Republican David McCormick is flipping the key Pennsylvania Senate seat, unseating Bob Casey

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Republicans David McCormick has won Pennsylvania’s key US Senate seat as the former CEO of the world’s largest hedge fund beat the three-term Democratic senator. Bob Casey in Tuesday’s election after accusing the incumbent of supporting policies that led to inflation, domestic unrest and war.

The battleground state contest supports the Republican majority in the Senate, which they wrested Democratic control from this week.

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

McCormick drew on contacts from across the world of government, politics and finance to secure support 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-shattering for Pennsylvania’s Democratic establishment. Casey is the namesake of a former two-term governor and Pennsylvania’s longest-serving Senate Democrat. Until Tuesday, Casey had won six nationwide parliamentary elections dating back to 1996.

McCormick drummed up the consistent message that Casey was a low-key and weak career politician who was an important ally of the president Joe Biden and deputy chairman 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 around the world of hedge funds and securities trading.

It was McCormick’s the second time is running, this time with a clear primary and former President Donald Trump’s endorsement, after he narrowly lost to the Trump-approved 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 the online auction house FreeMarkets Inc. — who had his name on a Pittsburgh skyscraper during the tech boom — and sits on the boards of prominent institutions, including Trump’s Defense Advisory Board.

He also had luggage.

He repeatedly tried to soften his stance against abortion rights after celebrating the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn the 1972 landmark Roe v. Wade decision and end half a century of federal protection of the right to abortion. In the end, McCormick insisted he would oppose a federal ban on abortion and leave in place Pennsylvania’s law allowing an abortion up to the 24th week of pregnancy.

McCormick had to absorb accusations — first in the 2022 GOP primary and then again by Casey — that he was a rich carpetbagger from ritzy Connecticut The Gold Coast trying to buy a senate seat. McCormick lived there until he ran for the Senate in 2022, and while he bought a house in Pittsburgh, he also had a large home in Connecticut until a stepdaughter graduated from high school earlier this year.

McCormick, in turn, emphasized his seventh generation roots in Pennsylvania, recounted his high school days wrestling in northern Pennsylvania towns — 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 a legion of attacks on his hedge fund’s investments, including accusations that he became rich at America’s expense by buying shares in Chinese companies that the federal government later came to view as part of Beijing’s military and surveillance industrial complex.

McCormick, meanwhile, sought to capitalize on the unrest in the Middle East and on the US 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 the Casey and Biden administrations have not fought antisemitism or supported Israel strongly enough in Israel-Hamas war.

At the border, he supported Trump’s pledge to carry out a mass deportation of immigrants in the country without authorization — with priority given to those with criminal records — and vowed to push for the U.S. military action in Mexico to target fentanyl trafficking networks, a controversial idea that originated with Trump.

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