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Bob Casey Plays the Trump Card
The Democrat from Pennsylvania finds himself in the fight of his political life.Wonder Land: Democratic Senate candidates, including Bob Casey, Tammy Baldwin, Jon Tester, Elissa Slotkin and Sherrod Brown are drifting into Trumpian MAGA land. Photo: Composite: Mark Kelly
A week from the election, we have bipartisan consensus on two points regarding Pennsylvania.The first is that the presidential contest is way too close to call. The second is that only one contender has coattails. Both candidates for Senate—Republican challenger Dave McCormick and Democratic incumbent Bob Casey—agree on who that is: Donald Trump.
That Mr. McCormick would hitch his wagon to Mr. Trump is no surprise. But Mr. Casey is also wrapping his arms around the former president as a means of boosting his credibility. He’s doing this even as Kamala Harris is denouncing Mr. Trump as a “fascist” and Hillary Clinton is likening his Sunday rally at Madison Square Garden to a 1939 gathering sponsored by the pro-Nazi German American Bund.
Nor is Mr. Casey the only Democrat running for Senate who’s decided that the winning strategy is to distance himself from Ms. Harris and embrace his inner Trump. Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin and Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin are among those who have made similar moves.
In a post on Truth Social, the former president accepted the “great compliment” but called their alleged support fake: “Kamala Harris’ sinking Campaign has become so TOXIC, that Democrat Senators in four different States are using me in their advertisements, and stating that they are with President Trump on Tariffs, and numerous other things. While it is a great compliment, it is not fair to those Republican Senate Candidates, Bernie Moreno, Dave McCormick, Eric Hovde, and Sam Brown, who are with me all the time. These Democrats have voted with Crooked Joe Biden almost 100% of the time. They only pretend to be on my side when Elections roll around.”
The Biden presidency’s unpopular record—the rise of inflation, the insecure southern border, the humiliation in Afghanistan—means that to win, Ms. Harris has to distance herself from the administration she continues to serve as vice president. At this she has been awful.
The result is that down-ballot Democrats in tight races are now disassociating themselves from her. For the three-term Sen. Casey, this translates into contradictory messaging. On the one hand, he runs an ad touting his support for Mr. Trump on some policies to boost his credibility. On the other, he does so while calling Mr. Trump a “threat to our democracy.”
On top of this there’s the Biden factor. Forcing the president off the ticket may have been an overall plus for the Democrats’ chances on Nov. 5. But probably not in Pennsylvania, where Ms. Harris’s San Francisco progressivism is a harder sell to blue-collar Catholics. That’s one reason Mr. Biden, with his Scranton roots, eked out a win in 2020.
These developments have proved a boon for the McCormick campaign. Two months ago, he was down 8 or 9 points. Today he trails Mr. Casey by only 1.4 points in the RealClearPolitics polling average. The better Mr. Trump does, the better for Mr. McCormick. To put it another way, Pennsylvania in the final week of the 2024 election has upset what was a common assumption at the beginning of the year: that Republicans would have to distance themselves from Mr. Trump to have any hope of winning.
This campaign also marks a big change on the Republican side from 2022, when Mr. Trump passed over Mr. McCormick to endorse TV personality Mehmet Oz for the GOP nomination. The Oz campaign was a train wreck, and John Fetterman flipped the Senate seat from red to blue. This time Mr. Trump, who prefers winners, has been supportive of Mr. McCormick. In a Sunday New York Times story headlined “John Fetterman Fears Trump Is Stronger Than Ever,” Sen. Fetterman says that the level and intensity of support for Mr. Trump is “astonishing.”
If Ms. Harris wins Pennsylvania, it will be because Mr. Casey retained enough popularity to drag her across the finish line. But Mr. McCormick’s campaign against him—as another weak, out-of-touch career politician—is giving Mr. Casey a real fight. At the outset of the race, a member of the McCormick campaign says, Mr. Casey was a blank slate with no real negatives.
Mr. McCormick has used this campaign to define Mr. Casey, pointing to his flip-flops on issues such as abortion and guns. Ms. Harris has her flip-flops too. But whereas she flips to the right, Mr. Casey (like Mr. Biden) flops to the left—while painting himself as independent.
In his successful run for Senate in 2006, Mr. Casey attacked incumbent Sen. Rick Santorum for voting with President Bush 98% of the time. Today it’s Mr. McCormick driving home the point that Mr. Casey has voted with President Biden 98% of the time. The irony is that Mr. Casey’s answer to this attack is to grab onto Hitler’s—er, Donald Trump’s—coattails.
WSJ via RCP.
