‘You can’t judge how tough somebody’s going to be until you get to fight, and Bob Casey has never been tested.’
Steelton, Pa. — Soon after Vice President Kamala Harris replaced her boss atop the Democratic ticket, Republican Senate candidate Dave McCormick began testing his campaign’s new electoral thesis.
Yes, the president had all but faceplanted onstage during a late June debate that sealed his fate by confirming voters’ long-running polling doubts about his fitness for the job. But to hear McCormick tell it in interviews and in campaign ads, Joe Biden’s replacement candidate has serious political baggage of her own. A “San Francisco liberal” with a history of “very extreme” policy positions — like pledging to ban fracking, a position her 2024 presidential campaign now disavows — Harris is no shoo-in here in Pennsylvania.
“In many ways,” he posits, “she’s better for us than Biden.”
Sipping on what he estimated was his sixth Diet Coke of the day aboard his campaign bus last Thursday, McCormick insisted in a wide-ranging interview with National Review that Democrats have lost something by replacing a president with a half-century of political experience getting to know this crucial battleground, which may very well determine the balance of power in Washington come January.
“He knew everybody. He was here all the time. He was tied to the union guys,” he says. Sure, Biden had moved from Scranton – Casey’s hometown — at a young age. “But because of the proximity to Delaware, because he had run for president so many times, because he was the vice president,” he adds, Biden “knew Pennsylvania.”
The presidential race between Harris and Donald Trump remains a nailbiter as McCormick’s own Senate race continues to narrow in the final sprint. This former Bridgewater CEO, Gulf War veteran, and ex-Treasury official in the George W. Bush administration knows he’s the underdog in his contest against three-term Democratic Senator Bob Casey, the son of a former governor with a 3.5 point lead in RealClearPolitics’ Senate polling average here and whose family name rings familiar in kitchen tables across the Commonwealth.
“But every dynasty ends,” McCormick insists. As the presidential race continues to look like a jump ball, Casey continues to have an edge in surveys in this post-Labor Day crunch to November 5. The reason the Senate polls are growing tighter, he tells NR, is that 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.”
One of those “out of step” votes, McCormick insists, is Casey’s support of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. Moments before we hopped inside his campaign bus for a sit-down interview, McCormick kickstarted his inflation-focused “Price of Poor Leadership” tour at a gas station in Steelton. “Casey’s voted 99 percent of the time with President Biden and Vice President Harris,” McCormick said. “He is a rubber stamp vote” for the “$5 trillion of new spending” that has been the “primary cause of inflation.” He cheered his campaign’s decision to set up a “Bobflation.com” website that connects his opponent to rising prices, and later, on the bus, skewers his opponent’s plan to address those increases.
Ask Casey about high prices, and he’ll lay the blame on his campaign’s nicknames for corporate malfeasance — “greedflation” and “shrinkflation.”
“Over the last five years, big corporations have raised prices on everything from groceries to diapers while they rake in record profits,” Casey’s campaign site reads. “Bob has exposed how greedy corporations are ripping off working families, from charging excess junk fees to shrinking the size of their products while selling them at the same price.”
McCormick is not persuaded by his opponent’s economic analysis here, arguing that reining in inflation requires cutting back federal spending and that Casey’s legislative solutions to so-called “greedflation” and “shrinkflation” would only “destroy jobs.” He points to many left-leaning economists who dismiss the anti-price gouging shtick Harris attached to her economic agenda rollout earlier this summer, including Harvard economist and ex-Barack Obama official Furman, who called it “not sensible policy.”
Pressed for comment, the senator’s campaign team leaned into its months-long argument that McCormick is out of touch. “Pennsylvanians have figured out who David McCormick is — a Connecticut hedge fund mega-millionaire who sold us out to China, investing millions in China’s military and in China’s largest fentanyl producer,” spokeswoman Kate Smart said in a statement to NR.
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Then there’s abortion. While Democrats have spent the entire election cycle hammering McCormick on the issue, far less media has been paid to the incumbent’s evolving approach to abortion, as National Review detailed at length back in the spring.
Earlier on in his career, Casey expressed support for the belief that “life begins at conception.” He held onto the “pro-life” label during his 2018 reelection campaign, and, as recently as 2020, sided with Republicans on failed federal legislation to ban abortion at 20 weeks. But in this post-Dobbs era, Casey no longer believes that the “pro-life” and “pro-choice” labels “make much sense anymore” in the post-Dobbs era. In 2022, he voted in favor of the House-passed Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA), a bill that would drastically expand the right to an abortion and supersede federal and state-level conscience laws. “When the landscape around the issue of abortion fundamentally changed, Bob Casey made it clear where he stands: He thinks it was a mistake to overturn Roe v. Wade and voted for the Women’s Health Protection Act,” Casey spokeswoman Maddy McDaniel told NR back in March.
McCormick has a much more cynical view. “He’s not comfortable talking about it, because I think he knows he’s got no anchor, he’s got no core on this,” McCormick said, pointing to Casey’s support for the WHPA. “God forbid if his father could look down and see this, he’d be rolling over in his grave at the positions of his son.”
On the campaign trail, McCormick touts his own support for $15,000 in tax credits for fertility services like in vitro fertilization “to make it easier” for families to have children. He characterizes abortion as “a deeply polarizing issue” that should be left to voters on the state level. He references the late pro-life Democratic governor Robert P. Casey, who signed into law the Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act and paved the way for the Supreme Court’s landmark 1992 ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. “Republicans and Democrats alike voted for 23 weeks; a guy named Governor Casey signed that into law,” McCormick said. “I’m in favor of the three exceptions” for rape, incest, and the life of the mother and, if elected to the Senate, “will never vote for a national ban.”
To hear Republicans on the ground tell it, McCormick has improved as a candidate since 2022, when he lost the GOP Senate primary against Trump-endorsed celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz by fewer than 900 votes. As Cambria County GOP chairwoman Jackie Kulback put it, “he’s really found his stride” this cycle here in Pennsylvania – the center of gravity this election up and down the ballot.
As he continues to crisscross the Commonwealth in the final spring to Election Day, McCormick is also getting ready for two scheduled debates with Casey. “We’ve spent time” preparing ahead of the first scheduled debate early next month. “It’s a great opportunity to press Senator Casey on his record, which I think is abysmally bad and out of step with Pennsylvania.”
Pushed on Casey’s strengths as an 18-year incumbent with an affable, Mr. Rogers-like demeanor, McCormick recalled his college wrestling days. Sometimes, when you get on the mat and out walks your opponent with “muscles on top of muscles.” Other times, “you get a scrawny kid who just came out of the library, and he’d be tough as nails,” he said. “You can’t judge how tough somebody’s going to be until you get to fight, and Bob Casey has never been tested.”
Yes, Casey still has an edge heading into November. But the narrowed polling, twists and turns of this presidential cycle, and kitchen-table “price of poor leadership” has McCormick feeling good about his chances.