For the past several weeks, the two leading candidates in Pennsylvania’s G.O.P. Senate primary, David McCormick and Mehmet Oz, had been locked in something like a statistical dead heat. McCormick, the Gulf War-fighting ex-hedge fund C.E.O., has been trailing just slightly behind Oz, after the celebrity heart surgeon picked up an endorsement from Donald Trump. The race has since taken a particularly ugly turn, with Trump and Oz hitting McCormick for his hedge fund’s ties to China, and McCormick allies smearing Oz, a Muslim dual U.S.-Turkish citizen, for serving in that country’s military and voting in a 2018 election there.

And yet, incredibly, while these two carpetbaggers and aspiring centimillionaires have been pounding each other into the dirt over who is the more authentic populist in advertising campaigns—for a total cost that’s already eclipsed $50 million—a third, largely unknown Senate candidate has made a late-breaking run to snatch the election, which is next Tuesday, from both of them. “If I had to bet,” the Pennsylvania superlawyer (and political scion) Shanin Specter told me earlier this week, “Kathy Barnette is poised to either win or come close.”