(Bloomberg) -- Democrat John Fetterman said that his rocky showing at Tuesday night’s Pennsylvania Senate debate “wasn’t exactly easy” but insisted Wednesday that he got the best of his Republican rival, Mehmet Oz, despite his stumbles.

“I knew it wasn’t going to be easy after, you know, having a stroke after five months,” he told a crowd in Pittsburgh Wednesday night at a rally headlined by musician Dave Matthews. “In fact, I don’t think that’s ever been done before in American political history before, actually.”

Fetterman, the 53-year-old lieutenant governor, spoke haltingly and uncertainly in his hour-long debate Tuesday, the only one he’s scheduled to have with Oz before a Nov. 8 midterm election that could decide control of the US Senate. The winner will replace departing Senator Patrick Toomey, a Republican.

But Fetterman said the defining moment of the debate came when Oz, a celebrity doctor running as a Republican, said the issue of abortion was between a woman, her doctor, and “local political leaders.”

“Yeah,” Fetterman said Wednesday. “You know, to focus on some of the words that I missed, he has to say that he had the worst line of the night.”

Fetterman said he raised more than $2 million online in the hours following the debate.

“And here’s the right also about that debate. I may not get every every word the right way, but I will always do the right thing in Washington, D.C.,” he said. “You know, I have a lot of good days and every now and then I’ll have a bad day, but every day I will fight always just for you.”

Oz held an event focused on crime in Harrisburg on Wednesday with former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley but didn’t answer questions about the debate. He emphasized his criticisms of Fetterman during the debate for calling for the legalization of drugs and releasing offenders from prison.

Whether the debate was a game-changer won’t be clear for a few days as the dominant narratives from it emerge because most people have made up their minds and it remains to be seen how undecided voters will be affected, said Berwood Yost, director of the Franklin & Marshall College Poll.

More than 686,000 people had already voted as of Wednesday, out of 8.8 million registered voters in Pennsylvania. There were 5.1 million ballots cast in the 2018 US Senate race in that state.

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.