Pa. Senate contest will have national implications

Incumbent Democrat Bob Casey is trying to fend off a challenge from Republican Dave McCormick.

By KATIE MEYER
Spotlight PA
HARRISBURG — Voters in Pennsylvania will help determine the balance of power in the U.S. Senate when they choose between five candidates on Nov. 5.

The choices include incumbent Democrat Bob Casey, who has spent decades in state politics and was first elected to the chamber in 2006, and Republican Dave McCormick, a former hedge fund CEO who lost the GOP nomination in 2022.

Abortion, energy, and the economy — particularly the candidates’ approaches to relations with China — are among the issues that have gotten the most attention from the campaigns.

Casey has also continued a line of attack on McCormick that began in the latter’s last U.S. Senate bid — that the Republican lived in Connecticut until recently, still rents a $16 million mansion there, and only bought a home in Pittsburgh in 2021.

Polling shows the contest is relatively close. As of Sept. 20, an average of the last 16 voter surveys, taken over the course of September, shows Casey leading McCormick by 6.3 percentage points. By contrast, he won his 2018 election against former U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta, a staunch supporter of former President Donald Trump, by 13 points.

Major party candidates

Bob Casey, Democrat

The name Casey has been ubiquitous in Pennsylvania politics for decades, beginning with former Democratic Gov. Bob Casey Sr.

Before being elected governor, the elder Casey served in the state Senate and as auditor general. He was a popular leader: In 1990, he won reelection by a whopping 35 percentage points.

The younger Casey, now 64, grew up in Scranton, observing his father’s political career. His own career has resembled his father’s.

After passing the Pennsyl- vania bar exam and practicing law for several years, he ran for auditor general in 1996 and won, serving two terms.

As auditor general, Casey released a report harshly criticizing the state Department of Health for its nursing home oversight, reported wasteful spending at agencies including PennDOT, and reviewed contractors that remained in business with the state despite owing it money.

Casey ran for governor in 2002 but lost the primary to Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell, who won the general election.

Casey then ran for state treasurer, winning that position. However, soon after taking office, Casey was asked by Democratic U.S. Senate leaders to run for the Pennsylvania seat held by Republican Rick Santorum. He agreed and won.

Casey is known for his evenkeeled approach to politics — in 2018, he recalled a columnist had once compared him to oatmeal — and for the mostly centrist positions he maintained for most of his career. It was part of his brand from the very start; soon after his election to the U.S. Senate, Casey told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, “the seat that I am walking into, the one that was held by John Heinz, his ability to work in a very bipartisan way, is something that I always want to do.”

Casey gets an annual salary of $174,000 as a rank-and-file U.S. senator. The other significant outside income he reported in his personal financial disclosure for 2023 was a little over $19,000 in pension income from the Pennsylvania State Employees’ Retirement System, for which he qualified after working in state government.

Casey and his wife’s assets include an education savings plans, checking and savings accounts — the largest, according to the disclosure, contains between $50,001 and $100,000 — an IRA, his wife’s retirement fund from Drexel University, and a small collection of mutual funds, managed accounts, and money market accounts. The largest, a Vanguard Federal Money Market Fund, is reportedly worth between $100,001 and $250,000.

The Caseys also have two mortgages, plus a stake in a limited liability company, which the report notes holds a bank account into which Casey and his siblings put insurance proceeds to rebuild a collectively owned family vacation property damaged in a fire.

Positions: Casey is a staunch supporter of the Affordable Care Act, chaired the U.S. Senate’s special committee on aging (where he continued his auditor general-era work on nursing home oversight), and has steadily moved left on a host of his more conservative positions — in particular, gun control and abortion.

Like his father, Casey opposed abortion access when he first entered the U.S. Senate. In recent years, however, he has become a defender of abortion access and, as the Associated Press has written, has argued that his longtime identity as a “pro-life Democrat” and past votes for abortion restrictions never meant he supported total bans.

Casey has vowed to be tough on China, saying he supports keeping jobs in Pennsylvania and promoting his lead sponsorship of a national security bill that would require screening of American companies’ investments in several key tech sectors in “countries of concern,” including China.

He has walked a fine line on energy and the environment. He criticized the Biden administration’s pause on approving liquefied natural gas exports to certain countries, for instance, but also vocally supported the administration’s sweeping spending bills on environmental infrastructure and maintains a 94% lifetime approval score from the League of Conservation Voters.

In ads, he has highlighted his efforts to keep steel production in the U.S. and to produce microchips domestically instead of in China. He has also focused on consumer protection, noting that he’s a sponsor of the proposed Price Gouging Prevention Act, and saying in an ad that he wants to “roll back [companies’] huge corporate tax breaks, putting money in your pocket instead.”

Endorsements: Many of Casey’s biggest endorsements have come from labor unions, including the powerful Philadelphia building trades, the Pittsburgh regional building trades, the regional chapter of United Auto Workers, Pennsylvania’s chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, and the state’s biggest Teamsters local. Other endorsers include Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, the BlueGreen Alliance (a partnership of labor unions and environmental groups), the Human Rights Campaign, the National Security Leaders for America, and the Guardian Civic League, which represents Black police officers in Philadelphia.

Top donors: Casey is the son of a governor and has been a politician for his entire professional life, a background that shows in his ability to raise a lot of money from a network of small donors.

From the beginning of 2023 to the end of June, Casey brought in more than $25 million and spent a little shy of $20 million. The bulk of it, $18.5 million, came from individual contributions, which are capped at $3,300. The rest includes more than $4 million from other candidates’ committees and a slew of smaller donations from PACs, which are capped at $5,000.

Some of the biggest contributions to federal races often come from independent expenditures — PACs that spend on candidates’ behalf but can’t coordinate with them.

As of Sept. 20, PACs spending on Casey’s behalf have put nearly $2 million into the race this cycle and PACs spending to oppose Mc-Cormick have spent another $34 million, according to OpenSecrets, which aggregates donations.

Major supporters include the PAC for the League of Conservation Voters, the labor union-affiliated PAC Workers Vote, the PAC for the union SEIU, and CASA in Action, a PAC primarily focused on engaging Latino and immigrant voters. WinSenate, the U.S. Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, also spent a lot of money opposing McCormick, as did the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Dave McCormick, Republican McCormick, 59, primarily grew up around 60 miles from Bob Casey, near Bloomsburg, the Columbia County seat.

His father, James McCormick, was the president of Bloomsburg University and became the first chancellor of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education. The family also owned a nearby farm, which has featured heavily in McCormick’s campaigns.

After attending West Point, U.S. Army Airborne School, and Ranger School, McCormick deployed to Iraq as a paratrooper during the Gulf War in 1991. He received the Bronze Star, and retired as a captain.

He received a Ph.D. in international relations from Princeton after leaving the military, then got a job with multinational consulting firm McKinsey and Co. After that, he joined a Pittsburgh-based software company, FreeMarkets, and rose to CEO — his first experience helming a company — and sold it two years later.

He left the software world in 2005, when he was nominated to be the under secretary of commerce in the Bush administration. There, he oversaw the Bureau of Industry and Security. He moved to the U.S. Treasury in 2007, where he also served as an under secretary, holding the role just before the global financial crisis. In 2008, one bank CEO told a reporter that McCormick enabled the Treasury to have “relationships at the right places in the financial institutions.”

After the Obama administration began, McCormick left the federal government and joined Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund, as president, then climbed to co-CEO and, in 2020, sole CEO. He left the company in 2022, just before announcing his first U.S. Senate bid.

McCormick has filed three personal financial disclosures this year — an initial one in January, an amendment in May, and a third report in August.

His most recent report shows that he earned more than $100,000 from a 2023 book he wrote with a former Bridgewater associate turned campaign advisor. But that amount pales in comparison to the long list of assets that the report lists as being held by McCormick, his wife, and possibly by their children: mutual funds, government securities, corporate bonds, private equity investments, a wealth management account, commercial real estate, and more.

Notable among these are Mc-Cormick’s real estate investments. These include a stake worth between $1 and $5 million in a multifamily development in Colorado; at least four rental and investment properties; and a Colorado ranch worth as much as $50 million.

McCormick also reported that his exit agreement from Bridgewater was worth more than $50 million in corporate securities stock. He drew more than $5 million in income from it during the period of the report. He also drew income from interest and capital gains on many of his other investments, which yielded tens, hundreds, or in several cases up to a million dollars.

He also has a dynasty trust, which is a financial tool designed to pass significant amounts of money to a person’s descendants while avoiding estate taxes.

Positions: McCormick’s relationship with China has been a throughline of the campaign. As CEO of Bridgewater, he oversaw investments in China and publicly spoke of “admiration” for China and the promise of U.S. involvement in the nation.

It has earned him criticism from both sides of the political aisle. But he argues his hedge fund experience qualifies him to navigate the complex U.S.-China relationship.

On his campaign website, Mc-Cormick says he opposes abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or to protect the life of a parent. He also says he doesn’t support a federal ban.

Another issue that McCormick has highlighted is shale gas fracking, an extraction process that has been used in Pennsylvania for two decades.

He claims both Harris and Casey want to ban fracking and has said fracking is “great for the environment.” Harris did support a fracking ban when she ran for president in 2020, but says she no longer does. Casey never has.

He has also blamed fentanyl proliferation on Democratic border policies, though experts say the synthetic opioid primarily enters the U.S. through legal ports of entry. And in ads he has tied inflation to Democratic spending while touting himself as a job creator — though on that claim, he has also faced criticism for layoffs he oversaw in his corporate roles.

Endorsements: McCormick’s biggest endorsements have come from law enforcement groups, most notably the Pennsylvania Fraternal Order of Police and the Pennsylvania State Troopers Association, which have both backed Democrats, including Casey, in the past. A group of sheriffs also endorsed him. Other endorsements came from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump — who was initially hesitant — and former gubernatorial candidate state Sen. Doug Mastriano.

Top donors: McCormick is a prodigious self-funder who has relied heavily on bigger donors — though his campaign is also saddled with nearly $18.7 million in debt. A spokesperson did not return a request for comment about the debt, which appears to be left over from his previous campaign.

His campaign committee brought in less overall than Casey’s did from the beginning of 2023 to the end of June. A little under $10 million of that came from individual donors, $4 million was from McCormick’s own pockets, and around $3 million came from other candidates’ committees.

However, McCormick’s independent expenditures have been more active.

As of Sept. 20, PACs spending on his behalf have pumped nearly $18 million into the race this cycle and PACs spending to oppose Casey have spent another $45.5 million, according to OpenSecrets. These supporters include Keystone Renewal (a PAC spending exclusively to support McCormick), Americans for Prosperity Action, and the Senate Leadership Fund.

Third-party candidates

Leila Hazou, Green Party

Hazou, 56, is based in Pike County, where she runs a soap and candle shop.

According to her campaign website, she and her husband moved to the Poconos in 2016 when she left her previous job as a project manager for an investment firm in New York City.

On her website, Hazou writes that part of the reason she felt compelled to run for U.S. Senate under a third party is because she is Palestinian and can “no longer sit idly by and witness her country openly support the ongoing oppression funded by U.S. taxpayers.”

Marty Selker, Constitution Party

Selker, who is 67 and from Clarion County, describes himself on his campaign website as a former part owner of a small family business, former construction worker, and current truck driver for the natural gas industry.

He writes that he was inspired to get involved in politics in 2020, and says the Constitution Party’s rejection of super PACs and large corporate donors appealed to him. He ran a successful write-in campaign for the Clarion-Limestone school board in 2021; his current term lasts until 2027.

He has listed firearm rights and protecting against government overreach as focuses of his campaign.

John C. Thomas, Libertarian Thomas, 46, lives in Armstrong County and spent his career working in education. On his campaign website, he says he has worked in public, private, and charter schools.

Thomas also describes himself as a devout Christian and as being very involved in local volunteer organizations such as Habitat for Humanity.

He acknowledges on his campaign site that he’s a long-shot candidate, but says he wants to “serve as a strong voice for change that will stand up for Pennsylvanians tired of their hard-earned money going to foreign wars across the world and constantly being devalued by Federal Reserve printing-caused inflation.”

In 2023, Thomas ran unsuccessfully for the board of the Armstrong School District on a platform of offering alternatives to public schools and combating “the so-called ‘woke’ agenda that has crept into our local schools.”

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