THE HILL
Democrats running for the Senate in “blue wall” states that will be critical to determining the outcome of the 2024 election are running away from Vice President Harris, signaling that they are hoping to win over some of former President Trump’s voters to keep their seats.
And Democratic candidates in those states have been careful about criticizing Trump during the high-stakes debates. They have focused on policy and their own records without taking many — or any — shots against the Republican nominee.
Pennsylvania incumbent Sen. Bob Casey (D) has even embraced Trump’s tariff policies. His campaign launched an ad last week that described him as “independent” and touted how he “bucked” the Biden administration to protect fracking and “sided with Trump to end NAFTA.”
“There’s no party affiliation in Casey ads. I don’t recall seeing any that say ‘Democrat’ or anything like that. He’s running as an incumbent on his own record,” said Berwood Yost, the director of the Center for Public Opinion Research at Franklin & Marshall College.
“He’s trying to distance himself a little bit from an administration that is viewed negatively by the most part. He doesn’t want to be tied to that either through Biden or Harris,” he said.
Yost said Casey has dabbled in some of the populist messaging that is Trump’s forte to drive a wedge between working-class, blue-collar voters and his Republican opponent, David McCormick, the former CEO of Bridgewater, one of the country’s biggest hedge funds.
“If you look at some of the messaging that Casey has put forward, he’s tried to run some populist messaging against McCormick. He’s tied McCormick very closely to the leadership of that hedge fund and tying him [to] China,” he said.