At this moment, Mehmet Cengiz Oz has a narrow lead in the Republican primary for Senate in Pennsylvania. It’s hard not to pull for him. After all, few candidates come with an entire Wikipedia page of scams they’ve pushed on national TV. There was the time he pushed colloidal silver, which has absolutely no known medical benefits and plenty of side effects, as a treatment for the common cold. And for cuts and bruises. And for bacterial disease. And for viruses. There were the endless Dr. Oz miracle diet supplements and pills, which Oz promoted, and profited from. There was his promotion of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19—which he promoted on Fox News at least 25 times.
Homeopathy. Conversion therapy. A war on apple juice. Oz seems like the perfect example of Republicans nominating a celebrity known more for scandals than for anything like experience in public office, or understanding of the real issues dealt with in Congress. The kind of candidate who is more of a laughing stock than a serious contender.
You know, like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Or Donald Trump.
Here’s a simple rule that has applied all too often to elections no matter what the level: The most interesting candidate wins. Sure, Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell may have railed against the idea of Republicans nominating more “unelectable candidates,” with memories of past losses like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock—candidates best known for their support of forcing women to go through with pregnancies resulting from rape—but the bigger problem for both of those candidates may have been that those remarks were the only thing about either candidate worth remembering. Todd Akin had been a congressman in Missouri for a decade when he lost his Senate race over his “legitimate rape” statement. Mourdock was Indiana’s state treasurer when he started explaining that rape pregnancy was a “gift from God” that “God intended to happen.”
Washington state Sen. Emily Randall and RuralOrganizing.org's Matt Hildreth talk about what they're seeing and hearing while knocking on doors this week on Daily Kos’ The Brief podcast
The bigger problem for both of them was that these remarks were the only memorable thing they’d done in their careers. Akin was a prep-school kid turned conservative who stumbled into a primary win for an extremely conservative House district when a massive storm cut turnout to single digits. After that, he was on cruise control. Mourdock was a former coal company executive who ran for Congress three times, losing every time, before managing to edge out a win for Indiana Sec. of Treasury. Mourdock managed to secure his spot as the Republican candidate for Senate after running an ad showing incumbent Sen. Richard Luger actually traveling, on Senate business, with fellow Senator Barack Obama. That association was more than enough for the 92% white Republican Party of Indiana to kick Luger to the curb.
Akin and Mourdock were not unelectable candidates because they said something misogynistic and outrageous. They were unelectable because they were weak candidates—candidates who were unable to excite even Republican voters or to get anyone to look beyond their anti-abortion statements.
Candidates like Oz or Schwarzenegger or Trump are a threat specifically because their flapping mouths and long history of blowing through people’s living rooms with a new scam are so familiar. They offer a level of familiarity, amusement, and a chance to poke professional politicians—a class that Americans have been taught to hate for generations—right in the eye. That’s why the guy who played Gopher on the Love Boat was always destined to beat out a guy who was office director for a retiring congressman.
The real message that Republicans should be taking from Akin and Mourdock’s loss is not that they’ve been losing seats by nominating racists, misogynists, and weirdos. Those are exactly the candidates that have proven to be winners for the Republicans. The real message is that blindly anti-abortion positions are extremely damaging to everyone who is not being carried into office by dint of celebrity status.
(Note: This isn’t an indicator that Oz will win the general election, even if his wafer-thin margin holds up in the primary. Because to win, that celebrity candidate has to be more interesting than the person that they’re running against. And all the eyebrows in the world aren’t going to lift Oz past John Fetterman).
It’s all those other Republicans—the ones who have decades in Washington, but who are now forces to adopt positions on abortion rights at least as bad as those voiced by Akin and Mourdock—who are the real bad candidates for Republicans this year. The candidates McConnell views as most electable might be the most likely to hand Republicans some stinging losses.
