Dr. Oz of Trump-backed fame will run for senator from Pennsylvania once his challenger decides to concede the race.
Former hedge fund executive David McCormick said he could not make up the margin separating him and his Democratic rival John Fetterman in last month’s cliff-hanger vote. Fewer than 1,000 ballots out of 1.34m votes cast separated the two rivals. Mr Oz will now take on the Democratic candidate, who is currently recovering from a stroke. Mr McCormick and Mr Oz fought each other to a standstill, with the vote margin between them falling to within a 0.5% automatic recount threshold.
Winfrey Show heart doctor Mr Oz, best known for his guest appearances on the show, released a video cues prior to the recount even beginning, inviting people to vote for him as the “presumptive Republican” nominee.
Today, Mr. Oz was urged by his patron, former President Donald Trump, to declare victory pending the official outcome of the election. If elected, Mr. Oz would be the nation’s first Muslim senator. In a statement issued on Friday, Mr. McCormick said: “I called Mehmet Oz today to congratulate him on his victory.” He went on to say that he would extend his “full support” to Mr. Oz. In a series of tweets, Mr. Oz thanked Mr. McCormick for his “gracious” statement and expressed his gratitude for receiving such support from him as well as from many other people across the country at this time.
Now that the critical phase is complete, we will make certain that this US Senate seat does not revert to the radical left, who was just recently led by John Fetterman.
The race for the U.S. Senate seat in the swing state of Ohio will be decided in the November 2018 midterm elections. Midterm elections are held halfway through a president’s four-year term. They determine which political party controls the two chambers which make up Congress: the Senate and the House of Representatives. Following Mr McCormick’s concession, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spokesman Justin Barasky fired off a salvo at Mr Oz, calling him “a fraud and a scam artist” and a “self-serving millionaire”.
Also on Friday, the Democratic candidate for the Senate seat claimed that he “nearly died” because of his stroke last month.
Mr Fetterman, who is Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, said he should have been taking medication prescribed by his doctor in 2017. His campaign released a letter from his physician stating that the candidate has a disease called cardiomyopathy, which makes it harder for the heart to pump blood around the body. The doctor said Mr Fetterman would be “fine” if he took his medication and exercised.
The Harvard-educated former mayor, who embraced an ethnic ensemble instead of a business suit on the campaign trail, has garnered considerable attention within the Democratic party.
A controversy that dogged Mayor John Fetterman during his campaign is likely to come up during the general election. In 2013, during Mr. Fetterman’s second term as mayor of Braddock, a town near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he pursued an innocent black jogger who he wrongly thought had been firing a gun near his home.
Mr Fetterman, who is a towering 6 ft 8 in and was armed with a pistol at the time of the disagreement, has refused to apologise for the episode.
