As Pennsylvania voters prepare to head to the polls for Tuesday’s primary, GOP Senate hopeful Dr. Mehmet Oz is confident he can win the three-way race despite his opponents’ “bigoted” attacks.
With Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., retiring after serving 12 years in the Senate, the Pennsylvania Senate race is key to Republicans’ and Democrats’ plans for winning a majority in the midterm elections in November.
Democrats currently hold the majority in the 50-50 split Senate, due to Vice President Kamala Harris’ tiebreaking vote.
“I think it's going to be close,” Oz told the Washington Examiner. “I'll win, and it's going to be very tight between me and [David] McCormick."
"I will maintain the lead that I have. A lot of these numbers are becoming pretty rigid, even though there are a lot of undecideds — I bet you a lot of undecideds don't vote because they can't decide. It's not that they're undecided. They can't decide."
Oz, a longtime television personality, was locked in a months-long race with former hedge fund executive David McCormick before conservative activist Kathy Barnette’s last-minute surge in the polls threw pundits’ predictions for a loop.
In recent weeks, Oz’s opponents have attacked him for his Turkish dual citizenship.
“It's the classic kind of a bigoted attack that just is, I think, it's a bomb thrown out there to distract people from what the candidate is really trying to say,” he told the Examiner.
“I'm only maintaining that citizenship to help my mom because she has Alzheimer's, and in Turkey, with all of our support staff, it helps me deal with litigation and other issues to support her there. I can love my mother and love my country, America, at the same time. The vast majority of voters get that — they don't care about that issue.”
As the Donald Trump-endorsed GOP candidate, Oz said the former president’s endorsement was “very important” generally and “critical to the voters of Pennsylvania.”
"It opens their minds up to opportunities,” Oz told the Examiner. “It gets them to think differently about the race because they say, 'OK, well, you know, now that I've got an endorsed candidate, I trust that the president says he's pro-life. Trump says he's pro-Second Amendment.' By the way, the NRA gave me their highest grade for unelected candidates, so I think those are fair narratives.”
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