Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Republican Senate nominee in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, is flailing. He’s down by about eleven points in the polls, despite the fact that his Democratic opponent, John Fetterman — the goateed, heavyset, six-foot-eight-inch lieutenant governor of the state whose down-home, working-class public presentation is straight out of Pennsylvania central casting — was off the campaign trail for the past three months after suffering a stroke. (Fetterman held his first post-stroke public rally late last week.) Oz needs a course correction, and quickly. Whatever he’s doing right now clearly isn’t working.
But you don’t need a pollster to know that Oz is in trouble. Judging by his campaign’s latest advertisement, it’s not difficult to see why the Republican is struggling to catch on in an election year that should, by all accounts, heavily favor his party:
He’s the most radical candidate in the country. pic.twitter.com/Z2jr8yowos
— Dr. Mehmet Oz (@DrOz) August 15, 2022
It’s tough to envision the working- and middle-class Pennsylvanians that Oz will need to win being wooed by cartoon animation, circus music, and a baffling children’s-show-style narration. (“That’s crazy!”) The issues with Fetterman’s record that the ad identifies — get-out-of-jail for violent criminals, more government spending in an inflationary environment, slowing energy production, and so on — are all entirely legitimate themes for Republicans to run on in 2022. But voters, understandably, want to know that the candidate they’re voting for is serious about solving these issues. Oz’s latest ad is a lot of things, but “serious” is not one of them.