Yes, Dr. Oz Could Actually Win

Dr. Mehmet Oz (R-PA)

Celebrities have run for public office for decades.  Oftentimes people name-check Ronald Reagan when they have a conversation about the onslaught of celebrity candidates, primarily because he's the most successful (and it's oftentimes lost in the mythology of Reagan that he was once a major movie star, albeit not a particularly good actor), but it goes back before Reagan.  In the 1940's, for example, actress Helen Gahagan Douglas (the wife of Oscar winner Melvyn Douglas) ran successfully for Congress and was involved in one of the uglier Senate battles of the 1950's when she faced off against "Tricky Dick" (a moniker she coined) aka Richard Nixon two years before he became Vice President.  Since Reagan, we've seen candidates ranging from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Jesse Ventura to Clay Aiken try their hands at politics, sometimes failing but occasionally succeeding.  And of course, former President Donald Trump's greatest success in life has been in crafting a celebrity persona from nothing (he certainly can't claim a lot of success as an actual businessman, but his ability to market himself as a successful entrepreneur is undeniable).

So when Mehmet Oz (aka Dr. Oz made famous from his many appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show) announced for the Senate, I wasn't immediately taken to making jokes about it, even if it caught the larger public consciousness by surprise.  Dr. Oz has been toying with this run for weeks, and I know better after Jesse Ventura (and certainly after Donald Trump) than to not take a celebrity candidate seriously.  But more so I know the dynamics of the Pennsylvania Republican primary put Oz in an unusually strong position that he might not be in, say, North Carolina or Ohio.  

That's because the Pennsylvania Republican primary has largely been a flat affair.  While Democrats quickly lined up a frontrunner (John Fetterman), a clear second place that could upset (Conor Lamb), and a respectable outsider (Val Arkoosh), giving us a primary that, provided it doesn't get too negative, will produce a viable general election candidate, the Keystone Republicans have struggled to do the same.  Several of the best candidates (Ryan Costello, Charlie Dent) seemed to assume that they couldn't survive a primary & while they're reportedly still toying with the idea, I don't think are plausible options in the Trump Era.  Other candidates like Mike Kelly simply declined.  And the Republican primary frontrunner Sean Parnell suspended his campaign recently amid a messy custody hearing.

This means that Oz is now the highest-profile candidate in a race that is slowly closing (with a March 8th filing deadline).  Other candidates could get in, and Oz could falter, but he's a famous name in a race that has none.  And as a result, you wouldn't be foolish to describe Oz as being the frontrunner, though I wouldn't go that far quite yet (though, like I said, I'm taking him seriously).  Oz comes with some uniquenesses beyond celebrity.  He's a doctor in an era where doctors have been celebrated repeatedly (albeit demonized by Oz's own party), and he has decades of goodwill on The Oprah Winfrey Show to fall back (it does not appear, at least as of when I'm writing this on Friday morning, that Winfrey has endorsed in this race or even made a statement on it yet).  Republicans, who have struggled to make inroads with female voters, might be intrigued by a the potential cache of someone associated with Winfrey in the race.

Sen. Al Franken (D-MN)

But Oz also comes with a lot of unique baggage as a celebrity (not to mention the risks of being a first-time candidate in a high-profile race).  Oz's association with weight loss scammers is so notable he was grilled by Sen. Claire McCaskill in a 2014 Senate hearing  for raising these scams to legitimacy through his television program.  Oz is closely-associated with Donald Trump in a state that Trump lost last year, and is known for his promotions of hydroxychloroquine, a drug that was supposed to help with Covid-19 but was really just a conspiracy theory elevated by Oz & Trump.  Oz also is on the record as saying that reopening schools would be worthwhile even if it led to the deaths of thousands (though he later retracted this statement), which will surely hurt a with a general public that took Covid more seriously than your average Republican primary voter

I've seen a few allusions of paths that Oz could follow, but I think my friend Drew might've gotten it best when he said that Oz had vibes of Al Franken's chances in 2008, which I think is quite apt.  Franken, like Oz, came into his race with a lot of baggage (forgetting the reasons that Franken would eventually resign which weren't public at the time, Franken's comedy bits had had a lot of humor about women that many felt bordered on the sexist and, at the very least, made him vulnerable).  But similar to Pennsylvania, after several prominent Minnesota Democrats (Mike Hatch, Betty McCollum, Mike Ciresi) either dropped out or refused to run, Franken became the most plausible Democratic nominee.  He also won the general election, less because he ran a great campaign (Franken's 2014 campaign was very strong, his 2008 one was much weaker), but because the national environment allowed for a candidate who wouldn't otherwise win to take the W.  Democrats will bristle comparing Oz to someone they agree with to Franken, but it's accurate because Franken would've lost in most circumstances in his first race (I'd argue he couldn't have taken Minnesota as a non-incumbent in 2012 or 2016 even as the state went blue for Obama/Clinton), but he picked the right year to do it.  Republicans will be taking a risk betting on Oz, a non-serious person who could well be given the nomination to one of the most important Senate races in the country, but past precedent is not necessarily against Oz, and only foolish Democrats would look at this as a gimme race or a contest they shouldn't bring their A-Game.