PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The abortion issue has suddenly taken over primary races after the leaked opinion from Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito about Roe v. Wade. Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senate primary is no exception, even though the candidates are united in support of abortion rights.
Pennsylvania Democrats are hoping to flip the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Republican Pat Toomey, who is not running for re-election.
Four candidates are running, but one of them has an outsized lead. The leaked opinion has put new emphasis on the issue of electability.
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On abortion and electability
Lt. Governor John Fetterman issued a statement saying “the right to abortion is sacred,” and Democrats must act quickly to get rid of the filibuster and codify that right into law.
Fetterman said he is the only candidate in the race who has already won statewide He attempted to turn Congressman Conor Lamb’s possible cross-over appeal into a liability by aligning Lamb with Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia whose tendency to side with Republicans has stymied bills such as Build Back Better and the Women’s Health Protection Act.
"Joe Manchin is Conor’s mentor, and he did host a fundraiser for Conor and he just said recently that he would make a heck of a senator. That’s an endorsement," said Fetterman to Lamb in a recent debate.
"My fear is that I think one Joe Manchin is enough in this race, and his endorsement of you I found troubling."
On public safety
Fetterman boasted of his experience with law enforcement.
“I’m the only Democrat or Republican that’s actually been in charge of a police department — as mayor of Braddock — and I fought to increase their wages. I fought to shore up their benefits and I fought to increase budgets every year,” he said.
Fetterman said he brought down crime in Braddock with community policing, where police cultivate stronger relationships with citizens.
All of the candidates support an assault weapons ban; Fetterman ties it to a need to eliminate the filibuster, so a ban and background check bills could get through the Senate.
On fracking and environmental issues
Pennsylvania is the nation’s third-largest producer of energy from fossil fuels, an industry that creates an estimated 64,000 jobs in the state. The commonwealth is also subject to extreme flooding, agricultural losses and other impacts of climate change. So the Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate have to walk a fine line on an issue of major importance to their party: A clean energy future.
Congressman Conor Lamb has accused the frontrunner in the race, Fetterman, of flip-flopping on the issue. It’s true that when Fetterman first ran for Senate in 2016, he favored a fracking moratorium.
Now, his position is more nuanced, someday reaching the point of a phaseout.
“While we continue to produce natural gas, we need to make a common sense transition to clean, green new economy and we can’t turn our backs on the workers and those communities and just say ‘learn how to cope,’” Fetterman said. “It’s a commitment that’s going to take decades and not a short two-to-five-year kind of window.”
Get to know the candidate
Fetterman may be so far out in front because he started running for Toomey’s seat six years ago, even as he officially announced the run 14 months ago.
In 2016, he was then the mayor of Braddock, a down-at-heel town in Allegheny County, and not quite like anything Pennsylvania politics had ever seen: 6 foot 8 inches, bald, bearded, tattooed, with a master’s degree from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Establishment Democrats didn’t seem to know what to do with him. They worked to elect Katie McGinty in the three-way primary, but Fetterman stayed in the race — despite being outspent 15 to 1 — and won 19% of the vote.
That got former Gov. Ed Rendell’s attention.
“I thought, ’I’ve got to meet this guy. He’s obviously somebody who has a lot of ability to attract voters,” Rendell recalls. “He clearly was going to do something in the future.”
Rendell encouraged Fetterman, now 52, to run for Lt. Governor, even though the incumbent was running for re-election.
At a recent debate, Fetterman noted he’s the only candidate in the primary to be elected statewide.
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“I’m the only Pennsylvanian in history to unseat an incumbent lieutenant governor,” he said, “and when I joined Gov. Wolf on the ticket in 2018, we got more votes than any other ticket in the history of Pennsylvania.”
Now, Fetterman is running from a position of strength, with twice as much money as any other candidate and a 24-point lead in the latest Franklin & Marshall poll.
That has made him a target. He is either a socialist, as a PAC supporting one of his opponents has called him, or a gun-toting vigilante.
He has been asked repeatedly about an incident when he was mayor of Braddock in 2013 in which, wielding a shotgun, he chased down an unarmed jogger.
“I heard a burst of gunfire, with my young son, I made a split-second decision to call 911, get my son to safety and intercept an individual, the only individual out running from where the gunfire came, and intercept him until our first responders arrived, as the chief law enforcement officer in Braddock and as the mayor,” he said.
Fetterman’s Brazilian-born wife Giselle jokes she is the brains of the operation and he is just the pretty face. They have three children.
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On abortion and electability
Allegheny County Congressman Conor Lamb’s statement emphasized his “100% pro-choice voting record.” He added that he maintained that record “while winning in GOP districts,” neatly turning the statement back around to his preferred issue: electability.
Lamb tries to make the case that, despite trailing Fetterman by 22 points in last week’s poll by Monmouth University, he has the best chance of winning against a Republican in the fall.
"John’s record and his history, the choices he has made, place him too far to the extreme to win at the statewide level in Pennsylvania," Lamb said.
"When he was running around the state in his gym shorts, making marijuana the number one issue and campaigning with Bernie Sanders, he lost a lot of swing voters already."
On public safety
Lamb, a former prosecutor, believes there needs to be more emphasis on gun trafficking.
“Almost all the serious shootings that you read about, especially in our inner cities, are committed by someone who was not legally entitled to possess that firearm,” he said.
All of the candidates support an assault weapons ban. Lamb also supports further curbs on gun possession. He voted for universal background checks and to close background check loopholes, but he owns a gun himself and said he wants to “bridge the divide” on gun laws.
On fracking and environmental issues
Lamb got a 100% score from the League of Conservation Voters last year, indicating his record on the environment is impeccable. Yet he holds the most conservative position in the race on the key climate issue in the state — fracking for natural gas.
“We need to be thinking about our energy policy like a stool supported by three legs,” Lamb said.
“One of them is [that] we need to emit less carbon to deal with climate change. Another is [how] people need to be able to afford it, average people, at a time when their costs are going up in every other category, and the third is [that] we need to be creating jobs in our state, not taking them away. Fracking allows us to do all three of those things.”
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Get to know the candidate
Lamb trails Fetterman in the polls, but he has shown he can do something that many Democrats believe is essential to winning in November: get Republican votes.
An ex-Marine and former federal prosecutor, Lamb was elected twice in Republican districts. He said in a debate last week that he believes he can do it statewide.
“What Democrats in Pennsylvania can take away about me is that I have what it takes to withstand the pressure of these campaigns, the attacks. There’s nothing knew they’re going to learn about me,” he said.
“I’m the only person on this stage who has gone into Republican territory and beaten a Republican head-to-head when it counts.”
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Lamb is the establishment candidate. The state party is officially neutral because no candidate got two-thirds of the endorsement vote, but Lamb got the most votes by a wide margin and he received the Philadelphia City Committee vote.
Lamb, 37, has a political action committee, Penn Progress, which is attempting to make up the fundraising gap between Lamb and Fetterman. Its appeal to donors was written by stridently centrist Democratic strategist James Carville.
As for his lagging poll numbers, Lamb says he has time to turn that around.
“All I’m asking is [to] give me a chance. I just want people to get to know me,” he said.
Lamb lives in Mt. Lebanon with his wife Hayley and their son.
On abortion and electability
Electability as an issue works against North Philadelphia-based state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, who is polling at 4% among Democrats.
Kenyatta argued in a recent interview that electability in November will be about turnout, and he sees himself as the best candidate to energize the base.
"These are the voters that have helped Democrats win tough elections in Pennsylvania, and yet they’ve continued to not be listened to," Kenyatta said.
"If we’re going to win these voters, it’s going to take somebody who’s not just asking for their vote, it’s someone who understands their life. I’m the only person in this race who truly understands what working people are terrified about every single day."
Kenyatta boasts he’s the only one of the top three candidates who endorses expanding the number of judges on the U.S. Supreme Court, a position that has become more meaningful now that the court is apparently poised to overturn Roe v. Wade.
On public safety
Kenyatta said in a recent interview that he finds the police funding issue to be a false choice.
“I do reject this idea that in saying that we don’t want to defund the police, that we also can’t have police reform,” he said.
Kenyatta believes different policing — embedding counselors in 911 rooms, for instance — could improve public safety.
All of the candidates support an assault weapons ban; Kenyatta said if he were elected, the issue would be his top priority. “We need to treat this as the emergency that it is.”
On fracking and environmental issues
Kenyatta is alone among the four candidates in calling for a ban on fracking.
“I want us to remain an energy leader. That is part of who we are,” Kenyatta said. “But we have to own the future of this industry and not ignore the very real impacts of extractive industries.”
His stance would lead to one more yes vote, should Senator Bernie Sanders re-introduce a fracking ban bill. The last one in 2020 never got a committee hearing.
Get to know the candidate
Kenyatta is running an underdog campaign, but he’s proud of what he’s accomplished since announcing his candidacy.
Kenyatta, 31, has raised almost $2 million, won a big union endorsement from SEIU, and believes he has brought the concerns of working people to the agenda. He has highlighted his background as a working-class kid from North Philadelphia who got his first job at 12 and buried both his parents by 27, he believes, because they lacked a health care safety net.
What riles Kenyatta most is the conventional wisdom about why he’s an underdog.
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“There were so many people who said Pennsylvania is just not ready for a Black gay guy from North Philadelphia. He can just never, never win,” Kenyatta said.
“I find that deeply offensive and not even to me. I find it offensive to people who I’ve met all across Pennsylvania, in big cities and small towns who do not care what I look like, how I worship or who I love. They want to know what I’m going to do for them,” he told KYW Newsradio.
Kenyatta is married to Dr. Matthew Miller.
On electability
Electability also works against Jenkintown Borough Councilmember Alexandria Khalil, who doesn’t register in the polls. Khalil is untroubled by her standing, as she acknowledges hers is a quixotic campaign.
On public safety
“Defund the police” went from a rallying cry to a weapon that Republicans used against Democrats to paint them as soft on crime — a tactic President Joe Biden tried to shut down in his State of the Union address.
Democrats in Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race are taking their lead from Biden.
“I do not support defunding the police,” said Alex Khalil at a recent debate. “I want to be very clear about that.”
All of the candidates support an assault weapons ban.
On fracking and environmental issues
Khalil hews a similar line to Fetterman on those issues.
“We need energy to manufacture,” she said. “If you get rid of fracking, you get rid of oil, how are we going to manufacture and keep jobs in Pennsylvania?”
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Get to know the candidate
Khalil is running a low-key campaign. She is not doing the kind of fundraising and campaigning the other candidates are, but she said she is staying in the race to give ordinary people hope.
She finds her interactions with voters inspirational.
“You hear people. It’s not about them. Everyone is asking for help for the community, That’s why I’m doing this,” she said in a recent interview.
“As much as everyone wants to talk about how much money candidates have and endorsements, it means nothing if you’re not willing to work with communities and come up with solutions that can make positive change. And I’ve done that here in Jenkintown.”
Khalil also owns a small business.