Pennsylvania Senate Republican Candidate Dave McCormick Goes to the Mat with Ad on His High School Wrestling Career

Pennsylvania Senate Republican candidate Dave McCormick launched an ad on Tuesday, focusing on how his days as a Keystone State wrestler gave him the grit to go the extra mile.

“Pennsylvania wrestling taught me to do the hard thing: Hard work. Hard choices,” McCormick said in the ad.

“That’s not what we get from Washington. The career politicians don’t do the hard work,” he continued.

McCormick not only hopes to showcase his grit; he hopes to connect with Keystone States voters that love wrestling.

A press release from his campaign stated:

While at Bloomsburg Area High School, Dave was co-captain of the wrestling team and came in fourth place in the commonwealth. He was a PIAA District 4 champion and was inducted into the region’s Hall of Fame last month. Dave went on to wrestle at West Point, where he was co-captain of the Army Wrestling Team and twice qualified for the NCAA Division I Tournament.

Pennsylvania is one of top states for high school and college wrestling and this can be seen as the Penn State Nittany Lion wrestling team dominated during the 2024 NCAA Championships this week.

McCormick hopes to unseat Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA), a long-term Senate Democrat first elected in 2007. Casey is the son of Bob Casey Sr., a former governor of Pennsylvania.

Casey has sought to attack McCormick for his leadership as the CEO of the Connecticut-based Bridgewater Associates, a hedge fund; however, the ad describes how his high school wrestling led to him going to West Point.

The ad will run across the Pennsylvania commonwealth and will be featured during the NCAA basketball tournament.

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dave McCormick from Pennsylvania holds a campaign rally at Frosty Valley Resort on April 20, 2022 in Danville, Pennsylvania. (Mark Makela/Getty Images)

The Pennsylvania Senate race may determine if Senate Republicans can retake the majority from the Democrats, who have a razor-thin majority.

The stakes are even higher as a CNN poll released last week found that former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden are tied at 46 percent in the state. An Emerson College poll had Casey up by four points over McCormick, with 14 percent who remain undecided.

Law enforcement also recently called the anti-police Pennsylvania Indivisble’s endorsement of Casey “alarming and extremely dangerous.”

Chris Eiserman, Folcroft deputy police chief and Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) Lodge 27 president, said during a press conference.

This is a group [Indivisible] that said ‘we won’t stop until we defund the police.’ They have called for fewer officers on the street. They have advocated to end cash bail. This is a group that is responsible for bailing out some of the most violent offenders that Pennsylvania has to offer. At a time when there were four shootings in four days on our local public transit system, and law enforcement across the Commonwealth is understaffed, Casey’s decision to align himself with these Defund the Police activists is alarming and extremely dangerous. [Emphasis added]

“Thankfully, Pennsylvania has a law-and-order Senate candidate that will work with the police and not against us: Dave McCormick. Dave McCormick is a combat veteran, who takes threats to Pennsylvanians’ safety seriously,” he added.

Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.