Pennsylvania Republican Senate candidate David McCormick, left, conceded the primary to Mehmet Oz, right, on Friday. — AP Photo/File
HARRISBURG — Former hedge fund CEO David McCormick conceded the Republican primary in Pennsylvania for U.S. Senate to celebrity heart surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz, ending his campaign Friday night as he acknowledged an ongoing statewide recount wouldn’t give him enough votes to make up the deficit.
McCormick said he had called Oz to concede.
“It’s now clear to me with the recount now largely complete that we have a nominee,” McCormick said at a campaign party at a Pittsburgh hotel.
He added, “Tonight is really about us all coming together.”
Before the recount, Oz led McCormick by 972 votes out of 1.34 million votes counted in the May 17 primary. The Associated Press has not declared a winner in the race because an automatic recount is underway and the margin between the two candidates is just 0.07 percentage points.
Friday’s development sets up a general election between Oz, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump, and Democrat John Fetterman in what is expected to be one of the nation’s premier Senate contests.
The result could help determine control of the closely divided chamber, and Democrats view it as perhaps their best opportunity to pick up a seat in the race to replace retiring two-term Republican Sen. Pat Toomey.
Fetterman, the state’s lieutenant governor, acknowledged earlier Friday in a statement that he nearly died when he suffered a stroke just days before his primary. He said he had ignored warning signs for years and a doctor’s advice to take blood thinners.
Oz, who is best known as the host of daytime TV’s “The Dr. Oz Show,” had to overcome millions of dollars in attack ads and misgivings among hard-line Trump backers about his conservative credentials on guns, abortion, transgender rights and other core Republican issues.
The 61-year-old Oz leaned on Trump’s endorsement as proof of his conservative bona fides, while Trump attacked Oz’s rivals and maintained that Oz has the best chance of winning in November in the presidential battleground state.
Rivals made Oz’s dual citizenship in Turkey an issue in the race. If elected, Oz would be the nation’s first Muslim senator.
Born in the United States, Oz served in Turkey’s military and voted in its 2018 election. Oz said he would renounce his Turkish citizenship if he won the November election, and he accused McCormick of making “bigoted” attacks.
Oz and McCormick blanketed state airwaves with political ads for months, spending millions of their own money. Virtually unknown to voters four months ago, McCormick had to introduce himself to voters, and he mined Oz’s long record as a public figure for material in attack ads. He got help from a super PAC supporting him that spent $20 million.
Like McCormick, Oz moved from out of state to run in Pennsylvania.
Oz, a Harvard graduate, New York Times bestselling author and self-styled wellness advocate, lived for the past couple of decades in a mansion in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, above the Hudson River overlooking Manhattan — drawing accusations of being a carpetbagger and political tourist.
The celebrity heart surgeon stressed his connections to Pennsylvania, saying he grew up just over the state border in Delaware, went to medical school in Philadelphia and married a Pennsylvania native.
Before he ran, McCormick was something of a celebrity on Wall Street, running the world’s largest hedge fund, and had strong Republican Party establishment ties going back to his service in former President George W. Bush’s administration. His wife, Dina Powell, was a deputy national security adviser to Trump and had strong party connections as well.
McCormick had long considered running for public office, and moved from his home on Connecticut’s ritzy Gold Coast to a house in Pittsburgh before declaring his candidacy.
He stressed his connections to Pennsylvania: growing up on a farm as a high school wrestling and football star before going to West Point and fighting in the Gulf War. He also spent 10 years in Pittsburgh in business, giving him a stronger claim to Pennsylvania than Oz.
Like Oz, McCormick had worked hard to earn Trump’s endorsement, and he insisted he was the authentic “America First” candidate, invoking Trump’s nickname for his governing philosophy.
However, Trump attacked McCormick repeatedly in the campaign’s final two weeks, leading a rally for Oz where he called McCormick the “candidate of special interests and globalists and the Washington establishment.”
Despite that, McCormick closed the campaign by airing a TV ad showing a video clip of Trump in a private 2020 ceremony congratulating McCormick, saying “you’ve served our country well in so many different ways.”
“You know why he said that,” McCormick said in the TV ad. “Because it’s true. I risked my life for America and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. ... I’m a pro-life, pro-gun, America First conservative and damn proud of it.”
Members of the Pharr, Texas, police department visit a memorial at Robb Elementary School to honor the victims killed in the recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. The massacre of 19 children and two teachers has raised questions about having police in schools. —AP Photo/Eric Gay
Police stand watch as guests arrive for the service for Nevaeh Bravo at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, Thursday in Uvalde, Texas. Bravo was killed in last week’s elementary school shooting. —AP Photo/Eric Gay
Students from Olathe East High School are lead to a staging area to reunite with their parents after a shooting at the school March 4 in Olathe, Kan. Authorities say a suspect shot and wounded a school resource officer and an administrator at the suburban Kansas City high school. —AP Photo/Charlie Riedel
It was the day after an 18-year-old gunman massacred 19 children and two adults in Uvalde, Texas, and Shane Paul Neil kept imagining what it might have felt like if his 15-year-old daughter or 9-year-old son had endured that type of violence. As Neil sat in his home office in New Jersey, reflexively scrolling for new updates, he paused to read a Facebook post from his town councilman — an announcement that there would now be an increased police presence and more frequent patrols at local schools in the aftermath of the shooting.
Nothing about this news brought Neil any measure of comfort. Instead, as a parent of Black children, he found himself confronting the nexus of two uniquely American fears: the possibility of random gun violence, and the consequences of racially biased policing. He shared his reaction in a tweet that soon went viral: “As a Black father I now have two potential threats to be concerned over.”
When Neil, a 44-year-old freelance writer and photographer, scrolled down to the comments unfurling below the councilman’s post, he was surprised — and somewhat relieved — to see that local parents were overwhelmingly opposed to the presence of more police officers. “For white parents it was, ‘we don’t want to bring more guns into school,’” he said. “For myself and other Black parents, it’s that we don’t want to force police interaction in school with our children in particular.”
In the aftermath of the rampage in Uvalde, Republican lawmakers have revived a familiar array of proposals: More police in schools. Increased patrols. “Hardened” campuses with more stringent security measures. Several conservative leaders, including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, insist that arming teachers or school staff with guns might be the best way to guard against another mass shooting.
But the implications of more police, or even the possibility of armed teachers, resonate differently for marginalized communities that already feel disproportionately targeted by law enforcement and school officials. Black and Latino students are suspended or expelled from school at inordinate rates compared with their White peers, and are also less likely to be placed in advanced classes or programs for gifted children. Federal research shows that even Black preschoolers are disciplined at far higher rates than White children. Black and disabled children are the most likely to be referred to or arrested by police, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
More law enforcement officers at schools, Neil says, means more potential for encounters with Black children that could go awry. “It only takes one incident for my son or daughter to have an arrest record, a juvenile record,” Neil says, “and those things stick with you, they follow you.”
Natalie Moss, 43, who works in intellectual property and patent prosecution and lives in Prince George’s County, Md., with her husband and their two preschool-aged sons, finds the idea of anointing teachers as de facto law enforcement officers disturbing. She thinks of her older son, who just turned 4: “There’s a culture of adultification bias against Black children,” she says. “They’re cute when they’re 2 or 3. But when they reach a certain height, it’s different. My child is in the 99th percentile for height — he’s on par with most 6-year-olds in terms of height, so when people approach him, they often think he’s older than he is, already.”
Moss knows what that will mean in just another year or two, she says; her friend recently gave her own young son ‘the talk’: “Types of toys that he’s not allowed to play with outdoors, types of toys that he can’t bring to school with him, certain things he can’t say,” she says. “The way that she wants him to interact if he does encounter law enforcement, because the ultimate goal as a Black parent is to have your child get home safe.”
It doesn’t help, she adds, that the credibility of the police who responded to the shooting in Uvalde has steadily unraveled, as law enforcement officials have made contradictory statements and changed their story numerous times. The failed police response is now the subject of a Justice Department investigation.
“I think that what people have to pay close attention to is how these changing stories bring distrust in law enforcement, particularly in the African-American community as well as communities of color,” Moss says. “I have all these questions. How do I know what’s true and what’s not? As a Black parent, what about any of this would evoke any level of confidence that more police would benefit my Black sons?”
Beatriz Beckford, national director of the social welfare organization Moms Rising, has spoken with her own son numerous times about what to do if he has to interact with law enforcement. She often acts as a drill instructor, giving pop quizzes on car rides to make sure her message is received.
They rehearse the scenarios; there is a script. “I don’t want him to forget,” she says. “I want it to become muscle memory so that when he’s in that moment, he hears my voice.”
If he is ever questioned by police, he is to keep his responses terse, saying no more than what is necessary. Name. Age. I do not consent to any search. Please call my parents.
“My fear is that in being his full, free self, which he has every right to be, that some police officer will see him as a criminal,” Beckford says.
Beckford, who lives in the historically Black Bronzeville section of Chicago, says her community is already “inundated with school police” and she’s heard horror stories, including one about an officer who zip-tied a student.
Finding a way to improve school safety is “complicated,” says Beckford, 41, adding that some parents have told her their children have had positive interactions with school resource officers. But that is the exception, she says.
“There’s not enough space to dream beyond a world where we rely so heavily on police for everything,” she says. “We rely on them to discipline in the classroom. We rely on them to intervene when there’s a mental health crisis.”
As the debate about how to stop school shootings escalates, Ratasha Harley, a 37-year-old mother of four in Maryland and member of the advocacy organization Parents of Black Children, says she is dismayed but not surprised to see the perspectives of families like hers overlooked. She thinks of how she tried to rally community action following outbreaks of gun violence that affected predominantly Black neighborhoods in her area, those efforts didn’t gain much attention or support from white parents. She thinks of the White mom at one PTA meeting who, after recently proposing an active-shooter simulation drill in their school, said: Well, some kids already know what this is like, because they see this in their neighborhoods.
“Our parents remain voiceless,” Harley says. “Nobody is ever really saying: How is this going to affect schools that are predominantly Black, that have negative perceptions and interactions with police all the time, that have trauma from gun violence?”
FILE - Connecticut Sun guard Yvonne Anderson, left, drives against New York Liberty forward Natasha Howard, right, in the second half during a WNBA basketball game, Tuesday, May 17, 2022, in New York. Yvonne Anderson understood that making a WNBA roster as an undrafted rookie was going to be tough and getting that chance a decade after she left college would be even tougher. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)
