(Bloomberg) -- The late surge by Kathy Barnette, a pundit known for her strident commentary as well as a compelling up-from-poverty personal story, has upended Pennsylvania’s Republican US Senate primary.

A regular on Fox News, Barnette’s rise to the top tier of candidates for the May 17 primary has some in her party worried that if she wins the nomination, her most divisive positions and limited political experience could dash their hopes of keeping the seat being vacated by retiring Republican Pat Toomey. 

Polling shows Barnette, 50, benefiting from the large number of voters who were undecided while celebrity physician Mehmet Oz and former Bridgewater Associates executive David McCormick spent millions of dollars hammering each other in television ads. That’s created an opportunity for Barnette to emerge with tenacious campaigning.

“I’m surging in large part because of that,” Barnette said in a telephone interview. “With all their money that they’ve spent, I’ve run a far superior campaign, actually pressing into what it is people are feeling. People feel unnerved about the state of our country.”

Her fast rise in the polls follows a poignant revelation that she is the product of a sexual assault, which forged her strong anti abortion-rights views. She’s also received last-minute endorsements from GOP stalwarts the Club for Growth and the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List. 

A Fox News poll Tuesday showed Barnette at 19% -- up 10 points from March -- putting her within reach of McCormick at 20% and Oz at 22%. With a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points and 18% of voters undecided, the poll showed how Barnette could win, especially since there are no runoffs in the Pennsylvania primaries.

A Trafalgar Group poll on Sunday also showed a tight three-way race with Barnette in second place behind Oz. 

“You’ve had two candidates who have more money than most people in Pennsylvania beating each other over the head month after month,” Republican strategist John Brabender said. “At some point, people are looking for maybe an alternative.”

Brabender said there are concerns among some Republican leaders in Pennsylvania that Barnette wouldn’t be the strongest GOP candidate against expected Democratic nominee John Fetterman in the general election. That could put the seat at risk for the party as it seeks to reclaim control of the Senate.

Toomey told Axios that “there’s a lot” that voters don’t know about her as other Republican strategists have begun disseminating controversial tweets and video clips of her, seeking to slow her momentum.

Even Trump expressed doubts, saying in a statement Thursday that she “will never be able to win the General Election against the Radical Left Democrats.”

“She has many things in her past which have not been properly explained or vetted, but if she is able to do so, she will have a wonderful future in the Republican Party -- and I will be behind her all the way,” he said, reiterating his endorsement of Oz.

Asked about concerns that she wouldn’t be the strongest candidate in the general election, Barnette said that’s up to the voters and that she thinks she would be more appealing to voters than Oz or McCormick.

Working on shoestring budget compared with the other leading candidates – Barnette’s campaign has spent only $161,000 on ads compared with $14.8 million by Oz and $13.3 million by McCormick, according to AdImpact -- Barnette said she’s been traveling more than 1,500 miles a week to meet with voters. McCormick and Oz have relied more on outside endorsements and television ads, she said.

While McCormick and Oz have fought over who is more like Trump, who endorsed Oz in April, Barnette has crisscrossed the commonwealth, promoting a more potent distillation of Trumpism at grassroots events while touting her personal story.

Echoing Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud, she organized buses to the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021, that preceded the attack on the U.S. Capitol. Barnette’s also refused to concede her own 19-point loss in a 2020 House race. 

In social media posts, she falsely called former President Barack Obama a Muslim and said he “loves all things homosexual” and that Islam “should be banned in the USA.” She shared an article that said “pedophilia is a cornerstone of Islam.”

Barnette said her previous comments about homosexuals, Muslims and Obama are snippets being taken out of context and “I’ve been very clear about who I am and what I believe.”

In fact, it may be her personal story that has helped turn the tide in the race, an up-from-the-bootstraps story that she says led her as a Black woman toward conservatism and away from “the Democrat plantation.” Only two Black women have been elected to the U.S. Senate, both Democrats. There has never been a Republican African-American woman to serve in the upper chamber.

She’s talked about growing up on a pig farm with no running water and becoming the first person in her family to graduate from college, getting a finance degree from Troy State University and an MBA from Fontbonne University. She says she spent 10 years as a US Army reservist and then worked in the comptroller’s department at J.C. Penney before writing a book, “Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain: Being Black and Conservative in America.” 

Her only previous run for office was the 2020 loss to incumbent Democratic Representative Madeleine Dean.

Asked whether she’d accept an election loss in the current race, she said, “we’ll see, right, you’re asking me to have a crystal ball between now and then” and “let’s not forget, Democrats have made an industry out of challenging elections.”

 

 

During a Republican primary debate earlier this month, just after a draft of a Supreme Court opinion striking down the landmark was published by Politico, she revealed that her mother had decided against having an abortion after being raped as a pre-teen. She also released a video telling the story which has been viewed more than 1.2 million times on Twitter alone.

“I am the byproduct of a rape,” she said at the debate. “My mother was 11 years old when I was conceived, my father was 21. I was not just a ‘lump of cells.’ As you can see, I’m still not just a ‘lump of cells.’ My life has value.”

Asked about Barnette’s surge, McCormick’s campaign pointed to his media interviews on Tuesday when he said while she’s “getting her day in the sun,” Republican voters will be looking for a candidate who shares their values, can win the general election and get results in Washington.

Oz spokeswoman Brittany Yanick said Barnette has “a clear pattern of trying to cover up and embellish her background” and won’t answer basic questions about it. She pointed to his current lead in polls and Trump’s endorsement in his ability to win. 

Barnette already had high name recognition and backing among Republican voters in Pennsylvania because of her exposure in conservative media that got overlooked with the focus on Oz and McCormick, said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute.

“Kathy Barnette has a very strong base of support that’s equal to the two leading candidates, and it enables her to build on that as Oz and McCormick kind of keep trying to knock each other out,” Murray said.

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