(Headline USA) Republican David McCormick has won Pennsylvania’s pivotal U.S. Senate seat, beating three-term Democratic Sen. Bob Casey in Tuesday’s election, despite the incumbent’s last-minute effort to link himself with President-elect Donald Trump.
The victory pads Republicans’ majority in the Senate, which they wrested from Democratic control this week, and clocked in as the nation’s second-most expensive race while playing out alongside the presidential contest in the nation’s premier battleground state.
McCormick, 59, recaptured a GOP seat in Pennsylvania after Republicans lost one in 2022, paying off a bet that party brass made when they urged McCormick to run and consolidated support behind him.
Republican strategists largely credited Trump’s strong performance in Pennsylvania, beating Vice President Kamala Harris statewide by about 2%, as Democrats navigated headwinds like voter dissatisfaction over inflation under President Joe Biden.
That was enough to help pull McCormick to victory, they said.
McCormick drew on contacts from across the worlds of government, politics and finance to secure backing for his campaign after he was CEO of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, and served at the highest levels of former President George W. Bush’s administration.
Beating Casey is earth-shaking for Pennsylvania’s Democratic establishment. Casey is the namesake of a former two-term governor and Pennsylvania’s longest-serving Democrat ever in the Senate.
Until Tuesday, Casey, 64, had won six statewide general elections going back to 1996, but he had never been on the same ballot as Trump.
With votes still being counted, McCormick led Casey by about 31,000 votes, or half a percentage point.
Casey did not concede Thursday, and his campaign pointed to a statement from the state’s top election official that at least 100,000 ballots still remained to be counted, including provisional ballots and military and overseas ballots.
“We will make sure every Pennsylvanian’s voice is heard,” Casey’s campaign said.
McCormick drummed out the consistent message that Casey was a do-nothing and weak career politician who was a key ally of Biden and Harris.
It was McCormick’s second time running—this time with a clear primary and Trump’s endorsement—after he lost narrowly to the Trump-endorsed Dr. Mehmet Oz in 2022’s expensive seven-way primary.
His wealth—he’ll be one of the wealthiest senators when he joins the chamber—and connections got him flagged by Republicans as someone who could both raise campaign cash and pay his own way for a Senate campaign.
McCormick also benefited from tens of millions of dollars in campaign cash from allies from across the worlds of hedge funds and securities trading.
He ran an energetic campaign, often traveling by bus around the state, and appeared onstage at almost every Trump rally in Pennsylvania—Trump’s most visited state.
McCormick was also at ease in front of TV cameras, a skill he honed as a top Treasury Department official giving regular media briefings during the onset of the 2008-09 recession and a well-known figure on Wall Street who was sought-after for speaking engagements.
He has a long resume that includes being decorated for his Army service in the Gulf War, earning a doctorate from Princeton University, running online auction house FreeMarkets Inc.—which had its name on a skyscraper in Pittsburgh during the tech boom—and sitting on the boards of prominent institutions, including Trump’s Defense Advisory Board.
McCormick had to absorb accusations—first in 2022’s GOP primary and then again by Casey—that he was a rich carpetbagger from Connecticut’s ritzy Gold Coast trying to buy a Senate seat. He lived there until he ran for Senate in 2022 and, while he bought a house in Pittsburgh, he also maintained a massive home in Connecticut until a daughter graduated high school earlier this year.
He helped bring the carpetbagger caricature to life by mispronouncing the name of one of Pennsylvania’s best-known local beers.
McCormick, in turn, stressed his seventh-generation roots in Pennsylvania, talked up his high-school days wrestling in towns across northern Pennsylvania—a sport that took him to the U.S. military academy at West Point—and growing up the son of two educators. His father became the first chancellor of Pennsylvania’s state-owned university system—under Casey’s father.
McCormick also suffered through a legion of attacks on his hedge fund’s investments—including accusations that he got rich at America’s expense by buying shares in Chinese companies that the federal government later came to consider part of Beijing’s military and surveillance industrial complex.
McCormick, meanwhile, tried to capitalize on turmoil in the Middle East and at the U.S. southern border with Mexico.
He blamed Casey for supporting Biden administration’s border policies, which he said had enabled illegal immigration, and for backing policies that he said had empowered Iran to destabilize the Middle East.
He made a bid for Jewish voters by traveling to the Israel–Gaza border, speaking to Jewish audiences across the state and arguing that Casey and the Biden administration have not fought anti-Semitism or backed Israel strongly enough in the Israel–Hamas war.
On the border, he backed Trump’s pledge to carry out a mass deportation of illegal immigrants in the country without permission—prioritizing people with criminal records—and vowed to press for U.S. military action in Mexico to target fentanyl trafficking networks.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
