Had you just followed the Democratic U.S. Senate nominee John Fetterman’s tweets — or the staffer the Fetterman campaign says does much of his tweeting — you would be led to believe voters are most concerned about Sheetz runs, New Jersey, marijuana, crudité and contortionist efforts at tying his Republican opponent, Mehmet Oz, to the Jan. 6 riot in Washington, D.C.
Mr. Fetterman also tweets a lot about abortion and how Mr. Oz will take Pennsylvania women’s right to an abortion away — something that will never happen: The U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision has no impact on the legality of abortion in Pennsylvania; an abortion is still legal here through the 23rd week of pregnancy, and after that if the mother’s life or health is in danger. Medical pill abortions and in-clinic procedure abortions are also both still legal.
For whatever reason, Mr. Fetterman has calculated that voters’ concerns about inflation, the surging crime wave, and the consequences of record illegal border crossings — including the smuggling of Chinese fentanyl across the border and into the commonwealth’s suburbs, cities and small rural communities — aren’t actually top-tier concerns.
This decision to skip over major issues isn’t the result of Fetterman’s stroke, nor was it a lapse in judgment: It’s just who he is. If he were the working-class economic populist he’s often billed as, he would be focusing on those issues, and the pain they’re inflicting.
Instead, Mr. Fetterman has campaigned as a reliable progressive in a year people are looking for much more than a guy who just looks like he has your back: They want skills, leadership and not to be told the problems they’re facing aren’t as bad as they think they are.
Yet people need more than just someone to vote against, something Mr. Oz said he understood once the general election campaign began in earnest. That is when he said he decided he needed to give them someone to vote for, something he admits hasn’t always been without its challenges.
People assumed they knew who Mr. Oz was, based on his appearances on television for years as a celebrity doctor — which included a lot of silliness Mr. Fetterman and opposition researchers could use against him. Mr. Oz also brought some ridicule upon himself when a video he recorded over high costs at the grocery store featured him calling a veggie tray “crudité.”
Mr. Oz said he needed to do several things at one time to give people a reason to vote for him rather than against the other guy: “I understood I needed to go where voters are and listen to their problems — really listen, figure out solutions, admit when I don’t have all of the answers but will work with others to find a way to solve them, and then ask them how I earn their trust and their vote.”
“Getting out in the state, in places where candidates rarely go, and hearing stories people rarely have the opportunity to tell, has been rewarding,” said Mr. Oz. “I’ve learned so much about people’s lives, the things they do to make everyone else’s lives better — and the individual stories of heartbreak and struggles they experience are the stories the powerful in Washington never hear.”
In travels with Mr. Oz in 50 or more counties across the state — I lost count after 50 — the surgeon put aside his comfortable life and found a way to connect with the average voter: at an ice cream shop in rural Huntington County, with college students in State College, with energy workers on a drill pad in Washington County, visiting with distraught community members in the city of Duquesne, on the streets of the Kensington neighborhood in Philly or in the suburbs of Delaware County.
Sometimes he got an earful. Sometimes he got a hug. Sometimes he got both.
Mr. Oz, who has never stopped schlepping across the state since the first of June, said his closing argument for voters on Tuesday isn’t attacking his opponent for his positions, nor is it about attacking Democrats.
“I want to bring balance to Washington, to get Republicans and Democrats to talk to each other about the real big problems that we’re facing,” Mr. Oz said in an interview with the Post-Gazette on the road late last week. “Government can’t function well if people don’t collaborate.”
Mr. Oz, who comes across as polished when conducting cable news interviews — a hazard of his profession he jokes about — often showed another side to voters on the road: curious, compassionate and able to absorb the complexities of the situations in front of him.
Despite winning Donald Trump’s endorsement in the primary, Mr. Oz never adopted Trump’s populist style, as others like J.D. Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona have done. As one voter said in Erie, “He’s more Tom Ridge in temperament if you ask me, and I like that.”
Mr. Oz said he wants to finish his campaign by talking bout how he would solve the most pressing issues of our time — inflation, crime and the border — and how he will keep himself from getting “swamp fever” inside the Beltway.
“Inflation can be solved with two paths,” he said, “the better path is unleashing energy in Pennsylvania, because one third of all inflation is driven by an energy crisis, so when you curtail the ability of hardworking people to harvest natural gas out of the ground, you are hurting the economy.”
On crime, Mr. Oz said currently police are not allowed to do their job: “The crime solution to me is everyone does their job again; cops run up to criminals, wear body cams so we have confirmation that everything was done correctly, and frivolous complaints are thrown aside.”
He adds that district attorneys have to prosecute criminals and we have to have cash bail for violent offenses. “I’m okay with being more lenient on nonviolence; we don’t want to put people smoking marijuana in jail. But people who are stabbing people will then use guns next time,” he said. “If you are carjacking someone, there’s a higher chance you’ll kill someone as well, so carjacking is a real offense. The short of it is we have to enforce the rules. When cops arrest a carjacker, they have to go to jail.”
On the border, he said his plan begins with getting rid of asylum-seeking at the border: “Have enough border patrol there to repel people who don’t deserve asylum, go after the cartels and terrorist organizations and shut them down.”
As for how he will keep himself grounded, Oz said it begins with his pledge to never run for the office more than twice: “If I win, I am term-limiting myself to only running for this office twice; I am going to serve and get out, and then get the hell out of the way for the next generation.”
“The state’s success will depend on me spending more time on Parade Street in Erie, or in Kensington in Philadelphia, or Luzerne and Bucks Counties than in Washington, D.C., once the week is over in the Capitol. Voters send you to represent them, not represent D.C.,” he said.
“That is the long way of me saying that is how I will stay connected. Those are the people and places that need help; they are the reason I ran; and they will keep me grounded more than anything or anyone else.”
North Side native Salena Zito is a national political reporter for The Washington Examiner, a New York Post columnist and co-author of “The Great Revolt”
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