End of the Casey era: Bob Casey will leave the Senate with a reputation as a quiet fighter for working people

On the day Bob Casey was sworn into the Senate nearly 18 years ago, he stood alongside Sen. Sherrod Brown and the Ohio Democrat’s family. Brown recalled how anxious his teenage daughter was about the big event and how Casey, a girl dad of four, made a point to chat with Brown’s daughter to ease her nerves before taking the oath at the Capitol.

“My wife still talks about this,” said Brown, an incumbent who also lost his seat this year. “… It was the first time I really saw him in action … the first example of Bob Casey’s kindness.”

After Casey conceded to Republican Dave McCormick on Thursday, two weeks after the Associated Press called the extremely narrow race, colleagues and former staff commended the Pennsylvania Democrat’s character and work, particularly for working families, the elderly, and people with disabilities. They lauded his empathy and humility in a chamber where many members seek the spotlight.

“Bob Casey is a very pleasant guy, and a guy you can work with, and that proved to be very fruitful during our 12-year period together,” said former Sen. Pat Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican, who worked closely with Casey to appoint federal judges.

Casey’s mild-mannered personality likely cost him, too, in a race where McCormick framed him as a “nice guy,” without much to show for his political career. Casey’s accomplishments were not always major news — a fault perhaps of his own messaging — but they mattered to the people affected, several of his allies stressed on Friday.

The senior senator had few enemies or scandals during his tenure. He faced his fiercest criticism in the last two weeks from Republicans who accused him of wasting taxpayer money and unnecessarily prolonging an election he couldn’t win by pursuing a $1 million recount despite a gap of roughly 17,000 votes.

Casey’s decision to wait for all the votes to come in, he said, was a reflection of a career built on listening to voters.

“When a Pennsylvanian takes the time to cast a legal vote, often waiting in long lines and taking time away from their work and family, they deserve to know that their vote will count,” Casey said in his concession statement. “From the 100-year-old woman in Butler County who voted in every election since she was eligible, to the 19-year-old in Montgomery County who cast her ballot for the very first time, we made sure those voices were heard.”

The recount ended before its completion after Casey’s Thursday concession.

Casey’s loss ends — for now — an era of the Casey family serving in Pennsylvania that began with his father, Bob Casey Sr., who was governor of Pennsylvania from 1987 to 1995.

“Bob’s demeanor and his work ethic was a perfect reflection of the commonwealth,” said Larry Ceisler, who has worked in Democratic politics in the state for decades and first met Casey at a fundraiser for Casey Sr., at Ceisler’s parents’ house in 1966, when the elder Casey was a state senator.

“Obviously, Pennsylvania has changed,” Ceisler conceded. “The people like me who their whole lifetime there’s been a Casey, there aren’t as many of us anymore.”

Casey, a native of Scranton, also struggled to disconnect from his longtime ally, President Joe Biden, whose popularity has plummeted in the four years since his election. And McCormick was a well-funded opponent with a military and business background who ran a strong campaign bolstered by President-elect Donald Trump’s strength in the state.

“I think most Pennsylvania voters, by a narrow margin, believe that the Biden administration was on balance a failure,” Toomey said. “And I think Bob was never going to be able to separate himself from that.”

But for several cycles, Casey did run ahead of his party, garnering the nickname “Mr. Pennsylvania.” In 2020, as the nation waited to see how the state would vote, Casey gave updates on the presidential vote count from his living room with a map of Pennsylvania. The low-budget videos reflected Casey’s affinity for Pennsylvania and American history. (His staffers still remember how giddy he got when American historian Dave McCullough dropped by the office in his first term.)

Kevin Washo, a veteran Democratic political operative who worked for Casey from 2005 to 2009, traveled the state with him during his first Senate run in 2006 and was struck by his knowledge of the various burgs and county seats.

With each campaign stop, “the senator was giving me a tutorial,” Washo said. “He really was a historian of Pennsylvania. He understood the commonwealth, and I think one of the great assets that he had was that the senator was the same whether he was traveling to Erie County, Blair County, Center City Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, or Scranton.”

Once in the Senate, Washo said, Casey embraced a less flashy, results-driven approach to legislating that was best captured by a yearslong saga over reconnecting Scranton to North Jersey and New York City via rail that began after a passenger line was shut down when Casey’s father was governor.

The elder Casey fought to save the rail tracks from being destroyed, preserving the potential that they could be used again one day. Sen. Arlen Specter, who represented Pennsylvania for three decades, embraced the cause and brought the younger Casey in on the project after he took office in 2007.

Specter left office in 2011, but Casey stuck with it. This fall, Biden’s administration announced plans to establish an Amtrak line connecting Scranton, Casey and Biden’s shared hometown, to New York.

“If he didn’t stay with it and had that workhorse mentality, I don’t think it ever could have gotten done,” Washo said.

For much of Casey’s tenure, Democrats did not have the majority in the Senate, but he still managed to push through legislation. Including laws passed as larger legislation — the method by which most bills advance — 96 of Casey’s bills introduced have been passed into law since 2012, ranking him sixth among all U.S. senators in the most recent session, according to GovTrack, which tracks legislation.

“I’ve always thought that he doesn’t get credit for his work as much as he should,” said Brown, who has sat beside Casey in the last row of the Senate chamber since the two started together.

Casey’s softer touch had its advantages, too.

“People would actually listen to Bob because he was quiet in his presentation but forceful in his ideas,” Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren said of Casey.

Pennsylvania will go from having two senators with a combined 26 years of experience in 2022, with Casey and Toomey, to two relatively new members: Sen. John Fetterman, a Democrat elected in 2022, and McCormick, who will assume his first elected political position in January.

One of Stephanie Zarecky’s first jobs out of college was working for Casey as a press secretary. She remembers trying to keep him on schedule as his conversations with constituents ran long and struggling to keep pace as the former Scranton Prep basketball player took long strides to his next appointment.

But the real impact on her life came as a constituent. In 2017 Zarecky’s 16-month-old daughter died suddenly of an unknown cause. Zarecky went to check on Scarlett in her crib and saw she wasn’t breathing.

Months later, Casey’s office, without Zarecky’s prompting, started pushing through a bill that had been stalled in Congress to improve data collection in similar tragedies with the hope of improving research on SUDI (sudden unexplained death of an infant).

Casey named the bill after Scarlett. Zarecky keeps a framed copy of the remarks he gave on the Senate floor in the Pittsburgh home she shares with her husband and 6-year-old daughter.

“I’m enough of a policy nerd to think that my daughter’s name will live on forever as a result of Casey’s work,” Zarecky said. “When you lose a child, your biggest fear is they’re gonna be forgotten. Because of Sen. Casey, I know she never will be.”

Much of Casey’s work has focused on families and children, an interest tied to his father’s work as governor and to his close connections in Scranton, said Ed Mitchell, a political consultant from Northeastern Pennsylvania.

“They live in Scranton and they never lost that,” Mitchell said. “It’s kind of what Joe Biden had, an attachment I can’t really describe.”

New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker said when he first came to the Senate it was Casey who helped explain some of the policy work they could do to address childhood poverty.

“His fingerprints are all over so many significant bills that helped people in the shadow of life, the dawn of life, and in the sunsetting years,” Booker said.

Over several decades, Casey had a political evolution. He entered the Senate as “a pro-life Democrat” opposed to same-sex marriage and resistant to new gun control measures. As time passed, he changed his position on all those issues.

“His father was a much more conservative person, and Bobby, over the years, he loosened up on a lot of things and ended up being more progressive than perhaps some people now want,” Mitchell, the Scranton political strategist, said.

Casey has typically been a careful political practitioner, often waiting to get a sense of where other Democrats or constituent groups stood on an issue or appointment before weighing in.

During his first two terms, Casey was largely a quiet loyalist to President Barack Obama, especially on the Affordable Care Act.

But when Trump came on the scene, he demonstrated a more fiery side, leaving a fundraiser to show up at Philadelphia International Airport in coattails after Trump’s Muslim ban took effect. He slammed Trump’s policies on social media and grilled Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, at her confirmation hearing.

Warren said that Casey may have had a reputation as a gentle politician but that his fight against corporate greed over the last year was bold, as few Democrats had been willing to stick their neck out on the issue. She thinks it contributed to Casey’s loss in a race where his opponent benefited from a huge infusion of super PAC money.

“Bob Casey’s loss becomes a case in point for how a good senator working on behalf of the people he represents can be brought down by wealthy executives who don’t like his message,” Warren said.

Booker said he thinks that his friend was simply the victim of this year’s political headwinds but that his legacy will endure.

“There’s waves beyond him that affected this election,” Booker said. “Five to 10 years from now, he’ll be remembered in the state as one of the most effective senators, at getting things done, but even more so, as embodying the character of the better angels of our nation’s nature, and as someone who will be missed.”

Staff writer Sean Collins Walsh contributed to this article.