Republican David McCormick and Democratic Sen. Bob Casey are vying for Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate seat (Capital-Star composite from official/campaign photos)
The race between Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. Bob Casey and GOP opponent Dave McCormick remained too close to call on Wednesday morning.
Casey, who is seeking a fourth term in the Senate faced the well-heeled McCormick, who had Donald Trump’s endorsement. McCormick contributed more than $4 million of his own money to his campaign.
“There are more votes that need to be counted in areas like Philadelphia and it’s important that every legal ballot will be counted,” Casey campaign spokesperson Maddy McDaniel said in a statement Wednesday. “When that happens we are confident the Senator will be re-elected.”
He addressed a crowd of supporters at his election watch party in Pittsburgh around 12:50 a.m. Wednesday.
“We will look forward to a new agenda, a new America, and we’ll look back on this day, today, and we’ll say, ‘that was the day we turned the corner,’” McCormick said. “’That was the day we had new leadership in Pennsylvania. That was the day we got our country back on track.’”
When all is said and done Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race is expected to be one of the most expensive of the 2024 cycle. It was certainly one of the most hotly contested.
Casey, whose family has deep roots in the commonwealth, and who shares a Scranton connection with President Joe Biden, was first elected to the Senate in a landslide victory in 2006, and is the longest serving Democratic U.S. senator in Pennsylvania history.
The 2024 contest appears to be Casey’s closest race to date, with an early double-digit lead all but erased within the last month of the campaign. The once safely Democratic seat was rated a toss-up by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report in October, a shift from the previous ranking of “lean Democrat.”
McCormick, who served in President George W. Bush’s administration, criticized Casey for his close relationship with Biden and his record of voting with the president’s agenda most of the time. He repeatedly tried to portray Casey as weak, while Casey painted McCormick as untrustworthy and working on behalf of billionaires and corporations.
This was not McCormick’s first run for a Senate seat in Pennsylvania; in 2022, he lost the GOP primary to Mehmet Oz by less than 1,000 votes. Oz went on to lose to Democrat John Fetterman in the general election.
Born in Pennsylvania and raised in Bloomsburg, McCormick worked as a CEO at a Connecticut-based hedge fund prior to his 2022 run.
This led to questions about whether the Senate hopeful was living in Pennsylvania or Connecticut, something Casey himself seized on in debates.
Neither candidate faced a serious challenger in the primary election, so the two have had their sights set on each other for most of the year. Both candidates have been running TV ads in Pennsylvania since March.
Correspondent Abigail Hakas contributed
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