Global News Desk:
Over the past decade, Donald
Trump has emerged as the dominant figure in Republican politics, playing a
significant role in U.S. Senate races. Utilizing his substantial public
platform and devoted support base, he has influenced the decisions on GOP
incumbents seeking reelection and the selection of contenders.
This year, with control of the
U.S. Senate on the line, would-be nominees in the Senate battlegrounds of
Arizona, Montana, Michigan, Nevada and Ohio are endorsing Trump in the GOP
presidential primary, campaigning for him or otherwise seeking his approval.
But that’s not happening in
Pennsylvania, where an awkward dance between likely partners at the top of the
ticket seems all but certain to continue until the music stops in November.
There, the likely Republican
nominee, David McCormick, and Trump seem to be ignoring each other. Theirs is a
complicated relationship that Democrats say is fraught with danger for
McCormick and pollsters say makes his uphill climb against an entrenched
incumbent much steeper.
“It’s a fascinating relationship
to observe,” said Christopher Borick, director of the Muhlenberg College
Institute of Public Opinion in Allentown. “They’re not a natural fit in terms
of their policy positions, their rhetorical styles and, of course, given
Trump’s support of one of McCormick’s opponents in 2022, there is a history.
And how do you navigate that becomes the question.”
McCormick — a wealthy ex-hedge
fund CEO and onetime senior official in President George W. Bush’s
administration — has no major primary opposition, is popular with party brass
and doesn’t need Trump’s fundraising help.
But he is trying to knock off
Democratic U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, the son of a former governor and the best-known
political name in Pennsylvania.
For Democrats, Pennsylvania is a
must-win if they are to somehow hang on to Senate control and help President
Joe Biden remain in the White House. Biden’s unpopularity — even in
Pennsylvania, where Biden was born, roots for Philadelphia sports teams and
campaigns often — rivals Trump’s, and the presidential race will weigh heavily
on both McCormick and Casey, one of Biden’s strongest allies in Congress.
For McCormick, there’s the
additional baggage of Trump’s unpopularity with the moderate voters McCormick
wants to win over — not to mention the tongue-lashings Trump administered as he
worked to defeat McCormick in Pennsylvania’s hotly contested 2022 primary for
U.S. Senate.
McCormick — like others in the
seven-way GOP primary to succeed retiring Republican Sen. Pat Toomey — had
sought Trump’s endorsement. According to McCormick’s telling of it, Trump told
McCormick during their meeting at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida that
to win the primary McCormick would need to say the 2020 election was stolen.
McCormick said he refused. Three
days later, Trump endorsed Dr. Mehmet Oz and then savaged McCormick repeatedly.
In one setting, a rally in western Pennsylvania days before the 2022 primary,
Trump told the crowd that McCormick is “not MAGA,” using the acronym for his
Make America Great Again campaign slogan.
Then he derided McCormick as
having been with a company — the hedge fund — that “managed money for communist
China,” describing him in the next breath as “the candidate of special
interests and globalists and the Washington establishment.”
McCormick lost to Oz by just 950
votes — a loss he has acknowledged that Trump probably contributed to — before
Oz went on to lose to Democrat John Fetterman by 5 points.
Still, McCormick’s allies say he
hasn’t harbored hard feelings, and he hasn’t since criticized Trump for that
episode — or anything else, really.
But Trump has not walked back his
previous comments — and that could hang over McCormick.
“It’s definitely a problem for
McCormick,” said Pittsburgh-based Democratic campaign strategist Mike Mikus.
“The question is, how big? Donald Trump is always the wild card in these types
of relationships. Donald Trump cares about one person and that’s Donald Trump,
and if he’s not feeling it one day when he’s in Pennsylvania, he may start
taking shots at McCormick.”
McCormick declined an interview
request, and Trump’s campaign aides didn’t respond to messages. But the pall
between them is hard to miss.
The men haven’t spoken to each
other since 2022, according to McCormick’s campaign. They didn’t meet when
Trump was in the state recently to speak to National Rifle Association members
at the NRA’s Great American Outdoor Show. McCormick didn’t attend and Trump
never mentioned McCormick during the 82-minute speech.
In a recent interview with
conservative broadcasters, McCormick acknowledged the likelihood that the men
will lead the GOP ticket in Pennsylvania and described the relationship in
transactional terms.
“My guess is that President Trump
at the top of the ticket will help me, and I’d be hopeful that my candidacy and
the strength I would bring will help him,” McCormick said on “The Clay Travis
& Buck Sexton Show.”
McCormick tiptoed around Trump’s
liabilities with moderate voters in a state Trump lost by 1 point in 2020.
Instead, McCormick suggested Trump can help him because he mobilizes a huge
part of the Republican Party to vote — and that McCormick can help Trump with
more moderate voters.
McCormick has said he hadn’t
believed he needed Trump’s endorsement to win in 2022, as long as Trump wasn’t
attacking him, and acknowledged the necessity of convincing moderate voters to
back him. On Thursday, he name-dropped Trump when he told the crowd at a family
farm in northern Pennsylvania that he is wealthy and, thus, can be an
independent politician without fear of losing the job.
“I don’t need to make a living
after this,” McCormick said. “I don’t owe anybody anything. I don’t owe
President Trump anything. I don’t owe (Senate GOP Leader) Mitch McConnell
anything. The only people I would owe anything to are the people of
Pennsylvania who put me in office.”
Still, Borick and other pollsters
aren’t sure if there’s a needle left for McCormick to thread, given Trump’s
unpopularity with moderates and the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v.
Wade, ending a half-century of federal protection of abortion rights.
McCormick has said he favors
banning abortion, with an exception to save the life of the mother, a position
that could limit his appeal to otherwise persuadable moderates.
On top of that, McCormick is
virtually unknown compared to Casey, pollsters say. “Right now, the biggest
vulnerability for McCormick is nobody really knows him in this state, and he’s
got to make sure he defines himself before Casey does,” said Berwood Yost, a
pollster and director of the Center for Opinion Research at Franklin and Marshall
College.
Yost and other analysts say it
will be difficult for McCormick to win without the enthusiastic support of
Trump’s base. But, Yost said, McCormick may have to figure out how to do that
in a challenging political environment if he is “someone who Trump doesn’t
favor.”
For his part, McCormick has
promised to back the GOP’s presidential nominee — likely to be Trump. And
McCormick has largely stuck with Trump on policy, including siding against
Democrats and McConnell in the divisive fight in Congress over bipartisan
legislation to tighten border security and send more aid to Ukraine to help it
fight Russia’s invasion.
This time around, McCormick
didn’t need Trump’s help to get the party’s endorsement or effectively clear
the primary field. And McCormick — who has deep pockets and high-level
connections in business and politics — has wealthy backers in what is expected
to be one of the nation’s most expensive Senate races.
A supportive super PAC reported
nearly $18 million in contributions, largely from big Republican donors across
the world of high finance and securities trading, and McCormick has promises of
support from party brass, including a super PAC linked to McConnell.
Still, there will come a general
election cycle when Trump will visit Pennsylvania again. When that happens,
both men will have a decision to make about whether to appear together. That
could be especially uncomfortable for McCormick, Democrats say.
“McCormick will be given a pretty
bad choice: to skip it and risk potentially being a target of Trump’s,” Mikus
said, “or going and paying the price politically for cozying up to Trump.” (NEws Source By AP News)