PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania — With two separate polls showing quite similar trends in the Republican Senate primary in Pennsylvania, it looks like the curtain is being pulled away from the famous candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz.
A brand new poll obtained by the Washington Examiner, conducted by Honor Pennsylvania — the Super PAC supporting the campaign of businessman David McCormick — shows that McCormick’s lead in the race has remained steady since February. In addition to McCormick and Oz, the race features political commentator Kathy Barnett, former Ambassador Carla Sands, and real estate developer Jeff Bartos, each of whom has circled around or slightly below the 10% polling mark.
But, by contrast, the most noticeable shift is that the early front-runner in the race, Dr. Oz, has seen his numbers steadily decline by 15 percentage points since January, just before McCormick officially entered the race.
The poll — conducted by Gene Ulm of Public Opinion Strategies, the pollster for Honor Pennsylvania — was in the field from March 29-April 3 and has a margin of error of +/- 4 percentage points. As its top-line numbers are so similar to an independent Fox News poll released March 8, its more detailed breakdown of the race is likely an accurate assessment of the state of play.
The poll shows that McCormick leads among the key blocs of voters who will decide the election: He has a 9-point lead among base Republicans, an 8-point lead among very conservative voters, and a 6-point advantage among those who identify more with former President Donald Trump than they do with the Republican Party.
The poll also showed that Oz’s image has collapsed from 49% favorable / 24% unfavorable in January to 37% favorable and 49% unfavorable now.
Mark Harris, a strategist with Honor Pennsylvania, said what stood out to him most in the poll was the collapse of Oz’s image: “He has a 49% unfavorable image, and only 17% of those polled think he’s a conservative,” said Harris.
“That is a very bad place to be in a GOP primary,” Harris added.
The Public Opinion Strategies numbers are almost completely identical to the campaign’s internal polling numbers conducted by McLaughlin and Associates and shared with the Washington Examiner.
Born in the town of Washington, Pennsylvania, just outside of Pittsburgh, McCormick’s family moved to Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, when he was 7 years old because his father took a job at Bloomsburg College (now the Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania).
After receiving an appointment to West Point Academy, McCormick went to the 82nd Ranger School and the Gulf War. He then earned a doctorate from Princeton, returned to western Pennsylvania to helm an online auction company, was President George W. Bush’s undersecretary of the Treasury for international affairs, and then returned to the private sector and worked his way up to CEO of the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates in Connecticut from 2020 to 2021.
He launched his campaign in January of this year and by the end of February had inched ahead of Oz in the polls.
On the Democrat side, a new Emerson College poll showed Lt. Gov. John Fetterman earning 33.4% of support from Democratic primary voters, with Rep. Conor Lamb and state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta earning 10% and 7.6% support, respectively.
That survey, conducted March 26-28 with a margin of error of +/- 3 percentage points, showed 37.3% of those surveyed were undecided in who they would vote for in the May 17 primary.
The numbers are very similar to a poll conducted by Penn Progress, a group supporting Conor Lamb that warned donors Lamb was trailing Fetterman by nearly 30 percentage points.
Pennsylvania primary elections are closed: Only registered Republicans can vote for the Republican candidates, and registered Democrats can only vote for the Democratic candidates on the ballot.
