Pennsylvania Republican Senate candidates David McCormick, left, and Mehmet Oz are seen during campaign appearances in May 2022 in Pennsylvania.
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Pennsylvania Republican Senate candidates David McCormick, left, and Mehmet Oz are seen during campaign appearances in May 2022 in Pennsylvania.
AP
HARRISBURG, Pa. – Pennsylvania’s Republican primaries for an open U.S. Senate seat are too close to call and potentially heading for a statewide recount to decide the winner of the heart-surgeon contest famous, Dr. Mehmet Oz and former hedge fund CEO David McCormick.
A recount means that the outcome of the race may not be known in advance until June 8, the deadline for counties to report their results to the state.
Oz, who is endorsed by former President Donald Trump, leading McCormick with 1,079 votes, or 0.08 percentage points, out of 1,340,248 votes counted as of 5 p.m. Friday. The race was close enough to trigger Pennsylvania’s automatic counting of votes, with the gap between candidates within 0.5 percent of the law. The Associated Press will not announce the winner of the race until a likely recount is complete.
Both campaigns have hired Washington-based attorneys to direct their vote-counting efforts, and both have hired Philadelphia-based campaign strategists who have helped lead the operation. Election Day vote counting action for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2020.
The two campaigns involved dozens of attorneys and volunteers around the president’s battlefield as election officials and the election commission checked the remaining ballots.
Major Republican candidates and their super PACs reportedly spent more than $70 million in the primary campaign. The winner will face Democratic Lieutenant General John Fetterman in the midterm elections in November in an election that Democrats see as their best chance of picking a seat in the closely divided Senate.
Fetterman wins the Democratic nomination while in hospital recovering from a stroke four days before the election. Incumbent Republican Senator Pat Toomey will retire after two terms.
Trump’s power is emerging once again, as he seeks a third straight victory in the Republican Senate primaries after “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance won the presidential election. Ohio earlier this month and US Representative Ted Budd easily scored a victory in North Carolina on Tuesday.
County election boards begin meeting Friday to sort out provisional or problematic ballots, even as elections officials process the final ballots of mailed ballots and election day ballots from the precincts.
The state’s 67 counties have until Tuesday under state law to certify their results to the state. The state’s top elections official then has until next Thursday to issue a recount, which is required – unless the losing candidate requests in writing that it not be recounted. perform.
Oz’s campaign manager declined to comment Friday night. McCormick’s campaign said it had no plans to refuse a recount.
Counties have up to three weeks after the election – June 7 – to finish counting votes and another day to report the results to the state.
Initial results may vary: A recount of the votes in a statewide judicial race last November left the winner by more than 5,500 votes in a race where more than 2 million ballots were cast. be voted on.
Before that, there could be a flurry of lawsuits contesting the decisions of several counties about whether to count ballots that are difficult to read or have an irregular number.
So far, no campaign has gone to court and both candidates have expressed confidence in victory.
Oz and McCormick dominated the seven-man GOP field, blanketing the state’s TV screens with political ads for months and spending millions of their own, before conservative activist Kathy Barnette rose to prominence in the past few months. Last day of the campaign.
The hot-tempered, hardline pro-Trump alternative has turned both Oz and McCormick into “globalists” who pretend to be Trump supporters who sell carpets and are too rich to help those normal. She finished a distant third.
Oz, who is best known as the host of the daytime TV show “The Dr. Oz Show,” had to overcome the suspicions of hard-line Trump supporters about his conservative credentials. grandfather. Rivals also alleged that his dual citizenship with Turkey would affect his allegiance to the United States. If elected, Oz would be the nation’s first Muslim senator.
McCormick was virtually unknown 4 months ago and highlights his credentials as a hometown success story.
Not only did he have to overcome Trump’s endorsement of Oz, but Trump also viciously and repeatedly attacked McCormick during the final two weeks of the race, calling him a libertarian in Wall Street, a China seller and candidate of “special interests and globalists, and the Founding of Washington.”
