Vulnerable Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) is scrambling away from Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats to praise former President Donald Trump as Republican Dave McCormick threatens to unseat him in Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race.
Casey, who voted to convict Trump on impeachment charges in 2020 and 2021, is undoubtedly making a different closing argument than Harris in trying to align himself with Trump in America’s most critical swing state.
Speaking with WBRE 28 in a clip that was shared by the Trump campaign Wednesday afternoon, Casey said he opposed former President Barack Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade agreement–which Trump nixed when he entered office in 2017–and aligned with Trump on replacing the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
“I supported President Trump’s efforts to reform NAFTA, and I voted in favor of a trade deal. It’s the first trade deal I ever voted for because we finally were on the side of workers, and they had enforceable labor standards,” he said, adding he once opposed the Biden-Harris administration.
The Trump campaign blasted Casey as “another leftist scumbag” who “knows Kamala is losing and wants Pennsylvania to forget he votes with her almost 100% of the time.”
The Democrat senator’s lauding of Trump comes as Vice President Kamala Harris used the Atlantic’s sketchy smear piece to liken the former president to Adolf Hitler Wednesday afternoon, painting a wild contrast between the Democrat presidential nominee’s closing argument and that of one of her party’s most vulnerable senators.
Casey’s attempt to align with a man he twice voted to convict and Harris’s transparent effort to demonize Trump –after there were two attempts on his life in recent months– could indicate things are even worse for her in Pennsylvania than public polls suggest.
One of the most recent Pennsylvania polls from Atlas Intel, the best pollster of the 2020 cycle, found Trump with a three-point advantage over Harris.
Based on a sample of 2,048 likely voters from October 12-17, Trump led 50 percent to 47 percent.
The same survey found McCormick with a narrow edge on Casey, 48 percent to 47 percent. The margin of error for both races was ± two percentage points.
Moreover, the latest Gallup poll from Tuesday finds that more Americans have favorable views of Trump (50 percent favorable to 48 percent unfavorable). In comparison, more have negative opinions of Harris than positive ones (48 percent favorable to 50 percent unfavorable).
Harris’s mudslinging efforts in the home stretch seem to be an attempt to stir up negative perceptions of the former president when considering Gallup has her behind on the favorability front with just 13 days to election day.