Inside David McCormick’s Senate Victory in Pennsylvania Over a Popular Democratic Incumbent

It is just after 9 p.m. on election night in an oversized suite on the 24th floor of downtown Pittsburgh’s Fairmont Hotel. All the couches and cushioned chairs have been placed along the wall and replaced by around a half dozen campaign staffers working at desks, or makeshift desks, watching data start to pour in from across Pennsylvania. In the center of it all sits Dave McCormick, looking at a monitor with his wife, Dina Powell, hovering over him, her arm on his shoulder.It is a tender moment captured in the middle of a chaotic scene.It’s early, and Mr. McCormick, a Republican Senate challenger, is behind incumbent Senator Casey at this moment, but there appears little panic. In fact, they are smiling. So are Mr. McCormick’s top campaign advisers, Mark Harris and Brad Todd. Mr. Harris is looking at a whiteboard with counties scribbled across the top, and Mr. Todd is pacing, looking at his iPhone. Mr. McCormick’s press secretary, Elizabeth Gregory, is on the phone. Mr. McCormick’s campaign manager, Matt Gruda, is watching the results as the Republican challenger starts to grab a very slim lead.By midnight, they all know Mr. McCormick will win, as they have suspected for the past month. However, it would take the Associated Press two days to call it and Mr. Casey two weeks to concede a race very few analysts thought the three-term Democrat could ever lose to a candidate his team believed was an easy target.Mr. McCormick and his team believed otherwise.So how did a West Point graduate from Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, go from losing an agonizingly close, contentious Republican Senate primary two years ago to Dr. Mehmet Oz to winning against Mr. Casey, whose family has been a Pennsylvania political institution for four decades? It all began with focus and an interview conducted in his Pittsburgh living room days after he lost that first race.At the time, Mr. McCormick said he was unsure if he would try another race.Within just more than a year, he was in. The first thing he did was what many chief executives do when forming a board of directors: He formed a team of professionals from very different backgrounds and experiences who had never worked together. This is a risky business in politics, where a campaign team usually comes as a package deal.The Pittsburgh-based chief strategist, Mr. Harris, was hired first. He came from the political orbit of Senator Toomey. Mr. Todd, whom Mr. McCormick dubbed “the chief storyteller,” was hired on Labor Day 2023. He came from the world of Republican Senators Scott of Florida, Hawley, and Tillis. Messrs. Gregory and Gruda were strategists for Senator Rubio.Mr. Todd, a Tennessee native and founding partner of OnMessage who coauthored “The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics” in 2018, said it’s impossible to overstate the importance of their team not having a contested primary.“That is all a testament to Dave’s nature and his work ethic,” Mr. Todd said. “He did not get mad and let people who weren’t for him become enemies from the first race. He just kept working on relationships.”In those early days traveling across the state, you could see Mr. McCormick sitting down and listening to people who did not support him. He never acted like anyone owed him anything, even though it would have been easy to adopt an “I told you so” pose after Dr. Oz lost badly to Senator Fetterman in 2022. He also engaged in small, off-year elections for local offices, thus building more relationships.Then came the hard part: how to run against a man who, with the exception of one primary race for governor in 2002, had won handily in every statewide race he had run, including for state auditor general, state treasurer, and the Senate. Add the kicker that Mr. Casey had the same name as his late father, a beloved centrist Democrat governor of the state. From 30,000 feet, a win against Mr. Casey seemed daunting.Mr. Todd said he and Mr. Harris found out really quickly in research that Mr. Casey’s strength was overstated.“He was a mile wide and an inch deep,” Mr. Todd explained. “A lot of people were familiar with his name, but nobody was familiar with anything he had done or was working on doing.”In short, Mr. Casey had no political equity.Mr. Todd said it is rare to see a politician who has broad name recognition and no equity, “especially after as long a career as he had. But beyond knowing that he was in office, he really started with nothing. On the negative side (in terms of campaigning against him), he also did not have any established negatives.”No one was ready to throw Mr. Casey out, but no one knew how to rally around Mr. Casey to keep him in.Mr. Todd explained that was the tricky part of the campaign.“So we had to accept early on that people were not going to hate Bob Casey or think Bob Casey was terrible, so we had to construct a strategic framework that let voters vote for Dave without being mad at Bob,” he said.One key thing they had to do was invest cash in introducing Mr. McCormick.Mr. Todd explained that sometimes you beat incumbents by just piling on their negatives, something he said he’s done in certain races.“But because Casey didn’t start with a lot of negatives and we knew he would have unlimited money, we did not think that it was possible to beat him with negatives alone,” he said. “Therefore, the positive construction of Dave and what he’s for was going to be pretty important.”Meanwhile, Mr. Todd said Mr. Casey’s mistake was his refusal to break with President Biden or, later, with Vice President Harris.“It was obvious to us from the start that the administration was unpopular,” Mr. Todd said. “Joe Biden personally had some old wells of support, but the administration was unpopular.”Despite that, Mr. McCormick’s team likely was the only campaign in America that was happy when Mr. Biden stepped off the ticket.“We thought that Harris … would be a disaster in Pennsylvania, and that’s why we were ready to go with a campaign linking Casey to Harris on the very first day, really before any other campaign in the country was,” he said, pointing to their groundbreaking ad using the voices of Mr. Casey endorsing the vice president and the vice president on her litany of positions that included banning fracking, getting rid of the filibuster, limiting meat consumption, and abolishing the immigration-control service.The ad was potent. Using the vice president’s leftist statements in her own voice did more to demonstrate that the Democratic Party was too far left than anything they could put on the screen with an announcer in graphics. Using Mr. Casey’s voice saying she was awesome and perfect, juxtaposed with her saying something far left, helped establish him on the wrong side of the political divide.Mr. Casey’s team did little to disrupt their plan despite having a big money advantage heading into the summer, while Mr. McCormick’s team held their powder until they could even things up in September and October.Meanwhile, Mr. Harris “just spent an enormous amount of time trying to do resource strategy,” Mr. Todd said of the strategist’s strength in understanding the state. Mr. Harris had run both of Mr. Toomey’s successful races.Also crucial for Mr. McCormick was the help of Keystone Renewal, the super PAC run by a former Army Ranger, Sean Parnell, who served in Afghanistan, ran for Congress, and lives in western Pennsylvania. Without Keystone Renewal, Mr. McCormick may not have crossed the finish line.Mr. Parnell helped raise $14 million for the effort that tapped into several different categories of voters, including traditional, young and low-propensity voters, and got them to vote by mail. The final report released Friday showed Republicans added a total of 240,430 people to the permanent vote-by-mail list, the first cycle ever where state Republicans added more voters to the permanent list than Democrats did.Mr. Parnell said they also produced 365,000 first-time voters.“Those 365,000 are the first voters we need to fold into the program for the next cycle to get added to the permanent list, something that will benefit us immensely,” he said.Mr. Todd said the most maddening thing for him was race handicappers kept not seeing Mr. McCormick’s path to victory: “The Cook Report moved the race to toss-up, but nobody else did, ever.”Throughout the race, Mr. Todd said reporters would repeatedly tell him you cannot beat Mr. Casey in Pennsylvania. He would counter by pointing to Mr. Casey’s lack of deep favorables. What they missed was that the race was close, that Mr. McCormick had budgeted well and so was going to have enough money, and even more importantly, the presidential race was moving away from Ms. Harris and, in tandem, from Mr. Casey too.Poll after poll after poll showed Mr. Casey would be at whatever number the vice president was, and Mr. McCormick would be five or six points below President-elect Trump. Mr. Todd said that is a hill you can climb “because that means there are a lot of people who are voting for Trump who just don’t know enough about you yet.”In the end, the coalition that voted for Trump was also the coalition that brought over Mr. McCormick. There are likely a few voters in upper-income suburbs who voted for Mr. McCormick but didn’t vote for Trump, and there are likely a few people in blue-collar, suburban and ex-urban communities who voted for Trump but didn’t vote for anybody in the Senate race.However, the conservative populist coalition that most of the press missed once again expanded. It is a working-class coalition, plus some capitalists who think the Democrats have gone too far.Mr. Todd said he suspects that because a lot of the voters who are Republican historically but skeptical of Trump are mostly tax cut and border-security type voters, “I think some of those people will continue to come home. They don’t like the rhetoric around Trump. They’re not culture warriors, but they do agree with him on border security and on the economy. And I suspect he can win a few more of those over time if he plays his cards. And I think the more they get to know Dave, the more they’re going to love him.”In the end, Mr. Todd said Mr. McCormick won because of his leadership in the campaign infrastructure and because he embodied Pennsylvania.“Dave’s family has a detailed family history, and they’ve invested in writing it all down. They do things like go to Decoration Day every year,” he said.“You very quickly come into the fact that West Point is a really important inflection point for his father, Doug, and Dave both. It has shaped the rest of their life. And so, we had a challenge of … how do you portray (that) West Point’s a United States military institution (inside) which you cannot shoot an ad, then we got to the notion of the Thayer Gate because that’s a portal,” he explained.Once you walk through that gate, you’re a soldier, and when you walk out of that gate, you are an officer. It was a transformational threshold that became the pivot point of their campaign.The team’s last ad was shot in the streets of West Point, right outside the gate, with Mr. McCormick referring to the experience of going through the gate and how it changed him.In the close, he said, “I left here determined to serve my country for the rest of my life, and that’s why I’m running.”When you understand what motivates a candidate, it is the most important thing you can do to persuade a swing voter. They’re swing voters for a reason. They don’t have real strong opinions on a lot of matters. Or they have strong opinions that conflict with each other ideologically.From the deliberate strategy of winning over voters in places such as Pennsylvania’s Luzerne and Bucks counties and to cutting into Mr. Casey’s votes at Montgomery, Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia, it was clear the plan worked. In the end, swing voters went with their gut based on what they perceived to be the motivations of the candidates, and Mr. McCormick won.Creators.com

Inside David McCormick’s Senate Victory in Pennsylvania Over a Popular Democratic Incumbent

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