Chris Rabb is winning the PA-03 House race, according to his opponents' internal polls
9 paragraphs down in a newly published Philadelphia Inquirer article about Dr. Ala Stanford's television ads being pulled, they drop this bombshell:
>314’s polling showed Stanford was in a distant second place behind Rabb, the sources said. Street was in third.
>The Democratic City Committee, which has endorsed Street, also commissioned a poll in early May showing that Rabb had only a slight lead over Stanford
I did think it was bizarre how little public polling had been done on this race considering it grabbed a bit of national attention. The IL-09 race with Daniel Biss, Kat Abugazaleh and Laura Fine for instance had dozens of polls done on it in the lead-up to the election (and they ended up being fairly accurate). Now we have our answer: those polls looked bad so they chose not to release them.
I'm pretty confident at this point that Rabb will win a week from today.
He has had 2 controversies in May: the Bondi Beach post and the trafficking vote. However, those were on May 1st and May 4th respectively. These polls were taken in "early May" which means it was certainly after the 1st and possibly after the 4th. As for the trafficking vote story, it got little attention on facebook and mostly supportive comments on instagram understanding that his vote aligned with the ACLU. These polls were also conducted even after the most high profile endorsement Street received from Mayor Parker on April 20th. With the election less than a week away, I don't see these as being enough to reverse his lead over Dr. Stanford nor bring Street from 3rd place into 1st, especially when this final stretch has seen the biggest influx of spending and ads for Rabb in the entire race, and is more than his opponents are spending.
On the third slide you can see the few polls that have been released to the public. I can testify to the fact that Dr. Stanford's huge surge in the polls from November to April was a bombardment of TV ads and mailers. I saw many of them myself. It's an undoubtedly effective strategy that Rabb is now employing. Between that and Rabb's record breaking days for most doors knocked in Philly, his momentum seems unstoppable. He's running a much stronger campaign than Helen Gym, who ran for mayor in 2023 in the same progressive lane. As I explained in my previous post on this topic, PA-03 is the half of Philly which was more favorable to Gym & progressives in that election.
I only see Street winning if by some miracle the vast majority of the undecided votes all go to him and turn out with as much enthusiasm as there is around Rabb's campaign, which would be unlikely for people who are undecided 2 weeks before the election.