Frontrunner Fetterman targeted by Lamb and Kenyatta in PA US Senate debate

A debate between four Democratic candidates for a U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania saw political jabs mostly aimed at the apparent front runner by two of his closest opponents in the polls.

Conor Lamb tried to keep John Fetterman’s electability among swing voters a focus throughout the 90-minute debate Monday night at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Cumberland County, where the full slate of Democrats touched on key issues just weeks ahead of the May 17 primary.

Fetterman has been the ahead in recent polls, with a Franklin and Marshall College poll reporting potential voters favoring the current lieutenant governor by a rate of about 41%, followed by Lamb at 17% and state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, of Philadelphia, at 4%.

That poll, released on April 14, also estimates nearly a quarter of Democratic voters are undecided and almost half who do have a favored candidate said they could change their minds before the primary.

Candidate and Jenkintown Borough Council member Alex Khalil ranked at 0% in the Franklin and Marshall poll.

“One of my grave concerns about his candidacy is that I don’t believe he can appeal to the types of swing voters that we need to win in November,” Lamb said as he asked Fetterman if he would support Medicare for All.

Lamb, currently Congressman for Pennsylvania’s 17th District, raised the issue during a special “lightning round” section of this week’s debate organized by Spotlight PA in which each candidate was offered a chance to ask an opponent a question directly on stage.

Fetterman said he felt health care was a basic human right and supported “any means” to get to that end, and then pushed back on Lamb over what Fetterman described as an “endorsement” from Democratic West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin.

Manchin has been a target of criticism from his fellow Democrats in Congress, including Lamb, over his opposition to President Joe Biden’s $1.75 trillion Build Back Better coronavirus relief spending bill and other top priorities.

Fetterman claimed Manchin had said recently that Lamb would “make a good senator,” a claim Lamb said was “factually inaccurate” and said he has voted in the House for multiple Biden-backed bills that Manchin has voted against on the Senate floor.

Manchin did previously endorse Lamb during the 2020 election, and Fetterman overall seemed to be painting Lamb as too conservative for Democrats as Lamb painted Fetterman as too progressive to win over centrists in November.

State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, of Philadelphia, used his question to again call on Fetterman to apologize for “chasing down an unarmed Black man with a 20-gauge shotgun, holding it to his chest,” in 2013.

The incident Kenyatta was referring to was on a January afternoon when Fetterman was in his second term as Mayor of Braddock, in Allegheny County.

According to details in a police report obtained by the Philadelphia Inquirer, Fetterman heard what he believed to be gunshots while he was outside with his then 4-year-old son and saw a man who appeared to be running from the area.

Fetterman called 911 and got in his truck to pursue the man, Christopher Miyares, and detained him until officers arrived.

A police search revealed no weapons on Miyares, who said he was simply out jogging and said that Fetterman pointed the shotgun at him, a claim which Fetterman has repeatedly denied.

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“Here’s the problem, powerful men like John are used to having to play by a different set of rules. He wasn’t held accountable because he was the mayor and he’s trying to not be held accountable now,” Kenyatta said.

“That’s just not what happened,” Fetterman responded Monday, adding that his pursuit of Miyares was not racially motivated. “The people that re-elected me know that that’s not what this was about. I never pointed the weapon at anyone and everyone in town understood that protection of the community was always in my heart, and that’s what this was consistently about.”

The political sparring between the three men didn’t overshadow the evening, as the four candidates seemed to share more similarities than differences on several key issues.

Roe v Wade, The Equality Act and soldiers for Ukraine

Early into the debate Monday evening, the four Democrats were asked whether they would support putting American troops on the ground in Ukraine as the country continues fighting a Russian invasion that began earlier this year.

All four of the candidates said they supported sending aid to Ukraine for the time being, adding that they fully support military intervention if Russia pushes into a NATO ally in Europe.

Lamb and Fetterman both noted that sending U.S. troops into the Ukraine could incite Russian President Vladimir Putin into a more violent response than simply aiding the former Soviet state led by Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

When asked if they would push back on legislation to restrict access to abortion, the candidates again agreed that abortion is health care and wouldn’t back any federal restrictions.

Not only would the panel of Democrats not support challenges to the 1973 landmark reproductive rights case, they also said they would not support a U.S. Supreme Court candidate who didn’t support previous court rulings if a new justice was nominated during their term.

Likewise, the responses to whether they would support The Equality Act, a bill banning discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation and gender identity currently stalled in the Senate, were similar but with some important nuances from each candidate.

Lamb was the first to answer the question, which included a follow up on whether he supported bills that sought to ban transgender girls and women from school sports.

On the Equality Act, Lamb noted he has voted in support of the bill twice, both in the current 117th legislative session and a prior session. The earlier bill also languished in the Senate.

Lamb said that recent bills pushed by GOP lawmakers in and outside of Pennsylvania have left many in the commonwealth “frustrated and scared by what’s been going on.”

“What I think is so, just distasteful about this is you want to say to some of these Republican politicians, ‘why don’t you pick on somebody your own size,’” Lamb said, referring to the focus on anti-LGBTQ issues being focused on young children. Lamb added that he didn’t believe there was any reason to ban transgender girls from school sports programs and that college-level athletics can be left up to the National Collegiate Athletic Association instead of Congress.

“I think if any political party or elected official attempts to score points at the expense of a trans child, or any members of (the LGBTQ) communities, then they need to find a new line of work. It’s absolutely reprehensible,” Fetterman responded.

Fetterman added that he has long been against discrimination in the LGBTQ community, officiating a same-sex marriage in 2013, almost two years before the Supreme Court ruled that bans on those unions were unconstitutional.

“It makes no sense that, with 50 votes in the Senate, we haven’t already passed The Equality Act. It’s wrong,” Kenyatta said.

Kenyatta added that he would be the first “openly gay man in the U.S. Senate, who is going to bring my entire life and family and perspective to a body who is in desperate need of that perspective.”

A Republican-led bill in the Pennsylvania General Assembly banning transgender girls from from competing against cisgender girls in school sports, known as the Protect Women Sports Act, passed the House in a 115-84 vote on April 12. Kenyatta voted against the bill.

Now on the Senate floor, the bill is expected to be vetoed by Gov. Tom Wolf.

As of April 25, there were just shy of 4 million Democratic voters registered across the state of Pennsylvania who will get to decide who among the dais on Monday night will run against a GOP challenger in November.

This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Frontrunner Fetterman targeted by Lamb, Kenyatta in PA US Senate debate