The Pennsylvania GOP Senate primary race appears to be headed to a recount as Trump-endorsed celebrity surgeon Mehmet Oz led hedge-fund executive Dave McCormick by roughly 2,000 votes early Wednesday morning, well under the half-percentage-point required to trigger a recount in statewide elections.
In the final stretch of vote tabulation, McCormick had garnered a small edge over Oz until that flipped late Tuesday night. As of Wednesday morning, each candidate had won around 31 percent of the vote with roughly 95 percent of votes counted. Populist upstart Kathy Barnette came in a distant third with 25 percent of the vote.
Both McCormick and Oz assured supporters of victory at their respective election night parties.
”We’re not going to have a result tonight. When all of the votes are tallied, I am confident we will win,” Oz said at the Newtown Athletic Club, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
”Unfortunately we’re not going to have a resolution tonight, but we can see the path ahead. We can see victory ahead,” McCormick told backers in Pittsburgh.
Their supporters may be waiting for a while: any recount will likely take weeks to resolve and it’s not clear how long it will take to count the remaining ballots in the initial count.
While frontrunners Oz and McCormick were neck-and-neck in the polls for much of last month, they recently faced new unexpected competition from conservative commentator Barnette, who surged ahead at the last-minute. Barnette, who got into some trouble for past anti-Muslim and anti-gay comments, had joined Trump-backed Republican Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano on the campaign trail this past week. Mastriano won the nomination Tuesday night.
Oz and McCormick then switched gears on the campaign trail from criticizing each other to grilling Barnette’s history, specifically her appearance at the rally that preceded the January 6 Capitol riot and her inflammatory rhetoric.
Former president Donald Trump, who endorsed and campaigned for Oz despite the television star’s questionable commitment to conservative principles, released a statement last week saying that Barnette had no chance of beating the Democratic candidate. While Oz earned Trump’s support, he has been cautious about embracing the former president’s theories about the 2020 election.
The Emmy Award–winning host of the Dr. Oz Show entered the contest with the advantage of being a household name and a multimillionaire, but he came under fire for his somewhat tenuous ties to Pennsylvania, his connection to Turkey and its authoritarian leader, and his lack of experience in politics. During his stint on Oprah Winfrey’s show, Oz gave medical advice to guests that sometimes fell outside his specialty as a cardiothoracic doctor, for which he’s also faced some scrutiny.
At stake is the seat held by retiring Republican Pat Toomey, which Democrats are looking to flip to re-capture a majority in the evenly divided Senate.