This article will be updated with official election results.
Early Wednesday morning, The Associated Press called the Pennsylvania Senate Race, with Democrat John Fetterman taking the win over Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz.
Crunching the numbers: When the race was called around 1:00 a.m. EST, Fetterman had 49.9% of the vote, with Oz trailing behind by over 100,000 votes.
The bigger picture: Deseret News reported that Pennsylvania, a historical swing state, would be one of the states critical to determining whether the U.S. Senate would be controlled by Republicans or Democrats.
The Candidates: Democrat John Fetterman has been serving as Pennsylvania’s Lieutenant Governor since 2019, and previously served as the Mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania, for 12 years.
- Fetterman persisted on his campaign trail after suffering a stroke that nearly took his life earlier this year, The New York Times reported. He assured his voters that this medical roadblock would not affect his ability to serve in the Senate if he was elected.
- Dr. Mehmet Oz, a Republican, is widely known for his position as a celebrity doctor who garnered fame from his appearances on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in the early 2000s and later his own spinoff: “The Dr. Oz Show.”
- Oz stated the pandemic was the main motivation in his decision to run for Senate. Although he has only lived in Pennsylvania since 2020, he plans to continue to heal as he did when he was a doctor, but this time politically.
- “During the pandemic, I learned that when you mix politics and medicine, you get politics instead of solutions. That’s why I’m running for the U.S. Senate: to help fix the problems and to help us heal,” Oz wrote in a statement published by the Washington Examiner.