McCormick is lagging slightly behind Trump but has been making gains on incumbent Bob Casey in recent weeks.
Pennsburg, Pa. — Back when Kamala Harris ascended to the top of the ticket in late July, this year’s Pennsylvania Republican Senate nominee, Dave McCormick, was quick to turn around one of the most damning political ads of the 2024 cycle.
“Kamala Harris is inspiring and very capable. The more people get to know her, they’re going to be particularly impressed by her ability,” Pennsylvania’s three-term Democratic senator Bob Casey says at the top of the ad as dramatic music booms in the background. The rest of the 90-second spot highlights Harris’s 2019 primary debate positions, in her own words: Nuking the filibuster to pass the Green New Deal, banning fracking, mandatory gun buybacks, and much, much more.
On the stump here last week, McCormick was sticking to the same script as the race comes to a close. “Kamala Harris is the most liberal — extreme liberal — nominee in modern political history,” the former hedge-fund CEO and Gulf War veteran told a crowd of supporters here last Wednesday in Pennsburg, Pa., a roughly hour-long drive from Philadelphia. “Don’t trust me about it. Just look at her in her own words.”
A look at recent surveys here suggests that the Pennsylvania Senate race is narrowing as McCormick slightly lags the top of the ticket in polling. As McCormick put it in a wide-ranging interview with National Review in September, Casey “has been such a bad senator, he’s not been a leader on anything, he can’t point to a record of accomplishment, and his votes have increasingly been out of step with Pennsylvania.”
There are signs that the Democrat is indeed nervous about how Trump is performing here in the closing days. “Casey bucked Biden to protect fracking, and he sided with Trump to end NAFTA,” a Pennsylvania couple says in one recent ad paid for by the vulnerable Democrat’s campaign. And Politico reports that a Democratic-linked spending group “spent at least $370,000 to run a TV ad calling Constitution Party candidate Marty Selker ‘the choice for true conservatives and bashing McCormick for making ‘a fortune investing in building the Chinese military.’”
After McCormick lost the 2022 Republican Senate primary to celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz by roughly 900 votes, Democrats quickly braced for what they saw as an inevitable McCormick run against Casey in 2024. In ads and on the stump, Casey paints McCormick as an out of touch businessman who “ran the No. 1 foreign hedge fund in China.” Casey touts his on-the-ground support from unions, his support for capping insulin at $35 a month for seniors, and his pledge to fight against “greedflation” — his nickname for corporate “price gouging” of groceries and other goods.
Senate Republicans’ offensive game extends well beyond Pennsylvania this cycle. With West Virginia now a lock for Republicans and Montana Senate polls looking redder by the hour, all eyes are on Ohio (a state Trump carried by eight points in 2016 and 2020), as well as bluer-leaning but still not out-of-reach Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada. (Polls suggest that Kari Lake in Arizona is struggling to catch up to Democratic representative Ruben Gallego even as Trump is performing well there.)
Outgoing Senate GOP minority leader Mitch McConnell and Senate GOP campaign chief Steve Daines have set expectations low by predicting a simple majority for Republicans. And yet there exist a wide range of outcomes for this year’s Senate map, says GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini, of Echelon Insights.
If there is another Rust Belt polling error like we saw in 2016 and 2020, it’s not out of the question that Republicans could take two or three Rust Belt states, Ruffini said in a recent interview with National Review. “Everyone is coalescing around this ‘Republicans win 51 or 52 seats’ scenario,” he added. “But it could be 53, it could be 54, it could be 50-50.”
When it comes to Pennsylvania, Republicans are optimistic that McCormick’s message that Casey is a do-nothing senator is resonating. “He flies under the radar this whole time he’s been in the Senate, he’s just kind of been there, not really making any prominent moves for himself, not drawing any criticism,” says McCormick rally-goer Joan Cullen, from Hilltown township in Bucks County. “Then he comes out every six years to run, and there’s not anything really that you can hit him on.”
“Dave is hitting him appropriately on that unproductiveness,” Cullen said. “And then when he does do something, 99 percent of the time, it’s with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”
Fellow McCormick rally-goer Art Buster, of Cedars, Pa., concurs. And yet he says that, on the ground here, it’s often difficult to get low-propensity GOP voters to vote Republican down the ballot. “They’re going to come out for Trump. They don’t realize how important it is to have the House and the Senate down in Washington, enabling Trump to do the things that he wants to do.”
Democrats are hoping that Casey’s name recognition as a three-term incumbent — and as the son of the late popular Pennsylvania governor Bob Casey Sr. — will help him hold on.
Like most Democrats this cycle, Casey is also emphasizing abortion rights. The incumbent’s campaign support for abortion rights this cycle marks quite the turnaround for a formerly self-described “pro-life Democrat” who formerly sided with Senate Republicans to advance 20-week bans on abortion and said during his first run for Senate in 2006 that “life begins at conception and ends when we draw our last breath.”
For Casey, the overturning of Roe v. Wade changed everything.
“I’ve talked to a lot of people across our state, and when that that moment came, when the Dobbs decision was decided and Roe v. Wade was overturned,” he said to National Review in Allentown, Pa., following a reproductive-rights panel with Senator Tammy Duckworth (D., Ill.) and Representative Susan Wild (D., Pa.). “They were asking themselves, what are we going to do as a country? Are we going to be a country that bans abortion or not? That was the choice that people had to make, whether you’re a citizen or a legislator or otherwise, and I chose at that moment to support the Women’s Health Protection Act to restore the right.”
Added Casey: “Are we going to be a country that bans reproductive health care to the extent that even IVF would be put at risk because of the overturning of Roe?”
McCormick has navigated this political landscape by pledging support for fertility treatments, saying he would not support a national abortion ban, and that he supports exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother.