Kathy Barnette refuses to endorse Dr. Oz for Senate

Kathy Barnette has still not endorsed Dr. Mehmet Oz since the celebrity doctor won the GOP nomination for Pennsylvania Senate in June, despite the latter’s claim that all his former rivals have endorsed him.

“No, I have not endorsed Oz. He knows that,” Barnette, the conservative commentator who came in third in the GOP primary, told CNN in June. She added that she wasn’t surprised “the truth may elude them sometimes,” given how “they lied about [her]” during the primary.

This rebuttal comes after Oz claimed on Fox News that “my competition — they’ve all endorsed me, by the way. God bless them, gracefully done that.”

Barnette told POLITICO last week that while she hasn’t ruled out endorsing him in the future, she believes the nastiness of the primary “left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths on our side of the aisle” and that Oz needs to figure out “why over 70 percent of those in Pennsylvania did not vote” for him. Oz won the primary with only 31.2% of the vote.

In order to gain Barnette’s endorsement, Oz will have to refocus “on the issues that matter” to Pennsylvania Republicans, Barnette told POLITICO. She’s long criticized Oz’s priorities, even before the primary was called — back in May, on  Philadelphia radio program “The Dom Giordano Program,” she said she would hold Oz accountable if he won because “we don’t have much more room to go on just picking Mitch McConnell’s and calling it a win.”

When she went on the show again in July, she said her “number one advice to [Oz] would be to fire some of these people who are advising him.”

“Someone advised him to go into the middle of a field with church shoes on and take a photo of himself,” she said. “That’s not going to win. People are having very real problems. People are stressed up. People are unnerved.”

Barnette was an especially fierce critic of Oz during the primary. During a May interview with Newsmax, she questioned Oz’s loyalty to America because of his Turkish nationality.

“Is he a Pennsylvanian? Is he New Jersey? Is he America First? Turkey First?” Barnette asked. “We don’t have time for him to figure out who he is.”

Oz’s biggest endorsements include the other former GOP frontrunner for Senate, Dave McCormick, as well as former President Donald Trump, whose support helped launch him to victory back in June. But despite Trump’s support — which Oz has notably shifted away from advertising since his primary win — FiveThirtyEight calls the Pennsylvania Senate race a “toss-up” and predicts a 51-in-100 chance that Democratic nominee John Fetterman will take the seat in November.

Oz was also recently criticized for giving a keynote speech at a meeting for a lobbying group that provides a haven for pyramid schemes just days after securing the nomination.