Republican David McCormick flips pivotal Pennsylvania Senate seat

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 battleground state contest pads Republicans’ majority in the Senate, which they wrested from Democratic control this week.

McCormick, 59, recaptured a GOP seat in Pennsylvania that Republicans lost in 2022, paying off a bet that party brass made when they urged McCormick to run and consolidated support behind him.

McCormick drew on contacts from across the worlds of government, politics and finance to secure backing for his campaign after he was CEO of 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 had won six statewide general elections going back to 1996.

McCormick drummed out the consistent message that Casey was a do-nothing and weak career politician who was a key ally of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. McCormick maintained that he would bring leadership to the job.

McCormick also benefited from tens of millions of dollars in campaign cash from billionaires and other allies from across the worlds of hedge funds and securities trading.

It was McCormick’s second time running, this time with a clear primary and former President Donald Trump’s endorsement, after he lost narrowly to the Trump-endorsed Dr. Mehmet Oz in 2022’s expensive seven-way primary.

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.

He 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.

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 stepdaughter 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.

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.

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Follow Marc Levy at https://x.com/timelywriter.