NBC’s Kornacki: Voter reaction to Fetterman debate performance ‘single biggest question’ ahead of midterms

Steve Kornacki says the top unanswered question regarding Democrats’ odds of keeping control of the Senate is how Pennsylvania voters will react to Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman’s performance in the race’s only televised debate against Republican Mehmet Oz last week.

“We’ve seen movement in Pennsylvania over the last couple months. … To me, when you look at the battle for the Senate, it’s the single biggest question heading into the election,” Kornacki, NBC News’s top elections expert, said during a recent interview with The Hill. “It’s volatile, how are voters going to respond to the Fetterman situation, to the debate.” 

Fetterman, the state’s lieutenant governor, suffered a stroke earlier this year but was able to participate in the nationally broadcast prime-time debate against Oz. Fetterman at times struggled to answer questions coherently and used closed captioning during the hourlong back-and-forth with the television personality. 

Days before the Democrat took to the debate stage, Gisele Fetterman, the candidate’s wife, criticized an NBC News reporter who made on-air comments about the health of her husband and spoke about his auditory processing issues after interviewing him. John Fetterman’s health has sparked national debate about what counts as a disability and perceptions on who is able to serve in public office.  

Kornacki characterized Pennsylvania as “on paper, the Democrats’ best chance of picking off a Republican-held Senate seat.” 

“If the Democrats lose any of the seats they currently hold, and they’re in danger in a couple of them, they’ve got to be able to balance it,” he said. “The biggest question here is in these final two weeks with that debate now having happened, very unique set of circumstances, how does the public in Pennsylvania respond to it?” 

Ahead of election night, Kornacki said he is “a little more hesitant and a little less clear on where things are headed” with the various key races as opposed to other midterm cycles in recent memory. 

“I take a look at the generic ballot average, and it’s moved around in ways this year it hasn’t moved around in past midterms,” he said. 

Kornacki has spent an increased amount of time focusing on political strategies ahead of congressional midterm elections as he prepares to debut a new podcast this week. 

The election guru’s six-episode audio series, dubbed “The Revolution with Steve Kornacki,” explores the rise of former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and his role in the consequential midterm elections of 1994 when the GOP took the House majority for the first time in four decades. 

The project aims to provide context behind the 1994 midterms and understand American partisanship as it exists today, which Kornacki said can be traced back to the strategy used by Gingrich and the GOP to win back the House that year. 

“I view 1994 as a turning point in our politics, a process really began and it’s a process of nationalizing our politics,” he said. “We’re now living in a fully almost totally nationalized political climate. … There’s all sorts of debate and all kinds of discussion to be had about the long-term meaning, significance, implications of the Republican revolution of 1994, but to me there’s just no question that it changed our politics.” 

–Updated at 9:24 a.m.