz’s total favorability rating was 48 percent—20 very and 28 somewhat—but he has dropped to just 45 percent total favorability in the latest tracking survey, mostly taking a hit in that very favorable category dropping from 20 to 17 percent.
Interestingly, McCormick’s numbers during the same timeframe shot up big time as he introduced himself to Pennsylvania voters. Overall, in the first survey, McCormick had a 30 percent overall favorability rating and a 12 percent overall unfavorable rating—and he now has a 40 percent favorability rating with just 10 percent viewing him unfavorably.
Also, during this timeframe, the percentage of GOP primary voters who view Oz as either somewhat or very liberal or moderate jumped from 47 percent in the first survey up to 53 percent in the second one. That’s driven mostly by increases in voters who consider Oz either somewhat or very liberal, with very liberal increasing from 8 to 10 percent and somewhat liberal increasing from 12 to 15 percent.
The hits on Oz have been brutal. The New York Post recently revealed a family company Oz and his wife are involved with received the largest fine in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) history—a whopping $95 million in total—for a scheme in which the company hired and rehired illegal alien labor. Revelations of the television doctor’s various left-wing positions on things like transgenderism and the coronavirus pandemic have also stung hard.
“Our polling shows that the more Pennsylvanians learn about Oz’s long history as a pro-abortion, anti-gun Hollywood liberal, the more they’re rejecting his now flailing candidacy,” an adviser to the Honor PA PAC told Breitbart News. “While Oz hoped to pull the wool over the eyes of Pennsylvania conservatives, he has now been exposed as the Hollywood liberal he truly is.”
While Oz has been sinking, McCormick has been amassing a Trump-aligned war machine campaign. He traveled to the U.S. border with Mexico, where the National Border Patrol Council, which was critical in its support for Trump in 2016, endorsed him. McCormick has staffed his campaign with Trump alumni like Hope Hicks, Cliff Sims, and Tony Sayegh, and has won the endorsements of key conservatives such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—all while driving a focus on core Trump populist-nationalist issues, such as hardline stances on immigration and trade, especially with China.
These latest tracking surveys from the pro-McCormick Super PAC Honor PA come on the heels of an internal McCormick campaign poll that showed the same trend as Breitbart News reported exclusively last week, where McCormick has similarly taken the lead and Oz has crashed. It is likely, sources familiar with the matter told Breitbart News, that more polling will keep coming out, showing the same trends in coming days.
The outcome of this fast-approaching May 17 primary will say a lot about the future direction of the GOP and will likely set the tone for whether Republicans have a shot at retaking a majority in the U.S. Senate. McCormick and Oz are vying for the shot to represent the GOP in the general election, and the winner will likely face Pennsylvania’s Lt. Gov. John Fetterman—who has dominated Democrat primary polling—in November.
Whoever wins the general election will replace Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), a longtime GOP senator who is retiring this year. With a 50-50 U.S. Senate right now, Republicans need to flip at least a net one seat nationwide to retake the majority—and holding seats like this battleground state, and in other battleground states such as North Carolina, Wisconsin, and more, is important to make the path to retaking the majority easier.
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