Pennsylvania’s Senate race may represent a setback for Donald Trump’s “MAGA” wing of the Republican Party, and his chosen candidate seems to know it.
Dr Mehmet Oz declared in a fundraising email, first reported by The Daily Beast, on Monday that the former president’s political movement was “dying” as he trails Democrat John Fetterman in both poll numbers and fundraising totals in the hotly-contested Rust Belt state.
“MAGA MOVEMENT IS DYING,” read the email’s subject line. The body text depicted an equally grim outlook for Dr Oz’s campaign: “Liberals are winning the fundraising race, and the America First Pro-Trump movement feels defeated.”
“Our nation cannot afford for the MAGA movement to die,” it continued.
While a dire tone in fundraising emails is fairly common for candidates in US politics nowadays, the former president and his allies are typically known for taking the opposite approach in their campaigns: Mr Trump is famously known for predicting (or in the case of Jan 6, declaring) victory over his opponents with confidence and he rarely strikes a pessimistic tone about his own electoral chances or those of candidates he has endorsed.
The email is a further sign of the hurdles Dr Oz’s campaign is facing in its battle to keep the US Senate seat currently held by Pat Toomey in Republican hands.
While Mr Fetterman has been slowly recovering from a stroke that revealed an underlying heart condition and has been absent from the in-person campaign trail, his team has embarked on the digital warpath. They’ve brutalised the lieutenant governor’s opponent for his properties outside the state of Pennsylvania, where he apparently lived and voted until quite recently.
In one notable example, keen observers on Mr Fetterman’s campaign hammered Dr Oz as a carpetbagger after noticing that the Republican celebrity TV doc had filmed one of his campaign ads outside of the state from a luxurious mansion in New Jersey.
Dr Oz eked out a narrow primary win that went to recounts over two competitive GOP opponents earlier this year, thanks to an endorsement from fellow celeb-turned-politician Donald Trump. The endorsement riled many in the state who believed that Dr Oz’s record was insufficiently conservative.
Weeks after his primary victory, he now trails his general election opponent, Mr Fetterman, in all available polling.
Mr Fetterman is set to headline his first in-person fundraiser since the stroke on Thursday in Philadelphia; despite his break from the campaign trail, he holds a dominant lead in the money battle with nearly $10m raised through the month of June. The Democrat’s campaign ended the month with $5.5m on hand, compared to $1.1m for Dr Oz’s campaign.
