HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Republican David McCormick has won Pennsylvania’s pivotal U.S. Senate seat, as the former CEO of the world’s largest hedge fund beat three-term Democratic Sen. Bob Casey in Tuesday’s election after accusing the incumbent of supporting policies that led to inflation, domestic turmoil and war.
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 won by Republican Donald Trump 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.
In an interview on Fox News shortly after The Associated Press called the race Thursday, the Trump-endorsed McCormick said “people want change.”
“They're deeply distressed by the skyrocketing prices, the wide-open border, the crime in our cities, the war on fossil fuels, and they want change and common-sense leadership and that's why I think they elected President Trump and I think that's why they have elected me,” McCormick said.
Republican strategists largely credited McCormick's win to Trump's strong performance in Pennsylvania, beating Vice President Kamala Harris by about 2% as Democrats navigated headwinds like voter dissatisfaction over inflation under President Joe Biden.
That was enough to pull McCormick to victory, they said.
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.
In a statement, Casey said the vote-counting process must be allowed to play out and every vote counted.
“I have dedicated my life to making sure Pennsylvanians’ voices are heard, whether on the floor of the Senate or in a free and fair election," Casey said. He added, "That is what Pennsylvania deserves.”
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.
It was McCormick’s second time running, this time with a clear primary and Trump’s endorsement. 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 drummed out the consistent message that Casey was a do-nothing and weak career politician who was a key ally of Biden and Harris. McCormick maintained that he would bring leadership to the job.
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 on stage at almost every Trump rally in Pennsylvania, Trump's most visited state.
McCormick was 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 prominent 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 Ph.D 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 baggage, too.
He repeatedly tried to soften his stance against abortion rights after celebrating the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn 1972’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision and end a half-century of federal protection of the right to an abortion. In the end, McCormick insisted that he would oppose a federal ban on abortion and leave in place Pennsylvania’s law that allows an abortion up to the 24th week of gestation.
He also worked to ease concerns over Republican control of the Senate, saying he wouldn't vote to end the filibuster, a Senate rule that effectively makes 60 the minimum number of votes needed to pass legislation as a means to provide a check on the majority.
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. McCormick 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.
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.
Still, McCormick helped bring the carpetbagger caricature to life by mispronouncing the name of one of Pennsylvania’s best-known local beers.
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.
McCormick blamed Casey for supporting Biden administration border policies that 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 antisemitism 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 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, a controversial idea that originated with Trump.
___
Follow Marc Levy at https://x.com/timelywriter.