ICYMI: Dr. Oz Has Company: Meet the Many Senate GOP Carpetbaggers [Vice News]

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Vice News: Dr. Oz Has Company: Meet the Many Senate GOP Carpetbaggers
By Cameron Joseph
December 8, 2021

“The midterm elections are full of rich Republicans moving to new states and quickly jumping into Senate races.”

Key Points:

• Dr. Oz is not in Jersey anymore. And he’s far from the only Republican carpetbagging across the country in search of political fortune.

• Mehmet Oz… announced that he’d cross the Delaware to run for the Senate in Pennsylvania last week, even though he hadn’t lived in the state for decades and until very recently resided in a New Jersey mansion that overlooks the New York City skyline.

• That makes him one of more than a half-dozen well-funded GOP candidates who have sought out redder pastures this year, jumping into competitive Senate races in states where their local ties aren’t particularly deep.

• But he isn’t even the only carpetbagger heading to Pennsylvania.

• Carla Sands, a wealthy Pennsylvania native, spent most of her adult life in Southern California, and served as a delegate from California for Ted Cruz at the 2016 Republican National Convention… Sands sold her Bel Air, California mansion for almost $20 million in 2019, and has already dropped $3 million of her own money into her Senate campaign.

• Another wealthy, coastal opponent might also be jumping in soon. Hedge fund manager David McCormick… has lived in Connecticut for nearly a decade.

• [Herschel Walker’s] lived for decades in Texas, declaring a suburban Dallas home his primary residency on his taxes for [the] past decade. He only moved back to Georgia full-time to run for the Senate.

• In Arizona, solar power executive Jim Lamon is currently in between properties… [he] recently built a massive ranch in Utah. Lamon even featured a photo of himself outside the Utah ranch on his Senate campaign website.

• Lamon isn’t the only jetsetter in the Arizona GOP primary, however. One of his opponents, Blake Masters…. stayed in Silicon Valley to work for billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel.

• “I did spend the first decade of my career in Silicon Valley,” Masters said at a Navajo County GOP event in April.

• This year’s Senate crop of GOP candidates has an unusually high number of people whose runs have raised residency questions.
  

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