Republicans got a glimpse of, for lack of a better term, normal candidate behavior last night when Donald Trump buried the hatchet with Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who’d been the former president’s nemesis ever since the 2020 election. Kemp, a Republican, had refused to go along with Trump’s accusations of foul play in Georgia’s vote counting, and Trump had held on tight to this grudge.
Seeing the party function more smoothly in a battleground state (Trump is up in Georgia in the polls, but he lost the state to Joe Biden in 2020) should turn Republicans’ attention to Pennsylvania, another battleground state where the GOP has lost ground by following Trump-backed nominees for Senate and governor. There, the normalness of Dave McCormick’s Senate campaign feels like a blast from the past that Republicans surely hope is a glimpse of the future of the party as well.
McCormick, a military veteran and former hedge fund CEO, was considered the strongest candidate to take on John Fetterman in 2022. But he lost the primary to Mehmet Oz, the TV personality backed by Trump. This time, McCormick won the GOP nomination and is running against Democratic Sen. Bob Casey.
Trump was clearly caught off-guard by Biden’s decision to drop his reelection bid and the speed with which the Democratic Party coalesced around Kamala Harris as his replacement. But McCormick wasn’t. Right away, his team had a 90-second ad ready highlighting Casey’s praise of Harris and then demonstrating Harris, in her own words, backing the following policies on her previous run for president:
- Getting rid of the filibuster to pass a “green new deal.”
- Banning fracking.
- Banning offshore drilling.
- Decriminalizing illegal border crossing.
- Abolishing and replacing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
- De-policing.
- A mandatory gun buyback.
- Eliminating private health insurance.
A week ago, McCormick struck again. Harris has been campaigning on her promise to sign a “first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries.” It amounts to price controls, a Sovietesque self-detonation of the U.S. economy. There are worse ideas, but not a whole lot of them. But McCormick zeroed in on why we’re even having this discussion to begin with.
One of the bigger bills passed by the Biden-Harris administration was a 2021 spending boondoggle that essentially taunted the public over its concern about rising prices. And this was followed by more inflation.
Vice President Harris, as president of the Senate, cast the tie-breaking vote to pass it. Now that she’s campaigning on the need to bring down prices, McCormick was once again ready with the receipts. McCormick’s ad shows Harris voting for the bill, Casey praising the legislation, and economists criticizing it.
Last, McCormick confronts the toughest issue for Republicans, especially against Harris: abortion. The entirely of the ad is McCormick looking at the camera and saying: “You may be wondering, what’s the difference between Bob Casey and me on abortion? We both believe in exceptions for rape, incest, and to save the life of the mother. We differ on the third trimester. I support Pennsylvania’s limits on elective abortion in the last months of pregnancy. That seems reasonable. Bob Casey supports late-term abortion and tax dollars to pay for them. Senator Casey has the more extreme position; I’m more middle of the road and looking for common ground.”
McCormick is basically outlining a blueprint to make the case against Harris and—crucially—basing that case on Harris’s incumbency, which the vice president is trying hard to erase from voters’ minds. The irony is that the fate of McCormick’s candidacy will depend a great deal on whether Trump wins or loses. And McCormick’s competent and focused campaign stands in stark contrast to the former president’s.
Yesterday, as Democrats were preparing the last night of their convention, Trump visited Arizona’s southern border for a speech on border security. Joining him were the local county sheriff and mothers of children killed ostensibly by illegal immigrants. The optics, then, were set. But here is how Trump began his speech when he stepped up to the microphone, with the border wall and grieving families behind him: “Thank you very much everybody. It’s a very sad time for this country in many ways. You had a candidate I was no fan of, Joe Biden, but the way he was taken out was a coup. He got 14 million votes and the person running now got none. She was disgraced—she was figured out by the Democrat voters, she never made it to Iowa. She was the first one out of approximately 22 people that were running for the Democrat nomination. She never even made it to Iowa. Beautiful place, Iowa—but she didn’t. Plenty of people did. And Biden got 14 million votes; she got no votes and now she’s running against us. The good news is I think we’re winning in the polls based on what I’m seeing and after the debate, we were winning by many points, as you know, against Biden, they went in to see him, they said you’re losing, you’re not going to win, you can’t win, we’re going to get you out. It was a coup of an American president and it was done with anger and he’s more angry than anybody.”
Then he mentioned the border, for anyone who was still listening.
Long-term, this bizarre dynamic actually suggests the GOP will be fine, because the competent ad-makers and the attractive candidates will still be there in the future. But for all of Trump’s ideological nimbleness, it’s the more traditional candidates who have been able to adjust to the twists and turns of this wild election season.
