The famous TV doctor shakes up an already wild contest.
The famous TV doctor shakes up an already wild contest.
N ovember has been an eventful month for the Republican primary race to replace the retiring Pat Toomey in the Senate. Today’s entry in the race by Mehmet Oz, the famous TV doctor, follows the departure of Sean Parnell, the Trump-backed candidate who ran unsuccessfully for a House seat in 2020. With the Senate divided 50/50 and Pennsylvania a key swing state in recent presidential races, control of the Senate could end up depending on Dr. Oz.
The Map
Thirty-four Senate seats are up in the 2022 elections: 20 Republicans and 14 Democrats. While the political environment is likely to favor Republicans in 2022 — CNN’s Harry Enten argues that the GOP should be favored to gain one or two seats — the opportunities may be limited by the fact that 2016 (when most of these Senate seats were last contested) was already a good Republican year in the Senate. Also, Republicans are not just defending more seats; they are also defending more open seats and more seats in swing states than are Democrats.
In 2016, Republicans surprised the political world by winning races with less than 50 percent of the vote in Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Alaska, and with less than 52 percent of the vote in Wisconsin, Florida, and North Carolina. A number of candidates, including Toomey, Marco Rubio, and John McCain, won that fall while keeping various degrees of distance from Donald Trump at the top of the ticket. Democrats won three seats of their own with less than 50 percent of the vote: New Hampshire, Nevada, and Colorado.
Some Senate seats are already certain to be hotly contested next November, including Democrat-held seats in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, and possibly Colorado, and Republican-held seats in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and possibly Florida, Iowa, Alaska, and Missouri. There are long-shot states that some people think might go on the board as well, including Utah, Vermont, Louisiana, and maybe a surprise blue enclave such as Illinois, Oregon, Washington, Maryland, or Connecticut.
As of now, Republican governors Chris Sununu of New Hampshire and Doug Ducey of Arizona and Democratic governors Roy Cooper of North Carolina, Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania, and Tony Evers of Wisconsin have all passed on bids for the Senate; Republicans Larry Hogan of Maryland and Phil Scott of Vermont and Democrat John Bel Edwards of Louisiana have yet to decide, with Scott being the least likely of these to run. Sununu and Evers are running for reelection; Scott is expected to do the same, and he reiterated after Patrick Leahy’s retirement that the governorship was still his focus. Hogan is term-limited and has hinted that he might reconsider his stated lack of interest in running.
In the meantime, there are already hotly contested primaries underway. Lisa Murkowski will again be challenged by another Republican in Alaska, as she was in 2010 and 2016, and there are announced primary challengers to at least three other incumbents — John Boozman in Arkansas, James Lankford in Oklahoma, and Chuck Schumer in New York. The latter three presently look like very long shots, as their opponents (three of them, in Boozman’s case) are novices who have never won significant office before.
Other than Murkowski, the most serious primaries will come in the states — six of them so far — with retiring incumbents. Vermont is the first state with a Democrat retirement, although that could change as the political environment sinks in. Five Republicans have announced their retirement: Besides Toomey, the other retirements are Richard Shelby of Alabama, Roy Blunt of Missouri, Rob Portman of Ohio, and Richard Burr of North Carolina. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has been publicly undecided on running again.
The Fields
Both parties are expecting a raucous primary fight in Pennsylvania. Probably the leading Democratic candidate is progressive favorite John Fetterman, the state’s hulking, goateed, bald-pated lieutenant governor and a former mayor of Braddock, Pa., who finished third in the 2016 Senate primary. But Fetterman will have competition. Conor Lamb, a congressman who has positioned himself as a relatively moderate Democrat, is running. So is state senator Sharif Street, the vice chairman of the state party and son of former Philadelphia mayor John Street. State representative Malcolm Kenyatta shares Street’s Philadelphia base, is the first gay black man elected to the Pennsylvania legislature, has the endorsement of the Working Families Party, and was one of the 17 co-keynote speakers at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. There are three other declared candidates.
Republicans, by contrast, have been unable to attract a single candidate who has ever been elected to office. The seven candidates in the race before today include businessman Jeff Bartos, who lost the lieutenant governor’s race to Fetterman in 2018 and has been endorsed by a battery of state legislators; Kathy Barnette, who lost a House race in 2020 and has the backing of various Trumpworld figures; and three others who have lost races for various other offices. The most notable public servant on the list is Carla Sands, who served as U.S. ambassador to Denmark during the Trump administration.
Sean Parnell was, until this month, the expected front-runner. Parnell is an Army veteran who lost a bid to unseat Lamb in 2020 but impressed enough observers to gain endorsements from Trump, Josh Hawley, and Dan Crenshaw. But his campaign and public reputation imploded in a bitter divorce proceeding in which his wife gave dramatic testimony accusing him of choking her and telling her to get an abortion. The court ended up siding with Parnell’s wife and awarded her sole custody of their children. She had previously obtained two temporary court orders of protection against him, and while those had been withdrawn without a hearing upon her request, the fact that a court was persuaded on three different occasions of her accounts of Parnell as an abusive spouse made it both morally and politically untenable to defend him or make his campaign about anything other than spouse abuse. On November 22, Parnell left the race, saying he was focusing on getting his children back.
The TV Doctor
Parnell’s departure created an opening for Dr. Oz, who had been publicly mulling jumping into the race for a while. Among all the things that made Donald Trump a potent political force, the one that has been hardest for others to replicate is Trump’s massive celebrity status before entering politics. Dr. Oz has that. He made his name on Oprah Winfrey’s show, giving dozens of segments on weight loss and other health issues, before launching his own TV show and becoming a frequent commentator on Fox News. He’s published more than a dozen books. He’s guest-hosted Jeopardy!
Dr. Oz was appointed by Trump to the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition. It is hard to think of too many people in America who carry the stamp of approval of both Trump and Oprah.
His medical credentials are impeccable — he has taught at Columbia — but his embrace of controversial health advice, some of it outside his specialty as a cardiothoracic surgeon, is sure to be an issue in the race.
Dr. Oz will face three other challenges. One, his ties to Pennsylvania are somewhat tenuous; he was born in Cleveland, raised in Delaware, and until recently, lived and was registered to vote in New Jersey. He did, however, attend the University of Pennsylvania for his M.D. and an M.B.A. from the Wharton School of Business. When Eliana Johnson of the Washington Free Beacon asked in early November about his residence,
a spokesman for Oz told [the WFB], “Since last year, Dr. Oz has lived and voted in Pennsylvania where he attended school and has deep family ties. Dr. Oz has received encouragement to run for the U.S. Senate, but is currently focused on our show and has no announcement at this time.” Oz has a non-permanent voter registration in Pennsylvania connected to a Montgomery County address that appears to belong to his mother-in-law.
A second challenge will be scrutiny of Dr. Oz’s connections to Turkey, the land of his immigrant parents:
Oz’s ties to his family’s native Turkey are also likely to come under scrutiny. A dual U.S. and Turkish citizen, Oz served in the Turkish Army in the 1980s and has since developed a relationship with the country’s president, the strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The nature of their relationship is unclear.
The third challenge is political: As a neophyte to electoral politics, can Dr. Oz convince Republican voters that he actually stands for something? Can he earn Trump’s endorsement — which still carries weight in Pennsylvania — or at least steer clear of Trump’s wrath? Can he do so without attracting too much of Trump’s own baggage?
If he can overcome those three obstacles, Dr. Oz could be a formidable candidate. He’s famous, he’s comfortable on television, and he’s spent years meeting crowds across the country, so the transition to campaigning should be an easy one. His announcement video talks a lot about the pandemic — “they took away our freedom without making us safer” — but aside from a nod to being “conservative” and “America First,” it leaves a lot of blank space for him to fill in his views on policy and his philosophy:
I’m running for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania because America needs a Conservative Republican to cure what’s wrong with Washington. I’m a world-class surgeon, fighter, and health care advocate stepping forward to cure our country’s ills. Watch my announcement video now! pic.twitter.com/yLhKsZm9sl
— Dr. Mehmet Oz (@DrOz) November 30, 2021
It’s a good start; he mentions his immigrant family background and sketches his accomplishments, and consider: He doesn’t even need to introduce himself or mention his first name. Just “I’m Dr. Oz.” In politics, that’s a leg up that other candidates can’t buy.