Takeaways from the first debate between Democratic U.S. Sen. Bob Casey and GOP challenger Dave McCormick

HARRISBURG — Republican candidate Dave McCormick repeatedly attacked Democratic U.S. Sen. Bob Casey as a “weak” career politician, while Casey cast his challenger as a carpetbagging financier “bought and paid for by … big corporations and billionaires” in the first debate of Pennsylvania’s nationally watched Senate race.

From border security to nuclear energy, the candidates turned almost every question thrown at them into an opportunity to drive home their narratives about each other, resulting in a tense and fast-paced debate, hosted by Harrisburg’s abc27.

With Democrats fighting to maintain their narrow majority in the Senate, Pennsylvania’s race is among a handful that could determine control of the chamber.

» READ MORE: Bob Casey has a big lead in Pennsylvania’s Senate race. But Dave McCormick is still in it, a new poll shows.

Casey, a three-term incumbent, has maintained a consistent lead over McCormick, a former hedge fund CEO, in the polls. But many voters remain undecided, and the Republican still has a path to victory if he can win over many of those who won’t start paying attention to the race until the final weeks.

Here’s what you need to know about Casey and McCormick’s debate:

McCormick, whose campaign has sought to tie Casey to Vice President Kamala Harris since she replaced President Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket, said Casey was a “rubber stamp” who has “voted 99% of the time with Biden and Harris.”

“He’s been in the Senate for 18 years,” McCormick said. “Who is responsible for this wide-open border? Who is responsible for this inflation? Bob Casey would have you think that he was nowhere to be found.”

» READ MORE: China, Pa. teachers, and a ‘cult-like’ culture: Why Dave McCormick’s time at Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund, matters for his Senate run

Casey, meanwhile, relentlessly attacked McCormick over issues stemming from the Republican’s 13 years as an executive at Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world.

Casey criticized the firm’s investments in China and McCormick’s reported role in working to prevent two women who worked at the firm from publicly discussing issues they had involving male colleagues. But Casey most frequently returned to the fact that McCormick lived in Connecticut, where Bridgewater is located, until around the time he left the firm in 2022 to run unsuccessfully for Pennsylvania’s other Senate seat.

McCormick is originally from the Keystone State and now owns a home in Pittsburgh. But Democrats still question whether he has fully moved back to Pennsylvania.

At one point, McCormick criticized Casey for failing to prevent U.S. Steel from deciding to open a facility in Arkansas that he said could have been constructed in Allegheny County if it weren’t for local officials raising environmental concerns. The decision was announced in January 2022.

“Now, if I was the senior senator from Pennsylvania, I’d be standing on the desk of the people in Allegheny County getting that great investment and those jobs here,” McCormick said.

“He was in Connecticut when that was going on, so let’s be clear on that,” Casey said. “He doesn’t have any standing to talk about what should have been done in Pennsylvania.”

Casey has blamed inflation on corporations rapidly raising prices despite increasing profits, which he calls “greedflation,” and he has supported legislation that would create a national ban on price-gouging. Other Democrats including Harris have embraced that message on the campaign trail this year.

“These big conglomerates, these big corporations rigged those prices and jacked them up to levels we’ve never seen all while they’re making record profits,” Casey said in the debate. “That’s greedflation. We can take it on by passing a price-gouging bill.”

» READ MORE: How Sen. Bob Casey became Democrats’ go-to messenger on ‘greedflation’ — among the biggest issues for the party ahead of November

McCormick countered that the recent period of inflation was caused by the massive federal spending bills adopted in the beginning of Biden’s administration and that Casey’s focus on price-gouging was wrongheaded.

“When you’ve spent your entire life in public service, elected office for 30 years, you’re like a hammer looking for a nail,” McCormick said. “The cause of inflation is the policies, the out-of-control spending of Biden, Harris and Casey.”

The cause of the rapid inflation that struck the U.S. and many other nations in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic is multifaceted, economists have said. While increased spending likely exacerbated price increases in the U.S., the root causes were larger macroeconomic factors, including supply shortages resulting from manufacturing and transportation network shutdowns during the pandemic and energy cost increases following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Both candidates said they support the reopening of Three Mile Island, the nuclear energy facility near Harrisburg that was the site of a partial meltdown in 1979.

The plant has been shuttered since 2019, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is considering a proposal from Constellation Energy to bring it back online to sell energy to Microsoft for AI computing.

Casey said he has an “all of the above” stance on energy production that includes nuclear power.

“We’ve got a strong nuclear base in Pennsylvania,” he said. “I’m glad to see activity there at that site. We have to know more about what they’re asking.”

McCormick also said he would support reopening Three Mile Island before quickly pivoting to attacking Casey for supporting subsidies for renewable energy.