Republican Dave McCormick, an Army veteran and former hedge fund CEO, has unseated three-term Democratic Sen. Bob Casey Jr. in Pennsylvania’s nationally watched U.S. Senate race, according to The Associated Press.
While Casey held a lead in polls for much of the campaign, the race tightened in the final days. And McCormick ended up squeaking out a victory of less than 1 percentage point. It took two days before the race to be called as ballots were counted across the state.
A recount is still possible given the close margin. But McCormick has projected confidence since the night of the election, when he told supporters the race was “headed in a very good direction.”
“That American dream is slipping away,” McCormick said at his results watch party in Pittsburgh. “We’ve got to get it back for every single Pennsylvanian and every single American, and we need new leadership.”
McCormick leads by just over 30,000 votes. The Pennsylvania secretary of state’s office announced Thursday evening that there are at least 100,000 ballots still to be tabulated.
Casey made clear in a statement Thursday evening that he would not concede while the counting process continues.
“Pennsylvania is where our democratic process was born,” he said. “We must allow that process to play out and ensure that every vote that is eligible to be counted will be counted.”
Under Pennsylvania law, recounts occur automatically for races determined by a margin of 0.5% or less. McCormick currently leads by roughly that amount. But many counties, including Philadelphia, have not processed all of their provisional ballots.
The McCormick campaign declared victory earlier Thursday before the AP announced its call.
“While votes continue to be counted, any way you slice it, Dave McCormick will be the next United States senator from Pennsylvania,” McCormick spokesperson Elizabeth Gregory said.
If the AP call holds, Casey’s downfall will be seen as a shocking development in Pennsylvania politics. The mild-mannered moderate who previously served as state treasurer and state auditor general has won six statewide elections, often by significant margins, and is the son of a well-known governor.
It’s even more notable because Pennsylvania’s statewide election results this year appear to be aberrational. Five presidential swing states had Senate races this year, and Donald Trump won all five. But voters from Michigan to Arizona appear to have been splitting their tickets, because Democratic Senate candidates have won or are leading four of those races.
Casey is poised to be the only Democratic Senate candidate in a swing state to fall short this year, allowing McCormick and Trump to complete a statewide sweep in Pennsylvania.
McCormick made his first run for office in 2022, losing by fewer than 1,000 votes to Mehmet Oz in the GOP primary for that year’s Senate race in Pennsylvania.
Throughout the 2024 campaign, he worked relentlessly to tie Casey to Vice President Kamala Harris’ agenda, casting the incumbent as a “weak career politician” who, despite his moderate reputation, would be a “rubber stamp” for a liberal Democratic establishment.
McCormick also touted his compelling personal story, which became both a potent selling point for his candidacy and a target of Democratic attacks.
McCormick was born in Western Pennsylvania and grew up in Bloomsburg, where his father was the president of the state university in the city. He went to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, was a member of the wrestling team, and served in the Gulf War. He earned a Ph.D. in international relations from Princeton University after the war.
McCormick then spent about a decade in Pittsburgh, where he led the software company FreeMarkets. In 2005, he joined George W. Bush’s administration, with prominent roles in the Commerce Department and the U.S. Treasury.
After leaving Washington in 2009, McCormick became an executive at the Connecticut-based Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world and the subject of many of Casey’s jabs. Bridgewater, for instance, played a pioneering role in opening up opportunities for U.S. investment firms in Chinese markets, leading Casey to say it was hypocritical of McCormick to talk about China on the campaign trail.
McCormick left the firm around the time he launched his political career in 2022, and questions about whether he has fully moved back to Pennsylvania dogged him throughout his two runs for the Senate. Even this year, it was reported that he frequently flies back to Connecticut, where one of his daughters from a previous marriage lives.
McCormick is now married to Dina Powell McCormick, who was a deputy national security adviser in Trump’s first administration and who also served in the Bush administration.
The race saw more than $300 million in spending by the campaigns, their parties, and outside groups. The largest outside spender was Keystone Renewal, a pro-McCormick super PAC backed primarily by finance industry billionaires, some of whom knew the Republican from his days at Bridgewater.
The PAC’s spending was crucial to making McCormick financially competitive in just his second run for office against a man who had won statewide elections, including races for Pennsylvania auditor general and treasurer.
Ultimately, McCormick’s message resonated with voters anxious about the economy — and eager to back a candidate aligned with Trump.
McCormick “has a great background in business,” said Mary Dodgi, 80, a retired teacher who lives in Ross Township in the North Hills of Pittsburgh and who, until a decade ago, had been a registered Democrat. Now, she said, McCormick and Trump represented the party “for the people.”
At McCormick’s watch party in Pittsburgh, supporters who had spent weeks knocking on doors took time to celebrate. Gloria Hutcherson, 73, a self-described born-again Christian who lives in Tennessee and spent two weeks canvassing in Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, said McCormick shared Trump’s conservative values, like excluding transgender athletes from women’s sports and closing the border.
“He is a businessman, like Donald Trump,” she said.
In the 2022 Senate race, Trump snubbed McCormick in the primary by endorsing Oz, the celebrity physician who was defeated by U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., in the general election. This year, Trump endorsed McCormick, and he faced no significant competition in the primary.
That set the stage for a race with no less on the line than in 2022, given the Senate’s narrow partisan margins, but with a significantly different tone than the matchup featuring the polarizing and headline-grabbing personalities of Oz and Fetterman.
Casey is a rank-and-file Democratic senator who preaches the virtues of bipartisan civility, while McCormick is a clean-cut Army man-turned-businessman. And while neither man shied away from attacking the other on the campaign trail, there was little drama in the race, and voters were left with a relatively simple choice between a career politician and a plutocratic newcomer.
Neither candidate criticized his respective party’s presidential nominee, but both also sought to create some daylight between them and the top of the ticket.
Casey emphasized repeatedly that he does not support a ban on natural gas fracking, a position Harris took in 2019 but has since backed away from. And McCormick said throughout the race that he believed Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, which is usually seen as an affront by Trump.
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