The race between Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. Bob Casey and GOP opponent Dave McCormick were too close to call Tuesday morning.
Casey, who is seeking a fourth term in the Senate, faced wealthy McCormick, who enjoys the support of Donald Trump. McCormick contributed more than $4 million of his own money to his campaign.
“In areas like Philadelphia, more votes need to be counted and it is important that all legal votes are counted,” Casey campaign spokeswoman Maddy McDaniel said in a statement Wednesday. “When that happens, we have confidence that the senator will be re-elected.”
McCormick allied with Trump early in the campaign and frequently appeared with the GOP presidential candidate at rallies in Pennsylvania, including rallies in Butler in July, where Trump was shot and killed.
He addressed a crowd of supporters at an election monitoring event in Pittsburgh around 12:50 a.m. Wednesday.
“We’ll look forward to the new show, the new America, and we’ll look back on this day and say, ‘that was the day we turned the corner,’” McCormick said. “This 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, the U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania is expected to be one of the most costly in the 2024 cycle. It was certainly one of the hottest contests.
Casey, whose family has deep roots in the Commonwealth and shares Scranton ties 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 competition looks to be Casey’s closest race to date, with a double-digit lead that has been all but erased over the final month of the campaign. In October, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report saw the once-safe Democratic seat flipped, a change from the previous “lean Democrat” ranking.
McCormick, who served in President George W. Bush’s administration, criticized Casey for his close relationship with Biden and for voting with the president’s agenda most of the time. He repeatedly tried to portray Casey as tender, while Casey portrayed McCormick as untrustworthy and working for billionaires and corporations.
This wasn’t McCormick’s first run for a Pennsylvania Senate seat; in 2022, he lost the GOP primary to Mehmet Oz by less than 1,000 votes. Oz lost in the general election to Democrat John Fetterman.
Born in Pennsylvania and raised in Bloomsburg, McCormick served as the CEO of a Connecticut-based hedge fund before taking office in 2022.
That led to questions about whether the Senate had hope lives in Pennsylvania or Connecticutsomething Casey himself latched on to in debates.
Neither candidate faced any grave competition in the primary, so the two were opposed to each other for most of the year. Both candidates have been running television ads in Pennsylvania since March.
Correspondent Abigail Hakas contributed
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