Dr Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee for Senate in Pennsylvania, has been mocked for posting a video of a “fired up” crowd that actually didn’t appear very enthused to see him.
“Monroeville is fired up and ready for a Dose of Reality!” Dr Oz tweeted on Monday night, adding an eight-second clip of him greeting a crowd at an event.
“Your comms team is out to ruin you, Oz,” Elaine McCullough tweeted. “They’ve put out some disastrous ads for you, but didn’t you even look at this one before you let them publish it? The people are apathetic, their movements are mechanical, and it looks like they’re unhappy with what they’ve been paid.”
“I was a cheerleader in high school. This is NOT fired up. The amount of burpees, laps and leg lifts my coach would [have] demanded after failing this bad would have had me sobbing in an ice bath,” Sarah May-Seward added.
“Trump staged better fakes. Probably cost less too,” one Twitter user said.
“Team Oz finally figured out how to recruit effective from Craigslist,” another added.
Several people referenced the trilogy of zombie movies shot in Pennsylvania by George Romero, starting with The Night of the Living Dead from 1968, which is often referred to as the first modern zombie film.
“Can someone please point out a single person in this video who looks ‘fired up’,” one account holder asked.
“Monroeville appears to have already taken a dose Ambien,” another said.
Several polls have recently shown a close race in Pennsylvania. After being ahead by double digits in multiple surveys, the Democratic Senate nominee and the current Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman was shown to lead 48 to 44 per cent against Dr Oz, with five per cent being undecided and three per cent supporting another candidate in a poll released by Emerson College on 25 August.
Asking the voters who they expect to end up winning, 56 per cent said Mr Fetterman, while 44 per cent said they thought Dr Oz would eke out a win.
The Executive Director of Emerson College Polling, Spencer Kimball, said in a statement that “three out of four urban voters support Fetterman whereas 59 per cent of rural voters support Oz. Suburban voters are the battleground for this election, they are split 47 per cent support Fetterman and 47 per cent support Oz”.
Speaking about a possible 2024 presidential rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, Mr Kimball said, “significant portions of young voters and college-educated voters say they would support someone else or are undecided on a Trump-Biden 2024 ballot”.
In connection to Mr Biden’s recent announcement on student loan relief, Mr Kimball said the president “seems to be consciously attempting to re-motivate this base of support in key states like Pennsylvania ahead of a Midterm Election”.
