Trump-backed Dr Oz underwater with his own voters in new Fox News poll of Pennsylvania

Trump-endorsed candidate faces credibility questions

More bad news for Dr Mehmet Oz, the Trump-endorsed GOP Senate candidate in Pennsylvania.

The celebrity TV doc already faced questions about his Yinzer bona fides before posting an embarrassing video last weekend filmed in a grocery story in which he tried to point out the painful toll of inflation, succeeding only in attracting mockery with his mispronunciation of the market’s name and apparent unfamiliarity with the task of shopping for groceries.

Now a new Fox News poll is out showing (as many other polls have) that Dr Oz trails his Democratic opponent, Lieutenant Gov John Fetterman, by a significant margin. What’s unique about this poll, however, is the deficit it shows the Republican nominee faces among even his own supporters.

Asked about their enthusiasm for voting in favour of their selected candidate in November, just over two thirds of Mr Fetterman’s supporters say they are enthusiastic about their party’s nominee. Not perfect, but along the lines of what would be expected for a candidate who faced challengers in his party’s primary for the nomination.

For Dr Oz, however, there’s a problem. Just 35 per cent of his supporters told Fox pollsters that they “enthusiastically” support the TV doc for office. Nearly half, 45 per cent, of his own voters said they had “some reservations” about supporting him in November and nearly 20 per cent said they were only voting for him out of dislike for Mr Fetterman.

Overall, the lieutenant governor leads his GOP opponent in the poll by 11 points, 47 to 36. That same percentage is undecided.

These numbers strongly suggest that Mr Fetterman has not hit his ceiling for support in Pennsylvania’s key Senate race this fall, and could end up defeating the Trump-backed Oz by a serious margin. Such a defeat for Dr Oz would be an embarrassing blow to Donald Trump’s image as a GOP kingmaker and will embolden his enemies, private and public, among the GOP Senate caucus.

Republicans across the country, including Trump arch-enemy Mitch McConnell, have begun sounding alarm bells over their party’s chances of taking the US Senate in November and have laid blame for their fears squarely on the shoulders of Donald Trump and the Trumpist wing of the GOP. “Candidate quality” has become a top concern cited by GOP sources as they deal with the flagging campaigns of not only Dr Oz but also Herschel Walker in Georgia and JD Vance in Ohio.

Fox News’s poll surveyed 908 Pennsylvanians registered to vote in 2022 between 22-26 July. The survey’s margin of error is 3 percentage points for the general sample, 4.5 percentage points for Fetterman supporters, and 5.5 percentage points for Oz fans.