BLOOMSBURG, Pennsylvania — Republican Senate candidate David McCormick launched his first television ad of the race between him and Sen. Bob Casey Jr. (D-PA) of Scranton as part of a statewide seven-figure ad buy that will include a digital launch across multiple platforms and will run through April in this key battleground state.
The video is striking in that it is a departure from traditional political ads launching jabs at an opponent and instead focuses on the impact of the highly competitive sport of wrestling.
Wrestling is a wildly popular sport in Pennsylvania at both the high school and collegiate levels, and his success on the mats took McCormick to West Point. The Republican candidate was fourth in the state in high school in 1983, and because of those skills, he was recruited by the U.S. Military Academy, where he became a co-captain and helped lead the team to the Eastern collegiate championship and qualified for the NCAAs twice.
McCormick said in an interview with the Washington Examiner that wrestling had an outsize role in the development of his character, resilience, and sense of personal responsibility throughout his adulthood.
The ad begins with the imagery of an empty wrestling gym and intense training: “Six minutes. That’s all you get. Sometimes it’s all you can take. On the wrestling mat, there is no place to hide.”
McCormick then appears and begins speaking directly into the camera.
“Pennsylvania wrestling taught me to do the hard thing,” he says. “Hard work, hard choices — the Pennsylvania way. That’s not what we get with Washington. The career politicians don’t do the hard work. They’re selfish and soft. I’m running for the Senate to make the hard calls. That’s why I approve this message.”
McCormick never once mentions Casey in the ad. However, the phrase “career politicians” is a direct jab at the three-term senator who has held statewide elected office in Pennsylvania since the 1990s.
While wrestling may seem like an odd choice to focus on for states outside of Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Oklahoma, here, it packs high school and university gyms to capacity and often overshadows the popularity of football in states where high school and college football is wildly popular.
In fact, in small and large towns across Pennsylvania, wrestling remains one of the most popular high school and collegiate sports in the commonwealth. Many small river and post-industrial towns are drawn together by both the competitiveness of the sport and also the fierce rivalries that have existed for decades between neighboring communities.
Penn State University’s Division I program is second in the country in attendance, averaging 9,000 people a match. Lots of Division II schools in the state also have high attendance, including Gannon University in Erie County, Kutztown University in the Lehigh Valley, Millersville University in Lancaster County, and the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown in Cambria County.
The same goes in Division III, with Messiah University, Wilkes University, Ursinus College, Lycoming College, Washington & Jefferson College, and Muhlenberg College all fielding nationally regarded wrestling teams.
Last weekend, Penn State broke the NCAA’s wrestling championship scoring record as it tallied 172.5 points, and the team broke a second record for the college sport’s largest-ever winning margin after it defeated Cornell University by 100 points.
In short, wrestling is big here, so the ad appears to serve as a direct appeal to parents in cities, suburbs, and small working-class towns who often spend their weeknights taking their children to practice and weekends taking their student-athletes to tournaments.
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Parents know the dedication it takes to succeed at their sport of choice, whether it is wrestling, soccer, lacrosse, baseball, softball, or football, and are also weary of the constant drumbeat of national politics.
In the latest Emerson College poll, Casey leads McCormick ahead of the November Senate race, 45% to 41%, with 14% of voters undecided in the survey of 1,000 registered Pennsylvanians — in February, that same poll showed Casey leading McCormick by 10 percentage points, with 49% support.