Fetterman Tops GOP’s Oz for Hard-Fought Pennsylvania Senate Seat
(Bloomberg) -- John Fetterman will bring his Pennsylvania brand of Rust Belt progressivism to Washington after defeating Republican television celebrity Mehmet Oz in one of the country’s hardest fought Senate contests.
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The win, projected by NBC and Fox News, flips the seat now held by retiring Republican Senator Patrick Toomey.
For Fetterman, the election represents a personal as well as a political triumph. The 53-year-old lieutenant governor suffered a stroke days before the Democratic primary in May, and returned to the campaign trail in August after intensive speech therapy. He relied on closed captioning to conduct press interviews and his one debate against Oz, where a rocky performance sparked fresh questions about his health.
Fetterman held on despite seeing a double-digit lead evaporate in the final weeks of the campaign. Oz, 62, is a heart surgeon known for hosting “The Dr. Oz Show” for almost 13 years. Backed by former president Donald Trump, Oz used $21 million of his own money and more than $71 million in advertising from the super-PAC affiliated with Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and other outside GOP groups to attack Fetterman for being “soft on crime” and too liberal on economic policies.
Pennsylvania’s significance was on display this past weekend as President Joe Biden and former presidents Trump and Barack Obama descended on the state for rallies.
Sidelined for three months, Fetterman fought his campaign as much on social media as in the $171 million in television ads that dominated the state’s airwaves -- the second most expensive race in the nation, after Georgia’s Senate contest.
Fetterman mocked Oz for an awkward grocery-store video complaining about the price of crudites. (“In PA we call this a... veggie tray,” Fetterman tweeted.) Other recurring themes included attacks on Oz having recently moved to the state from New Jersey and the sometimes unorthodox medical advice he dispensed on his daytime television show.
Born in the manufacturing town of York, Fetterman’s political career started in the Pittsburgh suburb of Braddock, a gritty steel town of less than 2,000 people that elected him mayor in 2005. In a town that was two-thirds Black, he defeated two Black candidates in a three-way race for the Democratic nomination. His margin of victory was a single vote.
In his first statewide race, for the same Senate seat in 2016, he finished third in the Democratic primary. But he won a five-way primary for lieutenant governor before winning the office on a ticket with Governor Tom Wolf in 2018.
Once a devotee of Senator Bernie Sanders, Fetterman ran on unrestricted abortion rights, the legalization of marijuana and shorter prison sentences for non-violent offenders -- an issue Oz and his allies used to portray him as “soft on crime.”
Fetterman downplayed his progressive credentials in the Senate campaign, becoming more evasive about his support for a government-run health care plan like Sanders’ “Medicare for All.” “I’m less fixated on what you call it, and more focused on the result: ensuring access to health care for every American,” Fetterman says.
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“There isn’t anything that I’m running on that is different from any other Democrat in this race or any Democrat running for the Senate nationally,” Fetterman told Bloomberg News. “In 2016, that would have been a fair statement to make, that I would have been on the progressive side, but now that’s where the Democratic Party is.”
Indeed, Fetterman promised that he would be a reliable vote for Biden’s more ambitious climate proposals -- and would vote to end the filibuster to allow Democrats to enact it with a simple majority.
But he had difficulty reconciling his climate activism with his stance on fracking -- an important industry in western Pennsylvania. “I don’t support fracking, at all, and I never have,” he said in 2018. In his October debate with Oz, he repeatedly proclaimed that, “I do support fracking.”
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