With the Republican US Senate primary in Pennyslvania too close too call on Wednesday, former President Trump had a familiar prescription for Mehmet Oz, the celebrity doctor he endorsed against Dave McCormick. In posts on his Truth Social network, Trump urged Oz to "declare victory" before the counting process is completed, the BBC reports. "It makes it much harder for them to cheat with the ballots that they 'just happened to find,'" said Trump, who narrowly lost Pennsylvania to President Biden in 2020 and has long insisted that the election was "stolen."
"Here we go again," Trump said Wednesday. "In Pennsylvania they are unable to count the Mail-In Ballots. It is a BIG MESS." The former president has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that voting by mail leads to increased fraud, the AP reports. In Pennsylvania, both parties support a change in the law that would allow officials to start counting mailed ballots before Election Day. A printing error in heavily Republican Lancaster County has also delayed counting. Oz currently has a lead of fewer than 2,000 votes over McCormick, with tens of thousands of votes still to be counted. With an automatic recount likely to be triggered, a final result may not be known for weeks, Politico reports.
Oz has not taken Trump's advice and declared victory, though he told Sean Hannity on Fox Wednesday night that "the election is ours, we have done well" and thanked Trump for "putting so much effort into this race." McCormick, a former hedge fund CEO, told Laura Ingraham that he's "excited about where we are." Robert Gleason, former chair of the Pennsylvania GOP, tells the Washington Post that Trump appears worried that his chosen candidate might lose. "For him to declare any kind of victory before all the votes are counted, he must be in a panic then," Gleason says. (More Pennsylvania stories.)
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