Republican Mehmet Oz holds a narrow lead over Democrat John Fetterman in Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race, according to a post-debate poll.
The poll from Wick Insights shows that 47.6 percent of likely voters respondents are behind Oz, while 45.9 percent back Fetterman. Just 2.9 percent of participants are undecided, and 3.6 percent say they intend to vote for someone else.
The poll was conducted after the debate between the candidates, where Fetterman used a closed captioning system to help with his post-stroke auditory processing issues. Fetterman struggled with his words throughout the debate.
In a poll from Wick Insights that was released last week, Oz held a four-point lead over Fetterman. However, the polling outfit reported to discover that unvaccinated individuals were severely underrepresented throughout the polling industry while conducting that poll, and after-the-fact statistical adjustments were made for accuracy:
In mid-October, we went into the field not knowing that boosted individuals were answering polls at much higher rates than vaxxed-not-boosted or not-vaxxed. When we recognized this imbalance, we made adjustments and then relied on weighting to correct the rest. Unfortunately, we do not know the exact percentage of likely voters that are boosted, so we just set it to 40% in each state. We may move that number up slightly in our next round and customize it in each state, but whatever we set will be at least 15 points lower than what we think is actually being collected right now by probability pollsters. So at the end of the day, compared to the other polls out there I would give this research top marks, but compared to our next round, in which we will design the polling methodology with this knowledge, I would give it a C+. Think of this article more as evidence proving that there is a selection bias that is impacting polling rather than a perfect example of how to treat that bias.
This current poll also analyzed the governor’s race, finding that Democrat Attorney General Josh Shapiro leads Republican State Sen. Doug Mastriano. Shapiro garners 49.2 percent of the likely voter respondents’ support, while Matraino takes 43.3 percent.
The poll sampled 1,000 likely voters from October 26-27 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.