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In a new ad, Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee for Senate in Pennsylvania, highlights his career as a heart surgeon, telling viewers, "Doctors fix big things. I fixed hearts and fought for every last one."
The message is a new twist in a race that has become increasingly personal between the two candidates as the critical Senate contest turns to the fall stretch.
In the ad, Oz also tells viewers that his opponent, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman would "hurt us."
"I’ll heal us and bring change to our divided nation," he adds.
The new spot comes amid a growing spat between Fetterman and Oz that's played out mostly on social media and online.
That back-and-forth was spurred by the resurfacing of a video Oz posted in April which showed the candidate shopping for ingredients for a "crudite."
Democrats and Fetterman's campaign quickly seized on the video, drawing attention to Oz's use of the word "crudite" for an arrangement more commonly called a veggie tray and poking fun at him for mistaking the name of grocery store he visited in the video.
The spat continued this week when Rachel Tripp, Oz's communications advisor, told Insider that Fetterman was at least partially to blame for the stroke he suffered in May. "If John Fetterman had ever eaten a vegetable in his life," Tripp said, "then maybe he wouldn’t have had a major stroke and wouldn’t be in the position of having to lie about it constantly."
In this new ad, Oz still attacks Fetterman, saying, "Radical John Fetterman spent a career in politics, making things worse," but the tone of the ad is very different from that of their Twitter wars.