Citing no path left to victory, U.S. Senate candidate David McCormick conceded the Pennsylvania Republican primary race to Dr. Mehmet Oz on Friday evening, over two weeks after election day. Oz will face Democrat Lt. Gov. John Fetterman in the general election race in November. Fetterman won the state’s Democratic primary race after having suffered a stoke just days before.
McCormick called Oz during an ongoing vote recount to concede the race and to congratulate the celebrity doctor, he announced. McCormick also said he will give Oz his full support in his battle against Fetterman, calling for Republican voters to unite around him:
“We’ve spent the last 17 days making sure that every Republican vote was counted in a way that would result in the will of the Pennsylvania voters being fulfilled,” McCormick said. “But it’s now clear to me with the recount largely complete that we have a nominee.”
McCormick continued, “And today I called Mehmet Oz to congratulate him on his victory, and I told him what I always said to you, that I will do my part to try to unite Republicans and Pennsylvanians behind his candidacy, behind his nomination for the Senate.”
A former hedge fund CEO and military veteran, McCormick could not catch up to Oz even though he trailed him by less than 1,000 votes. While the initial ballot counting process wrapped up last week, McCormick and Oz took little time in sending their attorneys to inspect the secondary ballot count of remaining mail-in ballots, provisional ballots, and ballots outstanding for any other reason. McCormick and Oz butted heads over mail-in ballots that had been sent in undated envelopes, leading McCormick to file a lawsuit seeking for counties to count these ballots, a move that Oz opposed. While McCormick won his case, he decided to concede to Oz when he learned that there were less than 800 undated ballots in question.
Congratulations to Dr Oz’s win Republican U.S. Senate candidate pic.twitter.com/wQtnCIPC0K
— Linda Kindopp (@kindopp_linda) June 4, 2022
Both campaigns were confident that each would prevail, with McCormick’s saying that he would win once all ballots were counted, and Oz publicly announing the he was the winner a little over a week after the election.
It was a heated race, with each candidate garnering celebrity support, most notably Oz who won the endorsement of Donald Trump. But McCormick was magnanimous in his support of Oz after conceding to him, remarking that this Pennsylvania race could be the tipping point for control of the U.S. Senate come November.
“It is so important for Pennsylvania, so important that we beat John Fetterman, and it’s so important for the country that we take back the majority in the Senate in 2022,” McCormick said. “So [Oz] has my full support, and I wish him and Lisa well in the next phase of the campaign.”
Trump has been critical of McCormick, saying he is “an insider who absolutely sold us out to China,” according to Politico. He was also critical of the third GOP candidate in the senate race, Kathy Barnette, a convervative commentator, whom he took to task over her support of the building and erection of a statue of the Obama family in Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Park, which she said should go next to an Abraham Lincoln monument.
“That’s no good,” Trump said of Barnette’s idea. “These are not candidates who put America first, and that’s what we need.”
