Surrounded by friends and supporters at the Hotel Indigo in Pittsburgh, David McCormick announced that he was conceding the Pennsylvania GOP U.S. Senate race to Dr. Mehmet Oz.
“We came so close, by the slimmest of margins on election night with thousands of votes outstanding,” McCormick said at the event on June 3 at 6:30 p.m. “We spent the last 17 days making sure that every Republican vote was counted in a way that resulted in the will of Pennsylvania voters being fulfilled. That is what this process is about.
“I called Mehmet Oz to congratulate him on his victory,” McCormick added. “It is important that we beat John Fetterman and take back the majority in the Senate. He has my full support.”
For weeks, polls showed that the race was too close to call. Results from primary election day demonstrated that the projection was accurate.
Though he slipped to third in some recent polls and saw former President Donald Trump endorse Oz in April, McCormick carried a slim lead for most of the night in the primary on May 17.
In the early hours of May 18, Oz pulled ahead.
With 95 percent of the precincts reporting at 12:30 a.m., Oz received 31.2 percent of the vote (397,347) while McCormick tallied 31.1 percent (396,724) and Barnette accumulated 24.7 percent (314,828), according to Decision Desk HQ.
Under Pennsylvania law, an automatic recount is triggered when the two leading candidates have a separation within half of 1 percent. McCormick had the option to forego a recount, but he chose to move forward with the procedure.
On May 23, McCormick’s campaign filed suit against Acting Secretary of the Commonwealth Leigh M. Chapman and county boards of elections. The campaign claimed that the boards were not counting absentee and mail-in ballots in the primary election that were received on time and stamped by the county boards but did not include a date on the exterior mailing envelope.
The campaign asked the court to rule that absentee and mail-in ballots received by the deadline “may not be rejected due solely to the lack of a date in the declaration on the exterior envelope.”
The undated mail ballots at issue in the case were “indisputably submitted on time—they were date-stamped upon receipt—and no fraud or irregularity has been alleged,” McCormick’s attorneys argued in the lawsuit.
Late on June 2, a Pennsylvania state court ruled in favor of McCormick, ordering that contested ballots be included in the count.
On midday June 3, Oz held a slight edge in unofficial results with 31.2 percent (419,661 votes), followed by McCormick at 31.1 percent (418,688 votes), a difference of 973 votes
