Dems Bet the Farm on a Retro Candidate Running a Snoozefest Race
Plus: What role will gas prices play in the election?
COBURN, PENNSYLVANIA—Everything about Bob Casey’s campaign for a fourth term in the United States Senate feels like a throwback to the pre-Donald Trump era, right down to how fundamentally boring it is. The race features two white guys with exceedingly white names in a predominantly white state duking it out over The Issues. Casey is the Jesuit-educated son of a former governor who had the same name and a comparable résumé. Casey’s Republican challenger, Dave McCormick, is a bit of a Sorkinesque villain: an obscenely rich hedge-fund CEO dogged by accusations of carpetbagging.
Following Casey on the campaign trail last week felt like stepping into an alternate universe, a feeling that got even stronger after I spent an evening with two avatars of the Trump-infused political era: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Phil.
Standing on a small platform flanked by hay bales, CASEY FOR SENATE signs, and a Patton-esque American flag that almost fully covered one side of a big red barn, the senior senator from Pennsylvania rattled off a lengthy list of accomplishments. And after citing each one, he described how and why his opponent will dismantle those legislative gains if he manages to take Casey’s Senate seat in the next Congress, which is likely to be as finely split as the outgoing one.
How about the infrastructure bill that was so critical to the rural community, right? My opponent wants to repeal that bill. He wants to repeal the entire infrastructure bill. . . .
There's a drinking water project in Haines Township. It's about 1.4 million [dollars]. Actually, it’s more than that. I think it's a couple million—Haines Township, $4.8 million. That's where the money came from, from the drinking water part of the infrastructure legislation. My opponent, maybe they don't need that drinking water in some community in Connecticut where he lives, but we need it here. . . .
In this county alone, just in the [American Rescue Plan], got eighteen million for schools. You've never seen federal money like that in fifty years combined, let alone one year. While I was doing all that work, you know what he was doing? He was running the biggest hedge fund in the world. You know what that hedge fund was doing? It was investing in China.
Every attendee, me included, was met with a firm handshake and a “great to see you” from the Senator. It’s a shrewd, age-old tactic to avoid alienating someone you might have met previously but not remembered—a great example of classic retail politicking.
The politically active elderly mixed with center-left young parents and their toddlers. Attendees all brought their own foldout chairs. Their cars were arranged neatly across the grassy field thanks to the staffer who organized parking. I’d never seen so much flannel in one place.
Political staffers are hard to miss at events like these. At Democratic rallies, they’re usually wearing variants of the same navy blue sweaters, vests, or quarter zips; overwashed jeans; and shoes that indicate a sedentary professional life, like Cole Haan ZERØGRANDs. (At Republican events, staffers either look like Trump clones or like they just raided a warehouse containing Tory Burch’s fall/winter 2014 campaign.)
None of what I saw at Casey’s campaign stop felt like it was taking place in the year 2024. There were no warnings of fascism, villains becoming heroes, multiple assassination attempts, professional wrestling cosplay, or shock moments. It was staid and no-thrills, a reminder of how politics could be and has been.
But once I started talking to attendees, I snapped back to reality. The first person I met was Michael Petrunyak. After spending a couple decades in Germany as an Army officer, Petrunyak told me, he was no longer content to remain an apolitical observer.
Being apolitical for 27 years was kind of rough, you know, because I did two tours in Iraq. So retiring kind of has me uneasy about getting involved in politics. I'm really uncomfortable with it. But certain things that motivate me about, you know, Veterans Affairs, and one thing that really upsets me a lot is the suppression of any type of overseas votes. Because for the majority of my career, I was voting remotely.
Petrunyak also took issue with Casey’s opponent, specifically calling out McCormick’s “disingenuous behavior” on refusing to support military aid to Ukraine, a stance that could have severe economic implications in Pennsylvania.
“The relationships with NATO and the Russo-Ukraine war, that’s vulnerable,” Petrunyak said. “When you look at the role the Commonwealth plays in the Russian-Ukraine war, [155mm rounds] are made in Scranton, PA. So it’s huge. So all the money that's spent for that war is actually coming—the majority, about 90 plus percent—is coming to the United States. So it’s really priming the pump here. To cut that funding would hurt the Commonwealth.”
“You don’t get an excuse because you’ve served, okay,” Petrunyak added. McCormick is a West Point graduate who served in the Gulf War.
Petrunyak embodies one of the demographics most prized by Democrats this year, including presidential candidate Kamala Harris: He’s educated, principled, and likely, in a less-fraught time, a Republican. He also lives in a county won by Joe Biden in 2020 by just 3,683 votes. He’s fully behind Casey.
On the opposite end of the ideological spectrum was Lisa Maras, a self-described “leftist” and former third-party voter. She explained to me how modern circumstances have eliminated the luxury of voting purely on ideals.
“I've only been a Democrat for a few years,” she said. “I am a voter for who makes the most sense for the common good.”
“I’m basically satisfied with the work that he's done, and I do not like the direction that Republicans are taking,” Maras added of Casey. “To be very honest, it’s the craziness of the . . . Republican party being taken over by MAGA that makes anything Republican an impossibility for me. Republicanism wasn’t always an impossibility for me. MAGA Republican is.” She then offered a remarkably conservative-sounding perspective: “Protecting what we have is, to me, my biggest desire for Bob Casey to be where he is.”
I asked Maras to imagine rewinding to the beginning of the campaign. What could McCormick have done differently, if anything, to earn her vote?
MAGA Republicanism is not conservative. It’s radical, it’s crazy, it’s anti-democratic, and it’s—quite honestly—fascist. I don’t mind using that word. I don’t think it's hyperbole. I think it’s a descriptor. So, [I’m] not embracing any of that. I think there’s just too much kowtowing in the Republican party today, that you have to bow down to Trump, and he had to bow down to the big lies—like, no, an election was lost. And if you have to say that an election was won that wasn’t won, then you’ve lost all your integrity. So I think it’s that total loss of integrity that . . . makes [McCormick] an impossibility.
Maras has the profile of a voter demographic that national Democrats haven’t tried very hard to court this cycle, but gaining the support of people like her remains critical to any real hope of success. Abandoning far-left voters to cranks like Jill Stein or Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—the latter of whom ultimately brought a whole new cohort to the MAGA movement—is a surefire way to lose a winnable election.
The fact that voters like both Maras and Patrunyak are turning out for Casey’s campaign events is a good sign for his campaign. If that holds on a large scale, there shouldn’t be too much ticket-splitting in Pennsylvania—their rationalizations for voting against McCormick, after all, were really rationalizations for voting against Donald Trump.1
Casey seemed surprisingly reluctant to talk about larger-scale issues, however. After the event, I asked him if he agreed with former Joint Chiefs chairman Mark Milley that Donald Trump was “fascist to the core.” Casey filibustered, hitting me with The Issues until I pressed again. He eventually claimed he had not seen Milley’s comments—something I found very hard to believe.
A Casey event is not a shout-fest. People don’t get charged up for the man the way they sometimes do for other politicians. That does not mean he lacks support, however: He enjoys a high degree of confidence. His supporters have a good read on what he’s accomplished in the past 18 years and feel it gives them a basis for trusting what he’s offering for the next six: legislative results, reliable Democratic voting, and making the occasional bipartisan deal.
If the polls are to be believed, Casey’s race is one of the most closely contested Senate battlegrounds, and the outcome will help determine the chamber’s balance in the next Congress. He’s betting big on the belief that classic campaigning—with solid political fundamentals, like great retail politicking—is the path to victory, and not every candidate needs to be echoing the top of the ticket. His style isn’t turning anyone off, but whether it’s enough to get him over the finish line is something we’ll find out in about a week.
A crude assessment
During my travels across Pennsylvania, I noticed that gas prices were consistently, peculiarly high. No matter where I stopped, the cost of a gallon seemed higher than the obviously marked up pumps near my home in Washington, D.C.
AAA’s gas price index confirmed this impression: I was shocked to learn that Pennsylvania’s prices are extremely high for the region. The Keystone State’s average cost per gallon, roughly $3.35, is the highest price in the Union east of Utah. You can fill up more cheaply in New York and Maryland, and much more cheaply in West Virginia, New Jersey, and Ohio. (There is a full 40-cent difference in average prices between Pennsylvania and Ohio. For the cost of filling up the 13-gallon tank of your Toyota Corolla in the former, you could fill up and cover most of the cost of a crunchwrap supreme in the latter.) Pennsylvania’s prices are also almost a quarter higher than the national average of around $3.13.
As for why the prices are high, it could be a confluence of things. At 58.7 cents per gallon, Pennsylvania’s gas taxes are higher than neighboring states. The gas tax rate is lower than it is in Illinois, but the overall prices remain higher. Other factors could include blended gasoline for the summer, according to Jana Tidwell of AAA Mid-Atlantic.
Gas prices can often be a significant indicator of political outcomes. According to S&P Global:
While it can be hard to pin down the importance of a given issue in any election year, "we have very solid evidence that gasoline prices are going to play a role," Jon Krosnick, director of the Political Psychology Research Group at Stanford University, said.
Krosnick, alongside Laurel Harbridge and Jeffrey Wooldridge, co-authored a 2016 study called "Presidential Approval and Gas Prices" tracking gasoline prices' direct impact on a president's approval ratings. The study reviewed data from January 1976 to July 2007, filtering for other economic factors and significant news events, and found that a 10-cent increase in gasoline prices correlated with a 0.60% decrease in presidential approval.
A high average gas price in Pennsylvania could affect the minds of voters as we inch closer to Election Day. While Pennsylvania’s gas prices are down from one year ago, they are slightly higher than they were just last month.
But there are lots of other concerns and unknown factors, like whether Pennsylvanians hold Harris accountable for gas prices—or whether the state’s significant Puerto Rican population will punish her opponent for an insult comic’s nasty gibes about the island at Trump’s rally on Sunday. How this all shakes out is another question we can’t answer for at least one more week.
Correction (6:45 p.m. EDT Oct. 29 2024): An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Sen. Bob Casey is seeking a third term in the Senate; he is seeking his fourth.
Unlike in Arizona, where we are poised to witness the introduction of the most confusing voter of all time: the Ruben Gallego/Donald Trump ticket-splitter.
Great newsletter. I really appreciate that you were on the ground with the Casey campaign. I get the impression a lot of reporters are phoning it in. You are an excellent writer retelling your observations.
I don't think Dems have abandoned far-left voters. Perhaps Dems are taking them a bit for granted, or not overtly courting them, but that does not translate into abandonment. They have made clear they welcome a wide spectrum of voters and want to make room for folks from AOC/Sanders to Cheney/Kinzinger, from Michael Moore to J. Michael Luttig, from Daily Kos to The Bulwark. I think far-left voters understand the stakes, understand that we must win the election and then wrangle over legislation and policy later. Jill Stein's current arguments don't seem far left to me at all, so I suspect most progressives would rather have a seat at the Dem table than risk being rounded up by Trump. If, as folks at the Atlantic say, some think Harris is too centrist and others think she is too liberal, while all agreeing Trump would be a disaster for the country, the Constitution, and democracy, the campaign has done an excellent job of creating a winning coalition. Harris is all about including as many voices and perspectives as possible; Trump is all about excluding as many voices and perspectives as possible. Far-left voters will continue to play the role under Harris that they have done for several decades now: pushing their ideas, working to persuade, until suddenly, those ideas seem centrist to more and more people. The battle this election is no longer between the center and the center-right, but between the center-left and a radical (fascist) far-right. What looks like the moderate center now contains many popular ideas and planks that would have been considered far-left not that long ago. I hope Harris wins, we hang on to the Senate, and gain the House so that the far-left can continue to play that creative and influential role!