HARISBURG, Pennsylvania – The television surgeon who became a television celebrity, Dr. Mehmet Oz and former hedge fund CEO David McCormick spent Wednesday, essentially in a fierce Pennsylvania race for a Republican nomination to run for a seat in the U.S. Senate. It is also expected that this fall will be one of the most competitive competitions with the Democrats.
It is too early to name the fight for the nomination of candidates from the Republican Party.
On Wednesday, Oz led McCormick with 1,723 votes out of more than 1.3 million counted votes. Tens of thousands of votes remained to be counted, including at least 22,000 ballots in the mail and an unknown number of votes cast on election day.
In McCormick, he was better than Oz, among postal voters, while Oz was better among the votes cast on election day. Counties must also count provisional, foreign and military advocacy bulletins before they confirm their results to the state by next Tuesday’s deadline.
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The race was close enough to launch in Pennsylvania an automatic vote counting law, with a split between candidates within 0.5% of the law.
Oz and McCormick appeared at parties after midnight election observation to say they would have to wait until the vote count resumed, and each said he was confident of victory. Former President Donald Trump has called on Oz to declare victory as a precaution. but Oz made no sign of it.
State Vice Governor John Fetterman won the Democratic nomination hours after surgery to implant a pacemaker with a defibrillator to help him recover from a stroke he suffered on Friday.
Democrats are considering the race to replace Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, who is retiring for two terms, as perhaps the best opportunity to take a seat in the 100-seat Senate.
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Republican turnout exceeded 37%, the highest average in two decades, an increase of more than $ 70 million in advertising and other spending.
Ozu was helped by Trump’s approval, while McCormick’s super PAC took a lot of weight in the race, spending about $ 20 million, most of it on attacking Oz.
Both men also spent millions of their own dollars on the company and battled accusations that they lacked carpets – Oz moved from a mansion in New Jersey overlooking Manhattan to escape, and McCormick moved from posh Gold Coast Connecticut.
Oz, best known as the host of the daytime television show The Dr. Oz Show, has battled conservative groups’ concerns about his stance on guns, abortion and other major conservative issues. He objected that Trump’s support ensured he was a conservative.
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Oz has also been repeatedly attacked for his dual citizenship in Turkey, and he has accused McCormick of “fanatical attacks”. If elected, Oz would become the country’s first Muslim senator, although he did not campaign on that milestone. He was born in the United States and said he would renounce dual citizenship in Turkey if elected.
McCormick is a U.S. Army veteran with strong ties to the party establishment since serving in the George W. Bush administration.
However, McCormick spent most of the campaign repelling accusations from competitors that he would be lenient to China after leaving the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, which conducts significant business in China with the blessing of the local government.
Trump has repeatedly attacked McCormick over the past two weeks of the race, calling him a liberal, a traitor to China and part of a corrosive Washington establishment that is not “America first” as Trump’s label for his ruling philosophy.
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However, McCormick insisted he was “America’s foremost” candidate in the race, and closed it by showing a TV commercial with a video in which Trump congratulated McCormick at a private ceremony in 2020, saying: “You served well. our country in many different ways ”.
Oz and McCormick avoided repeating Trump’s false claims that Democrats stole his 2020 presidential election in a state of war. By default, they did not repeat Republicans’ complaints about the decisions of state judges and election officials on how to conduct the election.
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Follow Mark Levy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/timelywriter.
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