BLUE BELL (AP) - In a community college gymnasium in an affluent Philadelphia suburb, John Fetterman walked on to a makeshift stage to cheers and stood at a podium beneath a massive “Women for Fetterman” banner.

As the crowd of mostly women looked on, Fetterman unfurled a pink T-shirt emblazoned with his Democratic Senate campaign’s familiar industrial-style lettering.

“My name is John -” he shouted, craning his neck to read the front of the shirt - “Fetterwoman!” The crowd roared in appreciation.

With the fall campaign election season kicking into high gear, Fetterman and his Republican rival, Dr. Mehmet Oz, are making a beeline for Philadelphia’s heavily populated suburbs. The candidates in one of the nation’s premier Senate races are holding rallies, bringing in surrogates and launching hard-edge TV ads aimed at wooing influential swing voters, particularly women.

For decades, Philadelphia’s suburbs have been an important indicator of success for statewide candidates in the presidential battleground state, with the large number of swing voters there.

In the 2020 presidential election, the onetime Republican stronghold was decisive in President Joe Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania, with moderate GOP voters joining with Democrats to produce an insurmountable deficit for Donald Trump.

For Oz, a celebrity heart surgeon and the former host of the daytime TV show “The Dr. Oz Show,” turning around Trump’s suburban slump and gaining ground with moderates is critical: Polls show he is not just trailing Fetterman, but also other down-ballot Republican candidates, campaign strategists say.

Fetterman has made abortion rights a prominent theme in the suburbs to invigorate female voters after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June. Oz, meanwhile, avoids mention of Trump or abortion in the suburbs but paints Fetterman as soft on crime and unfit to serve because of a stroke he suffered in May.

A few days after rallying with Trump in northeastern Pennsylvania, Oz appeared with former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, a potential 2024 Republican presidential candidate, at a “Dose of Reality” town hall in Delaware County.

Besides airing a laundry list of grievances with national Democrats and Biden, Haley, Oz and other speakers at the Springfield banquet hall warned the crowd that Fetterman wanted to make their communities less safe.

“He’s out trying to release people who’ve been convicted by a jury and sentenced by a judge for murder,” Oz said.

Fetterman, as lieutenant governor and chair of the state Board of Pardons, has pushed for more commutations of life sentences for people convicted decades ago of murder or as accessories to murder.

They lampooned Fetterman’s typical choice of dress - shorts and a hoodie - and suggested that Fetterman is avoiding reporters and debates because he is lying about the severity of the stroke’s effects.

“If he can’t live up to 110% of the job, he should have the courage to step out and say, ‘I can’t do it,’” Haley said. “But let me tell you someone who can do it,” she said, calling Oz a “pro-family, pro-child, pro-parent, pro-education, pro-business freedom fighter.”

Fetterman’s campaign maintains that he is expected to make a full recovery - he still speaks haltingly and struggles to quickly respond to words he hears - and that Oz is desperately trying to find anything to help him make up ground in polls.

Meanwhile, as Oz tries to shift the focus of the campaign away from abortion rights, the issue shows no sign of waning from voter’s minds. On Tuesday, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina proposed a federal 15-week abortion ban bill, which Democrats seized on as an example of the extreme policies that Republicans will pursue if they win control of Congress in November.

In a statement issued after Graham’s proposal, Oz - who has said he opposes abortion from conception, but with exceptions to protect the life of the mother and in cases of rape and incest - sidestepped a direct answer on what he thought of the bill.