PITTSBURGH (KYW Newsradio) — Democrat John Fetterman defeated Republican Mehmet Oz to become Pennsylvania’s next U.S. senator, a key race in the party’s quest to retain control of the upper chamber. The victory means Pennsylvania will have two elected Democrats in the Senate for the first time since the mid-19th century.
Fetterman, 53, beat back national headwinds favoring Republicans as well as questions about his stroke recovery in a bruising race that saw record outside-campaign spending, which produced a barrage of seemingly non-stop ads. He will take the open seat vacated by Republican U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, who declined to run for re-election.
Fetterman credited his “every county, every vote” campaign strategy, in which the tattooed and hoodie-wearing candidate sought to bring the Democratic Party back to predominantly white working-class areas that have increasingly rejected it, even as he ran on a progressive platform.
“And that’s exactly what happened,” Fetterman told a cheering crowd early Wednesday at a concert venue in Pittsburgh. “We jammed them up. We held the line. I never expected that we would turn these red counties blue, but we did what we needed to do and we had that conversation across every one of those counties.”
He said he ran for “anyone that ever got knocked down that got back up.”
“This race is for the future of every community across Pennsylvania, for every small town or person that felt left behind, for every job that has been lost, for every factory that was ever closed and for every person that worked hard but never gets ahead,” he added.
Oz, 62, a surgeon and television personality who moved to the state shortly before declaring his candidacy, tightened a polling disadvantage in the summer, pitching himself as a moderate who would combat “radicalism” in D.C.
To underscore the importance of the race, President Joe Biden campaigned in Pennsylvania for Fetterman three times in the final three weeks, while former President Donald Trump came in to hold a rally for Oz, his endorsed candidate.
The shape of the race was turned on its head when Fetterman suffered a stroke in May just days before the primary. In the general election’s lone debate in October, Fetterman often struggled to answer questions smoothly and stumbled over his word choices, a common effect of a stroke called auditory processing disorder. Fetterman has insisted he will recover fully, but he also required closed-captioning during media interviews and the debate.
Oz challenged Fetterman over whether he had been honest about the effects of the stroke and pressed Fetterman to release his medical records. Fetterman refused, and also refused to let his doctors answer questions from reporters.
He tried to turn his recovery into a strength, accusing Oz of trying to capitalize on his disability and saying it had made him more empathetic toward people with medical problems.
Outside experts have noted the cognitive abilities of those recovering from minor strokes remain strong, even if they can’t express themselves as they’d like.
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Fetterman has served as Pennsylvania lieutenant governor since 2018, following a long tenure as mayor of Braddock, a small borough outside of Pittsburgh. He lost a bid for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in 2016. As lieutenant governor, he championed a progressive approach to the state pardons board and held events in every county stumping for the legalization of marijuana.
Fetterman, originally of York County, drew a cult-like following nationally based on his image as a nontraditional politician who sports tattoos and dresses in workman shorts and hoodies.
Much of the communication between Oz and Fetterman during the campaign happened in stunts and social media ploys. Fetterman scored viral points by painting Oz as an out-of-touch, carpet-bagging candidate from New Jersey — seizing on moments such as the one where Oz posted a video conflating Redner's and Wegmans while shopping for crudité.
Oz was also attacked relentlessly during both the primary and the general election for his record of changing his mind on major issues, including guns, fracking and abortion — the latter issue surging to the forefront after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June.
Oz, indeed, has changed his positions, sometimes quite markedly. In a 2019 interview on the Breakfast Club, he seemed to support a woman’s right to choose and rejected the idea of “heartbeat” legislation, saying, “this whole thing about the heart beating. I mean, there are electrical exchanges at six weeks, but the heart’s not beating.”
In the primary, though, Oz moved to the right, coming out against abortion with three exceptions — for rape, incest and to save the mother’s life. However, in attempting to explain what he’d said in the 2019 interview, he seemed to take a much harder anti-abortion stand.
“If life starts at conception, it’s still murder to terminate a child whether the heart’s beating or not,” Oz said.
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That position differs starkly from Fetterman, who ran on a platform hoping to codify Roe into federal law.
Oz also relentlessly attacked Fetterman over flip-flopping on natural gas drilling.
Oz was joined by about 300 supporters in Newtown, Bucks County Tuesday night, where they had hoped for a victory. Oz appeared briefly and told them not to lose heart.
“When all the ballots are counted, we believe we will win this race. We’ve been closing the gap all night and we have a lot more ballots to go,” he said.
Democrats across the country faced tough odds Tuesday. The party that controls the White House typically underperforms in the midterms, and this year Democrats were particularly vulnerable based on both inflation and rising violent crime in cities including Philadelphia, where progressive policies have come under tougher scrutiny as the murder rate has reached record levels.
Pro-Oz super PACs spent millions running ads in recent weeks painting Fetterman as a soft-on-crime candidate who would add to the problem. Fetterman made his bona-fides in Braddock based in large part on his focus on reducing crime, which saw a decline that included five years without a murder followed by a rise during his tenure.
The pro-Oz ads focused more on Fetterman’s record on the state parole board, where he pushed for leniency for people serving life sentences for second-degree murder in killings they didn’t directly commit.
The election was the most expensive for a U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania, surpassing $300 million. Money from national groups poured in, and Oz spent more than $25 million of his own fortune on the race.