HARRISBURG (TNS) — Pennsylvania voters will get to see the one and only U.S. Senate debate Tuesday night when Democrat John Fetterman and Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz square off in a Harrisburg TV studio.
In fact, it will be the only debate in either statewide race this year. Democratic governor candidate Josh Shapiro, the state’s attorney general, and Republican candidate Doug Mastriano, a state senator, failed to reach mutually agreeable terms on a debate format.
The hourlong Senate debate held at WHTM/ABC27 will be broadcast live at 8 p.m. by the following TV stations and websites:
WJET/YourErie.com
Other websites streaming the debate will include: Mytwintiers.com, Pix11.com, Wivb.com and dcnewsnow.com
Debate moderators will be ABC27 News anchor Dennis Owens and WPXI anchor Lisa Sylvester.
The Senate race between Oz and Fetterman, the state’s lieutenant governor, is considered critical for Democrats if they are to hold their tenuous grip on the chamber or hope to expand their majority.
Currently, the Senate is split 50/50 with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as the tiebreaker for Democrats.
Fetterman declined numerous other debate invitations, fueling attacks from Republicans and the Oz campaign that Fetterman is hiding from voters.
“John Fetterman must think this is a game, dodging serious debates,” Oz campaign spokesperson Brittany Yanick said in a statement last week, “but John Fetterman can’t play the people of Pennsylvania, and he can’t hide his radical views forever.”
Oz has also complained that Tuesday’s debate will come weeks after voters began casting mail-in ballots.
“This has never really been about debates for Dr. Oz,” Fetterman said in a Sept. 7 statement. “This whole thing has been about Dr. Oz and his team mocking me for having a stroke because they’ve got nothing else.”
Fetterman’s campaign has said that in 2020, when the pandemic spurred huge mail-in voting numbers, that 83 percent of ballots were still cast in the two weeks leading up to Election Day, and that Pennsylvania U.S. Senate debates have traditionally been held in mid- to late-October.
“There is literally zero precedent in modern times for having U.S. Senate debates in Pennsylvania in early September. That was never going to happen,” Fetterman said in that September statement.
Oz’s campaign has repeatedly questioned why Fetterman declined seven other debates that Oz agreed to, suggesting that the Democrat doesn’t want to defend his record or make verbal stumbles as he continues to recuperate from a May 13 stroke.
Fetterman, however, has been open about his auditory processing issues while he recovers and his subsequent need to use closed captioning in interviews since July, as well as in Tuesday’s debate.
The Oz campaign sought an additional 30 minutes in the debate to accommodate for the down time it says will result from closed captioning, but the Fetterman camp refused to extend it beyond an hour.
