Harrisburg, Pa. ( Associated Press) – Dr. Mehmet Oz turned from heart surgeon to TV celebrity and former hedge fund CEO David McCormick Spent Wednesday essentially tied in Pennsylvania’s heated competition for the Republican nomination to fill an open US Senate seat. It is also expected to be one of the party’s most competitive races with Democrats in the fall.
The GOP nomination battle was still too early to take a call.
Oz led McCormick by 1,723 votes on Wednesday, counting more than 1.3 million votes. Tens of thousands of votes were still to be counted on Election Day, including at least 22,000 mail ballots and an unknown number of votes to be counted.
Across the state, Mel was outperforming McCormick Oz in ballots, while Oz was doing better among votes cast on Election Day. Counties still must count provisional, foreign and military absentee ballots before the state can certify their results by the next Tuesday deadline.
The race was close enough to introduce Pennsylvania’s automatic recounting law, with a 0.5% margin of separation between candidates by law.
Oz and McCormick emerge at their election night watch parties Each said they were confident of victory, saying after midnight that they would have to wait for counting to resume. Former President Donald Trump encouraged Oz to declare victory. But Oz has given no indication of doing so.
The state’s lieutenant governor, John Fetterman, won the Democratic nomination on Friday after surgery to implant a pacemaker with a defibrillator to help him recover from a stroke.,
Democrats look to race to replace two-time retired Republican Sen. Perhaps his best opportunity to take a seat in the nearly 100-seat Senate.
Republican turnout exceeded 37%, the highest midterm primary turnout in at least two decades, advertising and other spending increased by more than $70 million.
Oz is helped by Trump’s endorsementWhile a Super Pac backing McCormick weighed heavily in the race, spending nearly $20 million, much of it going to attack Oz.
Both men also spent millions of their own on the campaign, and were battling allegations of being carpetbaggers. – Oz moved from a mansion in New Jersey to see Manhattan, and McCormick moved from Connecticut’s gorgeous Gold Coast.
Oz, best known as the host of Daytime TV’s “The Dr. Oz Show”, has battled misunderstandings among conservative groups about his positions on guns, abortion, and other major conservative issues. He countered that Trump’s support guaranteed that he was a conservative.
Oz was also repeatedly attacked for his dual citizenship in Turkey, and accused McCormick of “massive attacks”. If elected, Oz would be the country’s first Muslim senator, although he has not campaigned on that milestone. He was born in the US and has said he would give up his dual citizenship in Turkey if elected.
McCormick is a US Army combat veteran whose President George W. Bush’s administration has strong ties to the party establishment going back to his service.
However, McCormick spent much of the campaign brushing off rivals’ allegations that he would be soft on China after leaving Bridgewater Associates, a hedge fund that, with the blessing of the government there, does much of its business inside China.
Trump repeatedly attacked McCormick in the final two weeks of the race, calling him a libertarian, a seller of China and part of a corrosive Washington establishment that is not “America First”, a label for his governing philosophy of Trump. .
Still, McCormick insisted he was the most “America First” candidate in the race and congratulated McCormick by airing a video clip of Trump at a 2020 private ceremony, saying, “You’ve done so many things.” Served our country well. Various ways.”
Oz and McCormick both refrained from repeating Trump’s false claims That the Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election from him on the battlefield. They missed repeating Republican complaints about the way state judges and election officials administer the election.
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