A concerned Sean Hannity on Wednesday reiterated his support for Mehmet Oz in the GOP Pennsylvania primary and later welcomed Oz on as a guest, amid recent polling indicating a three-way race with a soaring Kathy Barnette.
After Hannity presented a Fox News poll conducted earlier this month that showed Oz at 22 percent, David McCormick at 20 percent, and Barnette at 19 percent, the Fox host admitted, “I like Kathy.”
“But the problem is,” he explained, “we’re now looking at what is a must-hold Republican Senate seat if the Republicans ever want to take the majority in the U.S. Senate.” Hannity then listed a series of elements of Barnette’s past that he deemed troubling, one of which was a January 2016 tweet in which she called then-President Barack Obama a “Muslim.”
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“With six days left in this campaign, there are serious, real, open questions” about Barnette, Hannity said.
As for Oz, Hannity said, “I see him by far as the Republican candidate in this primary that will win the general election.”
With that, Hannity welcomed on Oz—whom the Fox host and former President Donald Trump have endorsed—to restate his case to Pennsylvania voters, who will head to the polls next Tuesday.
“I concur with your diagnosis. She is a mystery,” Oz said of Barnette. The controversial celebrity doctor then repeated many of the arguments that Hannity had just made, including his electability in the general election and how Barnette lost a 2020 House race in a district near Philadelphia.
“We have Washington money investing in Barnette to hurt [Donald] Trump,” Oz said at one point, in a moment representative of a fairly standard heat-of-a-campaign cable news hit during which he also asked viewers to “please” make a donation.
Later, Oz again referred to Barnette as a “mystery person” and warned that her past would be “fodder for the Democrats.”
Until recently, national attention directed at Barnette had been slim, though reports now highlight, among other things, how she frequently makes baseless election fraud claims, not unlike many other Republicans seeking public office—some even to oversee voting itself.
