6 More Years of ‘Punxsutawney Bob’?
Pennsylvania’s Democratic Sen. Casey leads the polls, but Dave McCormick is putting up a real fight.
By Kyle Peterson
Oct. 2, 2024 1:05 pm ET
Who’s to blame for the $12 Philly cheesesteak that used to cost $9.75? That’s what Dave McCormick, Pennsylvania’s GOP nominee for Senate, wants voters to ponder as they go to the polls Nov. 5. Asked about inflation last week at a business roundtable in this Philadelphia suburb, Mr. McCormick argued it was “very predictable,” after Democrats spent trillions of dollars while also constraining fossil-fuel development. “Those policies,” he said, “have hurt working families the most.”
Sen. Bob Casey, the Democratic incumbent, has a different theory. “You see it with all kinds of food and grocery stores, people paying more, and these big corporations are laughing all the way to the bank,” Mr. Casey recently told an audience, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren by his side. In campaign videos, he inveighs against what he calls “greedflation” and “shrinkflation.” His Senate office issued a report this summer criticizing Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ and other digital-media services for steadily increasing their prices, which he said was “streamflation.”
Mr. McCormick, sensing a comedic opening, is now telling voters to check out bobflation.com to see how prices of some classic Pennsylvania items have jumped in recent years, including for that Philly cheesesteak, as well as for a 6-inch hoagie from the Wawa convenience chain. “Bob Casey has no sense of how the economy works,” Mr. McCormick said at another suburban campaign stop. “That’s why he thinks the problem is greedflation, shrinkflation or these other things.”
But if Mr. Casey has the worse of the argument on inflation, he enjoys other advantages, including an 18-year incumbency in a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans, 44% to 40%. At the moment, he’s 4 to 5 points ahead, according to recent polling averages. Yet Mr. Casey won his past three races by 13 points, 9 points, and 17 points. Mr. McCormick’s ceiling appears to be rising, and the advertising will only get heavier.
For a GOP challenger, Mr. McCormick has an enviable résumé. He attended a public high school in Northeastern Pennsylvania; went on to West Point; earned a Bronze Star in the Gulf War; took a doctorate from Princeton; became CEO of FreeMarkets, a business-software firm in Pittsburgh; served the George W. Bush administration in various roles, including Treasury undersecretary; and became CEO of the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates.
Democrats have portrayed him as a wealthy carpetbagger who kept a home in Connecticut and hadn’t voted in Pennsylvania for 15 years, until he decided to run for the Senate in 2022. That year Mr. McCormick narrowly lost the Republican primary to TV personality Mehmet Oz, who then lost to John Fetterman. Questions about Mr. Oz’s Pennsylvania residency were an issue, and Mr. Fetterman launched a cheeky petition to get him inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame. That said, undecided voters also had other reasons to be skeptical of Mr. Oz, and Mr. McCormick’s Pennsylvania roots are less easily scoffed at.
At a rally with Donald Trump in the borough of Indiana last week, Mr. McCormick rattled off the towns where he was raised, baling hay and trimming Christmas trees, where “my pop-pop had a drugstore,” and where “my great-grandfather was a harness maker.” His mom, he said, was born in Punxsutawney, though its most famous resident is Phil the groundhog. “Punxsutawney reminds me of my opponent, Punxsutawney Bob,” Mr. McCormick added. “We only see him once every six years, right? He pops his head up, he starts to act like he’s been doing—he hasn’t been doing anything!”
This was at the first of two Trump rallies in Western Pennsylvania in a single week. Mr. Trump has another one this Saturday in Butler, where in July he was nearly assassinated. “This is a race between strength and weakness,” Mr. McCormick told the crowd in Indiana, after Mr. Trump invited him on stage. “I was standing there at Butler, 15 feet away. I saw you get shot. I saw you go down. And I saw you come up with your fist and say, ‘Fight, fight, fight!’ And that’s why we’re going to win.”
The two days after the Indiana rally Mr. McCormick spent working the suburban collar counties around Philadelphia, including at an event featuring Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, no favorite of Mr. Trump’s. “President Trump is an asset,” Mr. McCormick said in an interview. “He’s been a huge energizer for voters in Pennsylvania. But I’m running my own race.” One point of disagreement: Mr. Trump now wants to “restore” the federal deduction for state and local taxes, which his own 2017 law limited to $10,000. Mr. McCormick would keep that SALT cap.
The trick for Mr. McCormick is to galvanize rural Republicans who love Mr. Trump, while also getting reachable voters in and around the state’s two big cities. A Washington Post poll last month showed Mr. McCormick running ahead of Mr. Trump by 3 points in the Philly suburbs, while trailing Mr. Trump by 6 points across 19 counties in Western Pennsylvania, excluding Allegheny (Pittsburgh).
To compare, the last Republican to win a Senate seat in Pennsylvania was Pat Toomey, re-elected in 2016. Mr. Trump carried the state that year by 44,292 votes. Mr. Toomey’s margin was 86,690. He outperformed Mr. Trump’s vote share by 5.6 points in the Philly suburbs, while lagging Mr. Trump by 4.1 points in those 19 western counties. That math gets more difficult as the metro suburbs turn away from the MAGA GOP, even as Republicans are closing the state’s overall voter-registration gap.
This time Mr. Casey is the incumbent, and his name also happens to be an iconic Pennsylvania brand almost on par with Wawa. He’s a Senate three-termer (2007-present), after stints as state treasurer (2005-07) and auditor general (1997-05). His father, Bob Casey Sr., was governor (1987-95) and auditor general (1969-77). Many Pennsylvanians are used to filling in ovals for Bob Casey. Some surely still recall Casey Sr. as an antiabortion Catholic Democrat, who was kept offstage at his party’s 1992 presidential convention, shortly after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
Three decades later, Kamala Harris is saying that if Democrats win in November, they should override the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster rule and use a simple majority to pass a permissive national abortion law. Sen. Casey agrees. “The 60-vote rule has been an impediment to progress on a whole host of fronts,” he told CNN, including “women’s rights,” “voting rights,” “workers’ rights,” and “measures to reduce gun violence.”
So far the filibuster hasn’t been a big topic for these two candidates, but perhaps it’ll come up when they debate on Thursday, or in TV ads going after the incumbent’s reputation as a moderate. Mr. Casey “is a 98.6% vote for Biden-Harris,” Mr. McCormick said. “That is why Pennsylvania should be deeply afraid, because he is too weak and too liberal to stand up to a Democratic Party that is going off the deep end.”
Mr. Peterson is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.
