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Toomey And McGinty Face Off In Final PA Senate Debate

Toomey and McGinty at debate
AP Photo
/
Matt Rourke

GOP incumbent Pat Toomey and Democratic challenger Katie McGinty met in Philadelphia Monday night for a second and final debate.

With two weeks to go until Election Day, the candidates in the country’s most expensive US Senate race are within two points of one another in an average of recent polls.

Tension between the two was high onstage at Temple University.

Toomey accused McGinty several times of lying about his record, at one point saying that “this is what people are disgusted about with politics; when people like Katie McGinty will be so hypocritical and just won’t tell the truth.”

McGinty, in turn, worked to paint Toomey as a hyper-conservative with fringe positions.

On abortion, for instance, she told her opponent that his “position on this has been decidedly out of the mainstream, joining with Donald Trump and saying that women or their doctors should be jailed for having to make these excruciating decisions.”

Now and then, the audience—which was supposed to remain quiet—weighed in on the more controversial topics.

One was Toomey’s take on bias in policing.

Boos could be heard as the Senator argued that “The problem with the Black Lives Matter movement—and Katie McGinty propagating this—is just that phrase itself is meant to impugn the integrity of the police by implying that they don’t think that black lives do matter.”

Heated moments also broke out over corporate taxation, police bias, and green energy.

The outcome of the race between Toomey and McGinty could determine which party takes control of the Senate.

Katie Meyer covers politics, policy, power, and elections at every level of government, with the goal of showing how it all affects people’s lives. Before coming to Philadelphia, she covered state politics as Harrisburg bureau chief for WITF, and hosted the station’s politics podcast. She got her start in public radio in the Bronx, at Fordham University station WFUV. She’s from upstate New York.
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