Pennsylvania Sen.-elect David McCormick struck a conciliatory tone during his victory speech from Pittsburgh on Friday, thanking now-outgoing Democratic Sen. Bob Casey Jr. and his family for their decades of public service to the commonwealth.
McCormick said that Casey and his namesake father – a pro-life moderate who served as governor in the 1980s and 1990s – deserve a lot of respect for "serving . . . with honor." The younger Casey served three terms since defeating conservative Sen. Rick Santorum in 2006.
"I want to start with just a message of absolute gratitude: Gratitude to be standing here in this beautiful day in a city that's meant so much to my family. My dad went to college at Pitt. We had some of the most formative years of our lives here. Three of our girls were born here," McCormick said.
". . . Gratitude for the people of Pennsylvania for giving us the honor of serving at such a consequential time for our country: Gratitude to the amazing campaign team."
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The hedge fund executive was born in nearby Washington, Pa., and grew up in Columbia County on the other side of the commonwealth, where his father was president of Bloomsburg University.
He joked that he, like Casey, knows what it is like to lose a close election, as cardiothoracic surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz narrowly defeated him in the 2022 primary to replace retiring Republican Sen. Pat Toomey.
McCormick said he has already spoken with President-elect Donald Trump and is ready to hit the ground running on forwarding the mogul's agenda in the Senate.
"We heard a common refrain: the one message we heard over and over again is we need change. The country is headed in the wrong direction. We need leadership to get our economy back on track to get this horrific inflation under control," McCormick said.
"We need leadership to secure the border to stop this scourge of fentanyl. The most heartbreaking thing we encountered were parents along the way that had lost a child to fentanyl. . . . We learned time and again that the path to unlocking Pennsylvania's future is is energy."
Nodding again to the tight margin of victory, McCormick pledged to be a senator for all Pennsylvanians: "I don't care who voted for me and didn't vote for me."
He also offered outreach to Gov. Josh Shapiro, whose name is already being bandied about in the press as a 2028 Democratic presidential favorite, as well as the GOP-majority state Senate, and state House, which Democrats will reportedly hold onto by one member.
However, Casey's campaign is not yet conceding the race – which has been called for McCormick by the Associated Press. In a release just prior to McCormick taking the stage, the Casey campaign highlighted two lawsuits McCormick's team filed in Philadelphia challenging about 15,000 provisional ballots.
McCormick's campaign sought the sequestering of a chunk of those provisional ballots from voters who had cast now-rejected mail ballots nullified "for procedural defects" and provisions that may have non-matching signatures or missing secrecy envelopes, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
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Deep-red Cambria County remained the only other county with a large proportion of votes outstanding as of Thursday night. However, the sole state House race there yet to be called – in East Taylor – is Democrat-favored. That may translate to a slight edge in Casey's favor, based on historical electoral patterns.
The Johnstown Tribune-Democrat newspaper reported just as McCormick took the stage that the Democrat, state Rep. Frank Burns, will hold his seat.
Following the speech, McCormick took a few questions, including one on the lawsuits.
"Basically, if you look at all the math and the reason the AP called the races, there's no path to Senator Casey overcoming my lead. . . . But there are ballots that will continue to be counted and [the] lawsuits [are] just to make sure that there is an adequate number of observers that are overseeing that counting process," he said.
McCormick currently leads by about 30,000 votes, but the race remains within the 0.5% margin that triggers an automatic statewide recount.
