Gloves off in PA: Republican U.S. Senate candidates go head to head during Newsmax debate

The likely final debate among the top five Pennsylvania Republican primary candidates for Senate put more of their effort into going after each other than the issues Wednesday night at Grove City College.

Even as the hour-long debate organized by Newsmax began with a question on the candidates’ positions on abortion, Republican frontrunners Mehmet Oz and Dave McCormick were the main focus among their opponents Kathy Barnette, Jeff Bartos and Carla Sands.

Political commentator Kathy Barnette, of Montgomery County, who was conceived when her mother was raped as a child, is adamantly opposed to abortion and pointed to a 2019 interview in which Oz had expressed concerns over states restricting access to those procedures.

The cardiothoracic surgeon turned TV host shrugged off comments from Barnette, Oz saying he had operated on children who were just days old and would not harm any child that young or “nine months younger.”

The recent leak of a U.S. Supreme Court draft ruling on a case that would overturn a precedent protecting abortion rights since the 1973 landmark Roe v. Wade decision sent a shockwave through the national political landscape on Monday.

More: What makes Dr. Oz's Senate campaign stand out? Trump's endorsement, TV show and wealth

While it may be only a preliminary ruling and could change before the court is expected to decide early this summer, the rare leak of the Judicial Branch sparked outrage among Democratic leaders and signaled a rallying cry to Republicans as abortion is now expected by many to be a driving factor in the November midterm.

Each of the Republican candidates on the stage Wednesday have described themselves as “pro-life” and in favor of banning abortion in most cases.

Like Barnette, Bartos and Sands reaffirmed their position while taking jabs at McCormick and Oz over their attendance at past debates and their previous out-of-state addresses.

Bartos said Pennsylvania has “a long history of sending pro-life candidates from both parties to Washington” but warned against sending two candidates who had recently moved to Pennsylvania to the nation’s capital.

Oz lived in New Jersey before moving to Montgomery County shortly before he began his campaign in 2021. McCormick was born and raised in Bloomsburg, Columbia County, but lived in Connecticut for the past 15 years before moving back to Allegheny County for his campaign.

Sands, a former ambassador to Denmark under the Trump administration and resident of Cumberland County, chided both men for not appearing at a debate last week hosted by Spotlight PA in Carlisle.

“I want to thank Newsmax for hosting this debate … and I also want to thank the gentlemen on either side of me for showing up because they don’t come to many of our debates,” Sands said.

More: PA Senate race: Ex hedge fund CEO David McCormick tries to fend off Oz's Trump endorsement

The opening question lasted several minutes, but it set the tone for the rest of the night, leading to a heated moment between Bartos and McCormick.

As he’s done in past debates, Bartos responded to a question about inflation by highlighting his work creating the nonprofit Pennsylvania 30 Day Fund during the pandemic, which he claims has helped save more than 1,000 small businesses across all 67 counties in the state through more than $3.1 million in aid.

Bartos said Wednesday that his focus would be to help “Main Street” Pennsylvanians and again alluded to Oz and McCormick, saying there were two “out-of-staters” who “cannot save main street if you can’t find Main Street.”

When it came time to respond to a question about how the candidates would help older Pennsylvanians struggling to make ends meet, McCormick fired back at Bartos over a $1 million Palm Beach home he owns.

Florida property records show Bartos bought the home last March.

McCormick raised the issue while also referencing two Paycheck Protection Program loans Bartos had taken out in 2020 and 2021 for a total of $191,492.

According to data available on the U.S. Small Business Administration website, the loans given to FMG Operating Company LLC, which property records show shares the same address as Bartos’ Montgomery County home, have since been forgiven.

The federal pandemic relief loans funded with $800 billion of taxpayer dollars were designed to be forgiven in most cases as the funding was created to help small businesses struggling to stay afloat.

Bartos was denied a chance to directly respond, and instead used his time on a later question to raise questions around Bridgewater’s time as a state teacher pension fund’s biggest money manager while McCormick was heading the hedge fund.

Pennsylvania’s Public School Employees’ Retirement System had paid Bridgewater hundreds of millions of dollars since 2004 to manage what The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in March to be up to $5 billion of the roughly $75 billion fund.

Oz had initially taken his leading political rival to task over what he and PSERS officials have described as middling returns that should have been much higher than the $4 billion the fund saw over that time, The New York Times reported.

While Bridgewater didn’t lose PSERS any money, Oz and the retirement fund officials have said the returns would have been much higher if invested in stocks and blame lackluster returns for current teachers having to pay more into their retirement funds.

“His firm failed Pennsylvania seniors … they got screwed,” Bartos said.

McCormick said he wouldn’t “apologize for (his) success” and accused Bartos of “carrying water” for Oz.

McCormick stood by the returns Bridgewater did make for the teacher pension, saying “what (PSERS) paid for was what they got” from Bridgewater.

Barnette also referred to McCormick and Oz as “globalists” with business ties to China, with Sands claiming McCormick “made his billions” with the foreign country that Oz described as an “existential threat” to America.

“You don’t make billions in China without bowing to Chinese communists,” Sands said.

Sands also brought out one last jab against Barnette immediately after as the debate was nearing an end, but her comment underscored something noteworthy about the Newsmax debate.

More: This week on the campaign trail for PA governor, Senate races: Polls, debates and pledges

No questions about voter fraud

It was a claim Sands has made multiple times before, calling out Barnette’s 2020 run for Congress against Democrat Madeleine Dean in Pennsylvania’s 4th Congressional District.

“She used the same playbook two years ago and lost in a Red Wave year by 20 points to a weak Democrat,” Sands said.

Barnette pushed back, saying she “went to bed on Nov. 3, 2020, having won 76%” of reporting precincts and lost three days later as election workers tallied mail-in ballots.

The Associated Press called the race just before midnight on Election Night with Dean leading Barnette 92,337 to 38,913.

“Not only did I have that thing happen to me, but President Trump … lost by 26% to an equally weak Democrat, Joe Biden,” Barnette said before debate moderator Greta Van Susteren quickly moved to another question.

While tame compared to other rows that came up Wednesday night, this exchange is noteworthy because Barnette has previously been quick to cite her loss as an example of alleged widespread “irregularities” and unproven claims of widespread voter fraud that followed the 2020 election.

That’s not a claim that’s necessarily unique to Barnette either.

During last week’s Spotlight debate, Bartos was the only candidate who said he would have certified the 2020 election results if he had been in office on Jan. 6, 2021.

Election integrity, or rather the alleged lack thereof, has been a topic at every debate featuring a crowded field of Senate and governor candidates, most of whom have cited the persistent unproven claims that followed Trump’s presidential loss two years ago.

Newsmax settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems in August, which included an apology published by the news organization.

“Newsmax initially covered claims by President Trump’s lawyers, supporters and others … Newsmax subsequently found no evidence that such allegations were true,” the apology stated.

Dominion and another voting machine company, Smartmatic, filed multiple lawsuits seeking billions in damages against conservative news organizations and key figures who backed voter fraud claims on the national stage last year.

Forbes reported in March that nearly a dozen lawsuits against One America News Network, Fox News, attorney Rudy Giuliani and many others could be going to trial over the next two years.

There were dozens of court challenges across the country from Trump’s campaign following his loss in 2020, but none of those claims have resulted in conclusive evidence of widespread voter fraud.

As a result of the ongoing claims, Republican state lawmakers have also pushed for a review of the state’s voter registration system, claiming it’s wrought with errors that open the state up to potential voter fraud.

This news organization reviewed nearly 30 million rows of voter registration data across 2020 and 2021 and conferred with political policy experts who said the potential errors, like repeating names or missing information, made up less than 1% of the voter rolls and didn’t constitute a serious concern.

The May 17 primary may be less than two weeks away, but recent polls have continued to show the Republican race is still a toss-up with at least 40% of GOP voters still undecided.

Oz and McCormick have been neck-and-neck over the past month, but Barnette has been picking up steam.

The question of whether this week’s knock-down, drag-out debate moved the needle for those undecided voters will be answered after the polls close later this month.

This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: PA GOP Senate candidates get aggressive at 2022 Newsmax debate