This Pennsylvania Senate race is bad news for Donald Trump no matter how you spin it

| 4:41 pm EDT May 18, 2022
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No matter how many times the media and pundit class keeps making this claim, Kathy Barnette is not why the Pennsylvania race is so close. Mehmet Oz was only two points ahead of McCormick in the polls before Barnette’s surge. You can look at the numbers and see that Barnette’s late surge mostly pulled votes from several fading also-ran candidates, and didn’t really impact Oz vs McCormack in the end.

Oz is currently about 0.2 points ahead of McCormick, within the stated margin of error of the two points he was expected to defeat McCormick by. Oz struggled this entire race, never had more than a negligible lead, and now it’s predictably going down to the wire. No surprise here.

But if the media and pundit class admits that Barnette had no impact on the outcome, and that Oz was always within a hair of losing, it’ll then have to admit that Trump’s endorsement of Oz didn’t boost his numbers one bit, and that Trump is now irrelevant in these matters.

And if the media admits that Trump has become so non-influential that his endorsements are now good for zero additional votes – even among Republican voters – it’ll also have to admit that “Trump 2024” isn’t really a thing. Then how will it spend the next year ginning up ratings?

So as long as Oz and McCormick are duking it out, we’ll keep hearing about how Barnette is supposedly the reason Oz is struggling. And if Oz does end up narrowly winning the primary over McCormick, we’ll then hear about how it’s supposedly proof that Trump’s endorsements are still everything – even though Trump’s endorsement gave Oz a zero point bump in the polls.