Dave McCormick, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, discussed the state of his race against incumbent Democratic Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey and the key issues on voters’ minds ahead of Election Day in a Thursday interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Fresh off of his final debate against Casey on Tuesday night, McCormick spoke with the DCNF about key issues on Pennsylvanians’ minds like mass immigration and natural gas. Despite being a self-described “underdog” against Casey, McCormick made clear that he believes the momentum is on his side with just 18 days to go until voters head to the polls.

“I feel a lot of great momentum. I’m the underdog in this race. I’m being outspent, despite the lies of Bob Casey. If you look at the spending, he and his allies are outspending me by a lot. But I have enough to get my message out on the air, and I have huge momentum on the ground,” McCormick told the DCNF. “There’s lots of people knocking on doors. Millions of doors have already been knocked and will be knocked between now and November 5, signs everywhere. Listen, I feel it on the ground. I feel a lot of enthusiasm, and the polling supports it. If you look at the last two months, my polling has closed to where it’s a tie race. And so the momentum is on my side. The more people get to know me, and the more they focus on Bob Casey, the better it is for me. And that’s what’s happening.”

Casey is a three-term senator first elected to the chamber in the 2006 election cycle, and his father was the former governor of Pennsylvania. The incumbent senator has voted with President Joe Biden 98.5% of the time, according to FiveThirtyEight.

The RealClearPolitics polling average shows that the race has tightened: in February, the average had Casey leading McCormick by about nine points, but the most recent data now indicates that Casey now leads by less than four percentage points. The Pennsylvania race has also proven to be one of the most expensive of any contest in this election cycle, with the two candidates and outside groups pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the contest so far, according to OpenSecrets.

The Pennsylvania Senate race may end up deciding which party controls the chamber for the next two years, so it is no surprise that so much money is rushing in to affect the pivotal contest.

The massive increase in illegal immigration that marked President Joe Biden’s term has impacted Pennsylvania as it has nearly every other state in the country, and the issue is on voters’ minds in the Keystone State: 38% of Pennsylvanian respondents in a September poll by Monmouth University identified immigration as one of the two top issues in the 2024 election cycle. The DCNF recently reported that mass immigration is straining the state’s school system because school districts are shelling out needed resources to accommodate large numbers of students who do not speak English as their first language.

The burden the immigration surge places on social services further highlights the need for the government to reestablish order at the border, said McCormick, who added that his wife is an immigrant and that he supports legal immigration.

“There are so many first-, second- and third-order consequences of the border crisis that the most important thing is first to stop the flow. We have to secure the border. That’s first and foremost, job number one. And then, when you look at the 10 million people or more that have come in, there’s a triage that you’re going to have to do,” McCormick told the DCNF. “It’s going to be very challenging if your goal is to basically send everybody home that’s here illegally, which I think we should.”

Apart from immigration, abortion access and economic conditions are also major concerns for Pennsylvania voters, which may not be surprising that the same issues are on the electorate’s mind nationwide, according to the Monmouth poll. However, energy policy and fracking are topics that may end up playing a particularly strong role in Pennsylvania’s Senate and presidential races given the natural gas industry’s economic importance in the state.

Bob Casey Proposes $400,000 To Fund LGBTQ Center After Director Accused Of Sexual Abuse https://t.co/MnM1794CPu

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) March 22, 2024

Pennsylvania produced more natural gas than any other state in the country other than Texas in 2022, and the industry directly or indirectly supports about 123,000 jobs in Pennsylvania, according to an August 2023 FTI Consulting report commissioned by the Marcellus Shale Coalition. However, the Biden-Harris administration issued numerous anti-fossil fuel regulations, created new de facto taxes on the natural gas industry and stopped approving certain natural gas export hubs in the years since 2021, leading many pundits and industry experts predicting more of the same if Vice President Kamala Harris wins.

Harris said there’s “no question” fracking should be banned while running for president in the 2020 cycle, though her campaign has disavowed that position after she replaced Biden as the Democratic nominee. While Harris has attempted to suggest that she is much less hostile to natural gas and other fossil fuels in recent months, one of her top climate advisers undercut that messaging by saying that Harris is “not promoting expansion” of fossil fuels in an interview with Politico Pro.

Anecdotally, working- and middle-class Pennsylvanians seem to be motivated by the contrast on energy issues in this election cycle, particularly in the northern and western regions of the state that are home to massive gas deposits, McCormick told the DCNF.

“What’s happened under Biden and Harris — and Bob Casey’s been 100% supportive of this — has been a war on fossil fuels. The goal is to reduce energy demand for fossil fuels, and increase the price of energy to reduce carbon emissions. That’s the goal, and to do that by putting all sorts of red tape and bureaucracy, and making it much more difficult to frack,” McCormick told the DCNF. “You don’t have to ban fracking explicitly. To ban fracking, you just increase regulations, put bans in place, red tape, EPA mandates, and that drives up the price of fuel. Fuel prices are up 50%, and that’s exactly what’s happened. That’s disastrous for our industry as it exists, but it also stands in the way of the natural gas industry, doubling, tripling, quadrupling in Pennsylvania, creating hundreds of thousands, potentially millions, of jobs if we unlocked the fourth largest natural gas reserves in the world. So, that issue is resonating, because people’s futures depend on these great-paying jobs.”

“I think workers in the oil and gas industry, and the trades in general — pipefitters, steamfitters, welders — the rank-and-file all see that Biden, Harris and Casey are not going to be friends to their economic future. So, I think [energy policy] is a big issue, and don’t let the national level union endorsements for Kamala Harris or Bob Casey fool you, I think the rank and file has a very different view of things,” McCormick continued.

Barring any major and unexpected development, the contest between McCormick and Casey looks like it will be decided by a tight margin, but McCormick likes his chances. He believes he has the momentum and the gumption to close out the campaign with a victory, and that the contrast between his record and that of Casey and the Democrats is too strong for voters to look past.

“I think this is a race of contrast. It’s a race between change and status quo. It’s a race between strength and weakness,” McCormick told the DCNF. “It’s a race between someone who’s a combat vet, a West Point grad, a business guy, a political outsider, seventh generation Pennsylvanian, versus a guy who was born with a political spoon in his mouth and has been in elected office for years, and has been weak, and votes with his party 99% of the time on this crazy liberal agenda.”