Mehmet Oz and Dave McCormick are locked in a very tight Republican primary for the open U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania, with both candidates telling supporters that there would be no declared winner on Election Night.
Oz led McCormick by 1,241 votes, as of 1 p.m. Thursday. That's a lead of less than 0.2% out of the more than 1.3 million votes counted so far. A full recount, which is mandatory in races where the difference between a winner and another candidate is less than half a percent, appears very likely.
Some heavily populated counties in southeastern Pennsylvania had thousands of ballots yet to be counted, and an issue in Lancaster County with scan codes on about 22,000 mail-in ballots caused a delay in the full processing of ballots there.
"There will not be a winner tonight," Oz told supporters in Bucks County late on Election night. McCormick told his supporters the same thing at a party in western Pennsylvania.
Get top local stories in Philly delivered to you every morning. Sign up for NBC Philadelphia's News Headlines newsletter.
Neither candidate had spoken publicly Wednesday morning.
Oz, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump and campaigned in recent weeks with Trump, hoped that the endorsement would push him over the top.
Decision 2022
Coverage of the 2022 elections
But voters who talked to NBC10 continued to say that the celebrity television doctor known as "Dr. Oz" needed to prove his political bonafides.
McCormick is a former hedge fund CEO from western Pennsylvania who sought to cast aside the Trump endorsement as irrelevant to voters in 2022.
Both spent millions of their own fortunes on the race. Outside political action committees also spent millions on the race.
The eventual winner will face off against Democrat John Fetterman in the November general election. Fetterman, Pennsylvania's lieutenant governor, won the Democratic primary on Tuesday.
The race for the U.S. Senate seat of retiring Republican Pat Toomey featured combative contests for both parties.
The progressive Fetterman pulled far ahead on the Democratic side, easily beating U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb, a congressman from western Pennsylvania and state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta of Philadelphia.
Fetterman's health suddenly became an issue in the closing days of the primary campaign.
He is currently off the campaign trail while recovering from a stroke he said was caused by a heart condition called atrial fibrillation.
Fetterman said in a statement Sunday that doctors believe he's on his way to making “a full recovery.” But, it was unclear how long he would need to rest and recover.
Then on Monday, his campaign said that Fetterman wouldn't be attending his campaign's primary election night party Tuesday. He had pacemaker implant surgery on Election Day.
