Casey Won’t Admit Defeat, But Here’s Why He Lost
U.S. Sen. Bob Casey's final days in office read like a cautionary tale about the dangers of political evolution. His inbox overflows with increasingly desperate fundraising pleas – "Some bad news," "More bad news," "To avoid catastrophe" – while his campaign has embraced an unlikely role: election truther. The three-term senator now spams supporters daily, begging for $5 contributions to fund recounts against Republican Dave McCormick, whose narrow victory most media outlets have already confirmed.
The collapse of Casey's careful political balancing act offers a masterclass in how not to navigate America's shifting electoral landscape. Commonwealth Foundation polling captured this decline in real time: Casey's favorability ratings cratered from 50% to 44% between the second and third quarters of 2024, while his favorable-to-unfavorable margin shrank from a comfortable 14 points to a precarious 3. These weren't just numbers – they were warning signs of an expired political brand in free fall.
Casey's attempts to distance himself from the Biden administration's energy policies proved especially damaging. His belated concerns about the liquified natural gas (LNG) pause couldn't erase his support for job-killing initiatives like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals (FRAC) Act, and the Keystone Pipeline cancellation. Pennsylvania voters, facing soaring energy costs, saw through this performance just as they'd rejected Kamala Harris's similar attempts at moderation.
Casey’s stance on inflation proved equally tone-deaf. While Pennsylvania families struggled with rising prices, he embraced the administration's "greedflation" narrative, backing legislation to empower federal bureaucrats to police corporate pricing. This messaging ignored Milton Friedman's basic insight about inflation as a monetary phenomenon, driven by the very money supply-inflating direct payments to taxpayers that Casey had championed through the American Rescue Plan Act.
McCormick's campaign expertly exploited these vulnerabilities. Rather than engage in traditional Republican culture war messaging, they hammered Casey's 98% pro-Biden voting record and his connection to Harris's most extreme positions. Trump's memorable "Kamala Harris is for they/them" ad campaign provided the perfect backdrop, helping McCormick outperform expectations in traditional Democratic strongholds.
The timing of Casey's late-career pivot on abortion rights — completing a fascinating arc for a man whose governor father’s name is intimately connected with one of the most important Supreme Court cases related to states attempting to restrict the procedure — proved particularly unfortunate. While this shift might have paid dividends in 2022, when abortion energized Democratic voters nationwide, by 2024 the issue had lost much of its electoral punch. Many states where abortion access could have been decisive had already enshrined protections in their constitutions, leaving Casey looking like someone just aping the Democratic campaign strategy rather than a lifelong principled moderate.
The Scranton connection that once helped both Casey and Biden now worked against them. As Biden's mental acuity faltered and took his presidency with it, Casey's similar background and political style became a liability rather than an asset. Their shared brand of Blue Dog centrism, once a powerful force in Pennsylvania politics, now read as political cosplay – all flannel shirts and folksy manner with little substance behind it.
Casey's defeat, alongside fellow Blue Dog Democrat Sherrod Brown's loss to Colombian-born car dealer Bernie Moreno in Ohio’s U.S. Senate race, signals more than just the end of individual political careers. It marks the extinction of a certain kind of Democratic politics – pragmatic, moderate, and rooted in working-class concerns. The party's attempt to merge progressive identity positions with moderate aesthetics has produced something that appeals to neither group, resulting in the departure of genuine moderates like Arizona Sen. Krysten Sinema and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin.
In the end, Casey's refusal to concede to McCormick feels less like damn-the-torpedoes resistance and more like the last gasp of a political species facing extinction. His desperate fundraising emails, each more apocalyptic than the last, tell the story not just of one campaign's collapse but of an entire political philosophy's demise. The age of the Blue Dog Democrat appears to be over, buried under an avalanche of unforced party errors and demographic shifts that no amount of carefully calibrated messaging could overcome. Perhaps appropriately, it concludes not with a loud, populist bark but with loads of whimpering as the last cowed pup raises a paw to beg for the $5 donations needed to prolong his political lifespan.
