Abortion vs. Crime in Pennsylvania’s Senate Election Nail-Biter

John Fetterman

took three months off campaigning after his stroke in May, but he’s labored to make up for lost time with frequent rallies drawing respectable crowds. At a sunny outdoor event in this Philadelphia suburb Sunday, he wasn’t shy about his illness. He brought it up so often that the crowd’s attitude shifted from earnest goodwill to mild discomfort. His 1,200 supporters laughed feebly when he joked that he’d “never heard of crudités” and said when he first heard the word—which his opponent,

Mehmet Oz,

had used during a supermarket visit—“I thought it was a hallucination because of the stroke.”

The depth of his illness was displayed widely Tuesday in his first televised interview since the stroke, with NBC. At home in Braddock, he relied on a monitor and transcription software to understand the questions. Notably, a lot of his answers were the same prepared lines he gave at the Bristol rally. “By January, I’m going to be, you know, much better. And Dr. Oz is still going to be a fraud,” he said on both occasions. All politicians reuse lines, but Mr. Fetterman’s script seems shorter than most.

At the rally, the candidate’s struggles faded from focus only when he emphasized the all-or-nothing stakes of his race. “Send me to D.C. to be that 51st vote!” he said, drawing the loudest applause of the day. “Send me there to eliminate the filibuster!” He rattled off a list of Democratic priorities, from abortion to the minimum wage and union protections. He wanted voters to know his brain is clear enough to know “yea” from “nay.”

“Fetterman is authentic, Oz is inauthentic,” said

Jill Zipin,

contrasting the hoodie-wearing former small-town mayor with his polished opponent, a retired surgeon and TV host. “Pennsylvania is a place where being authentic is really valued. If you come from Pittsburgh, you might go away, but you go back to Pittsburgh. If you’re from Philly, you go back to Philly. You know the difference between Wawa and Sheetz.”

But like much of this crowd in Bristol, her enthusiasm has more to do with the overturning of Roe v. Wade than with the candidate. Ms. Zipin, 58, is a founder of Democratic Jewish Outreach PA. “We believe choice is a religious-freedom issue,” she says. “In Judaism we don’t believe that life begins until the first breath. So the Christian view of abortion takes away my religious freedom.”

As for Mr. Oz, Ms. Zipin echoes the Fetterman campaign’s frequent doubts about whether he really lives in Pennsylvania, and she adds her own doubts about his dual citizenship. “Is he going to vote in New Jersey?” she says, referring to Mr. Oz’s home in that state. “Is he going to vote in Turkey? We don’t know.”

These two issues—the GOP’s preference for abortion restrictions and questions about Mr. Oz’s fitness for the Senate—are probably the biggest reasons the Republican trailed for months in the polls. The end of Roe v. Wade in June boosted Democrats in blue and purple states, and 20% of Pennsylvanians told a recent Muhlenberg poll that abortion is their top priority. By mid-August Mr. Fetterman led by almost 9 points in the RealClearPolitics polling average.

But Mr. Oz has closed the gap from that point. As of Friday he had come within 4 in the RealClearPolitics average, with some polls showing a gap as small as 2.

One key to his comeback has been sidestepping the issues Mr. Fetterman is hammering him on. Naturally he brushes off questions about his residence and citizenship—he’s a constitutionally qualified candidate, and voters will make up their minds about the rest. (He has said he will renounce his Turkish citizenship if elected.)

But Mr. Oz is also vague on abortion. He’s declined to say clearly whether he supports a 15-week ban in Pennsylvania or at the federal level. Asked for a statement on his views, his campaign says he’s pro-life with exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. He says he wants to “make sure that the federal government is not involved in interfering with the state’s decisions.” It’s as much of a dodge as he can make without turning off the pro-life voters he’ll need to turn out in November.

The other key to Mr. Oz’s turnaround is his emphasis on crime. Last year Mr. Fetterman endorsed a state study that recommended allowing merit-based clemency for 1,200 inmates, including second-degree murder convicts. Before the campaign he said repeatedly that Pennsylvania could “reduce our prison population by a third and not make anyone less safe.” Mr. Oz has advertised his opponent’s positions in TV spots with names like “Releasing Felons,” “Releasing Murderers” and “Hurting Our Communities.”

He also emphasized crime more than any other issue when we spoke on Wednesday at Lyndon Diner in Lancaster. Last year, he said, Mr. Fetterman “was asked what’s the one thing he’d fix if he had a magic wand. He said he’d get rid of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Think about that—of all the issues we could address, and that’s the one. It shows how his focus is always on the perpetrators of crime. But what about the victims, and their families?”

He returned to the issue when asked what he’d learned on the campaign trail. “In law enforcement, I’ve heard from a lot of people that they feel disrespected. They say they often get blamed when things go wrong. And because of that, they can’t recruit.” He says he’d vote to increase federal funds for police departments, and last month Pennsylvania’s Fraternal Order of Police endorsed him.

Some patrons at the diner appreciated the support. “I told him I’m a retired police officer,” said

Mark Peifer,

73, who hadn’t known Mr. Oz would be visiting. During breakfast afterward with his wife, Jean, the Lancaster resident criticized Mr. Fetterman’s record as mayor of Braddock from 2006-19. “I know a lot of police officers from that area who say he didn’t really do much or support them at all. He just liked to show up and take credit.”

Mr. Fetterman has addressed attacks by pointing out that the dangerous town had a five-year streak without a murder on his watch. But others in Braddock share the doubts of Mr. Peifer’s police friends. “It seems like he’s very good at creating an image. And that’s what he did,”

Chardaé Jones,

his successor as mayor, told the Harrisburg Patriot-News earlier this month.

Retiring Sen.

Pat Toomey,

a Republican, endorses the strategy of his potential successor. “He’s doing a lot of things that I did,” he says of Mr. Oz. “Security is obviously a big focus for voters, and he’s hammering that issue. Fetterman is literally on camera saying his goal is to let as many people out of prison as possible. So now Oz has forced him to put out ads trying to shift and explain his position.”

Mr. Toomey muses on Pennsylvania’s other big race, for the governorship. That campaign pits Democratic Attorney General

Josh Shapiro

against Republican state Sen.

Doug Mastriano.

Like Mr. Oz, Mr. Mastriano won his nomination thanks to the endorsement of

Donald Trump.

Unlike Mr. Oz, Mr. Mastriano has made Mr. Trump a focus of his campaign and has affirmed his claims of election fraud in 2020.

Mr. Shapiro, for his part, is considerably more moderate than Mr. Fetterman. He favors more money for police, lower corporate taxes and a private-school choice program that passed the Republican-controlled state House with only one Democrat in support. When Mr. Mastriano criticized him for defending Gov.

Tom Wolf’s

Covid restrictions in court, Mr. Shapiro responded by disavowing the policies.

Mr. Mastriano trails by more than 11 points in the RealClearPolitics polling average, yet Mr. Toomey thinks he’ll do little harm to Mr. Oz and may even help: “I think Mastriano is very well defined, and very distinct from Oz in voters’ minds.” If Mr. Mastriano helps energize voters in the state’s conservative southern and western regions, “many of them will vote for Oz.”

A wild card in the Senate race will be Mr. Fetterman’s appeal among working-class whites. Like Mr. Fetterman’s mayoral successor, Mr. Toomey thinks the candidate’s everyman image is a cynical artifice. “Most Pennsylvanians probably think it’s OK if their U.S. senator wears a suit—at least some of the time,” he says. “He probably thinks he can appeal to these antiestablishment, blue-collar guys. But most of those guys have been trending Republican for years.” They’re “conservative in their cultural values,” whereas Mr. Fetterman is “pretty much in lockstep with the AOC wing of the party,” Mr. Toomey says.

Back in Bucks County, where wealthy enclaves border blue-collar towns, an exchange between two men tested Mr. Toomey’s prediction. Waiting for a train after attending the Fetterman rally in Bristol, one man said he thinks the Democrat will reanimate a local base of support. “I was born and raised in Bristol,” said

John Brennan,

66. “It used to be strictly Democrat, but now it swings back and forth.” Mr. Brennan, who wore a gray beard, blank green sweatshirt and Philadelphia Eagles cap, worked at the local U.S. Steel plant before it closed in 2020.

He applauded Mr. Fetterman’s support for “a woman’s right to choose” and said the candidate’s approach to crime could appeal to voters in places where criminal records are common. “They try to say he’s letting people out of prison. No he’s not. He wants to release people with drug charges, nonviolent things.”

At this point, another man walked over to interject. “That’s exactly what they’re doing in Chicago too,” said

Wally Riehl,

50. “They’re letting felons out, and that’s what’s bringing crime in.” Mr. Riehl, who wore a camouflage jacket and a shirt from his church, was in Bristol to watch his son practice football. He said he’d been to prison himself, and “it’s up to adults to set the example.” He doesn’t plan to vote in November, but he denounced Mr. Fetterman: “What Democrats don’t understand is that life’s not fair.”

Both men are suburbanites, though neither fits the stereotype that word brings to mind. Conversations like theirs in counties like Bucks are shaping the outcome of a razor-thin race.

Mr. Ukueberuwa is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.