Battleground state Republican Dave McCormick used Vice President Kamala Harris’ sudden emergence as the Democratic presidential nominee to launch a fierce attack on his rival, Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pennsylvania).
The ad represents a broader recalibration of strategy by the Republican Party and the Trump campaign for Harris, 59, and revisits some of the best hits of the far-left positions she championed during the 2020 campaign.
“Bob Casey just endorsed the most liberal candidate in the history of our country,” McCormick, 58, blasted in an X post featuring the ad.
One particular focus of the former Bridgewater Associates CEO’s campaign ad was Harris’ past comments about energy.
The ad highlighted Harris’ support for the Green New Deal and a ban on fracking.
Fracking and energy policy in particular are hot political issues in Pennsylvania, which is home to more than 185,000 operating conventional gas and oil wells. According to the Fractracker Alliance:.
During the campaign, McCormick repeatedly criticized Casey on energy policy.
But now his team believes Ms Harris has given him new ammunition to woo the Keystone State’s swing vote away from Mr Casey, 64.
“Kamala Harris is inspiring,” Casey said in the ad, adding that she’s “extremely qualified.”
“The more people get to know her, the more impressed they will be with her abilities,” he added.
At the national level, allies of former President Donald Trump and Republicans have widely criticized Harris as a far-left, naive candidate.
With President Biden stepping away from his 2024 Democratic campaign platform, candidates like McCormick are following suit in battleground states and lower-district constituencies.
They are, 2019 GovTrack Analysis The report characterized Harris as the most ideologically left-leaning senator at the time, and more liberal than Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
McCormick’s new ad shows Harris smiling in a clip from the CBS interview when asked about the rankings.
At the time, Harris supported left-leaning policies like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal to bolster her progressive credentials, but later backtracked on many of those positions.
GovTrack founder Joshua Tauberer told The Washington Post that the group stopped producing single-year reports like the one for Harris in 2019 because it concluded that “the limited data available in a single year is insufficient to paint a credible portrait.”
Other far-left elements of Harris’ record highlighted in the ad include decriminalizing illegal immigration into the U.S. and abolishing private health insurance (She later retracted it), supports mandatory gun buybacks, and even supports calls to reduce red meat intake.
The commercial then ends with Casey saying, “The public will be especially impressed with her abilities,” while Harris’ infamous laughter plays in the background.
His ad quickly sparked a social media frenzy and rallied conservatives together.
“I’d forgotten how insane some of these claims are,” Republican spokesman Matt Whitlock posted on X. “Limit red meat consumption? Let the Boston bomber vote? Abolish ICE to ‘start over’? End the filibuster to pass the Green New Deal?”
“Even AOC and her team members had to say, ‘Hey, calm down,'” he added.
“Kamala Harris wants to pass the Green New Deal, ban fracking, ban offshore drilling, decriminalize illegal immigration across the border, abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, defund the police, abolish private health insurance and provide taxpayer paid health care for illegal immigrants. She’s even more radical than Biden!” wrote Donald Trump Jr.
“A summary of facts the media doesn’t want readers to remember,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) wrote.
Casey holds an average lead of 6.2 percentage points over McCormick. According to the latest RealClearPolitics The polls are tallied. The three-term Democratic senator’s father was a former governor of Pennsylvania.
