Why Sen. Bob Casey has changed his positions on abortion and same-sex marriage — and why his opponent doesn’t talk much about it

Bob Casey Jr. entered the U.S. Senate 18 years ago as “a pro-life Democrat” opposed to same-sex marriage and resistant to new gun-control measures.

He’s changed his position on all of those issues — most recently on abortion two years ago, completing his evolution from a candidate seemingly molded from the clay of Pennsylvania’s famously moderate politics to a standard-issue congressional Democrat on almost all matters of policy.

Casey’s transformation is a reflection of a trend political scientists have been tracking for years: the increasing nationalization of state and local politics. It can also be seen this year in how Casey’s opponent, Republican Dave McCormick, has largely ignored the Democrat’s shifting stances in an attempt to tie Casey to the agenda of Vice President Kamala Harris.

» READ MORE: McCormick narrows gap with Casey in latest poll

Across the country, this year’s election cycle — in which Democrats could lose Senate seats in GOP strongholds West Virginia, Montana, and Ohio — could be a watershed moment for the consolidation of state and national politics.

Pennsylvania was once famous for its idiosyncratic elected officials and parochial politics. Casey’s father, Democratic Gov. Bob Casey Sr., was denied a speaking slot at the 1992 Democratic National Convention because of his antiabortion stance. The younger Casey holds the Senate seat once occupied by H. John Heinz III, a moderate Republican popular with Democratic voters. Heinz served alongside U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, a Philadelphia attorney who was originally a Democrat, switched to the GOP for 40 years, and ended his career as a Democrat.

“Back in 2000 and before, you had a lot of conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans,” said Berwood A. Yost, the director of the Center for Opinion Research at Franklin and Marshall College, whose book Are All Politics Nationalized? examined 2020 election results in Pennsylvania. “The parties have completely realigned themselves, which then also means that messaging can align that way. Your strongest play is to your partisan base.”

The intrusion of Washington’s political concerns into down-ballot races has been taking place for decades, but it has accelerated in the era of former President Donald Trump, about whom very few Americans have uncertain opinions and whose us-vs.-them rhetoric explicitly encourages tribalism.

Daniel J. Hopkins, a University of Pennsylvania political scientist who wrote a book on the nationalization of local politics, The Increasingly United States, said the phenomenon has been “particularly pronounced in Senate races, which used to be affairs in which candidates emphasized their local roots but have now become very, very nationalized.”

Casey is still seen by many as a moderate, and he breaks with Democratic orthodoxy when it comes to energy and climate change policy. He opposes attempts to ban fracking, a major industry in Pennsylvania, and he worked to prevent President Joe Biden’s administration from limiting the export of liquefied natural gas. He has also supported some of Trump’s protectionist trade policies.

» READ MORE: Pa. Democrats Bob Casey and John Fetterman split with Biden over natural gas exports pause

And in some instances, such as same-sex marriage, his changes of heart have aligned with shifting societal mores.

“Circumstances change and the centers of the parties change and the issue sets change,” Yost said. “It’s reasonable on reflection to perhaps recalibrate your positions.”

Casey declined an interview request. Instead, his campaign arranged interviews with surrogates, including former U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy, a moderate Democrat who represented Bucks County and part of Northeast Philly.

“He’s broken with the left wing of the Democratic Party when they were against natural gas and fracking, and I think that speaks volumes,” Murphy said. “He breaks with the party when it’s in the best interest of Pennsylvania.”

Casey’s evolutions on same-sex marriage, gun control, and abortion coincided with major events that thrust those issues into the national spotlight.

He came out in support of increased gun regulation following the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012. He backed marriage equality in 2013 as the issue was heating up in Congress. And in 2022, he came out in support of legislation protecting abortion rights after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Speaking at his law school alma mater, Catholic University of America, around the time he was first elected to the Senate, Casey called himself “a pro-life Democrat.”

“I believe that life begins at conception and ends when we draw our last breath,” Casey reportedly said. “And I believe that the role of government is to protect, enrich, and value life for everyone, at every moment, from beginning to end.”

As recently as 2018, Casey voted for a GOP bill backed by then-President Trump to ban abortions after 20 weeks.

But in 2022, when the Supreme Court erased the constitutional right to abortion with its Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling overturning Roe, Casey changed course.

“Today’s decision upends almost a half century of legal precedent and rips away a constitutional right that generations of women have known their entire lives,” Casey said in a statement. “This dangerous ruling won’t end abortions in this country, but it will put women’s lives at risk.”

In Casey’s telling, those major moments changed the conversation around those issues or prompted him to reflect more deeply on his position. But they also changed the political circumstances, and Casey’s evolutions have allowed him to avoid some inconvenient situations.

For instance, Casey’s being “a pro-life Democrat” before Roe was overturned had no practical effect. But the Supreme Court decision prompted a Senate vote on whether to enshrine Roe’s protections in statute, and it may have been politically untenable for Casey, who needs to turn out the Democratic base to win in purple Pennsylvania, to be seen as an obstructionist to his own party.

“When you’re in a legislative body when there really isn’t any room for defections, there’s no place to hide, so the question is: Are you going to be a team player?” Yost said. “In the nationalized, polarized environment, you cannot win without your base. That’s a practical circumstance for Casey.”

In 2022, Casey voted for the Women’s Health Protection Act, which sought to codify Roe’s protections but was blocked by Republicans.

Evidence of the nationalization of Pennsylvania politics can be seen not just in Casey’s transformation but also in how his opponent, McCormick, has approached this year’s campaign. Rather than branding Casey as a flip-flopper, the Republican has gone in the opposite direction, casting Casey as a committed liberal who will advance the agenda of Democratic presidential nominee Harris.

“Eighteen years later, Bob Casey is even weaker and more liberal than he was when Pennsylvanians first elected him,” McCormick spokesperson Elizabeth Gregory said in a statement. “Casey votes for Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s liberal agenda 98% of the time with nothing to show for it. It’s time for a change.”

Hopkins said he’s not surprised to see McCormick ignore the flip-flopper narrative.

“They may in fact worry that if they emphasize some of these shifts, they might unintentionally lead people to see Bob Casey as more moderate,” Hopkins said. “Moderate candidates often do better in elections.”

Casey, meanwhile, has not been as quick to lean into national political narratives when attacking McCormick. Instead, he has pointed to investments the Republican oversaw when he was CEO of the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates and has questioned his ties to Pennsylvania. (McCormick was born in Western Pennsylvania, raised in Northeast Pennsylvania, and worked in the Pittsburgh area for a decade as an adult. But he lived for years in Connecticut while he was an executive at Bridgewater, moving back to the Keystone State around the time he launched his political career in 2022.)

» 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

“While Bob Casey was capping the cost of medicine for seniors on Medicare and leading the effort to stop greedflation, David McCormick spent his career making millions for himself in China, outsourcing Pennsylvania jobs, and putting his own bottom line over working families,” Casey spokesperson Kate Smart said in a statement. “From his dangerous antichoice agenda to lying about where he lives, it’s David McCormick who is deeply out of touch with Pennsylvanians.”

Hopkins said it’s common to see elections with one candidate seeking to tie the race to the presidential contest and the other doing the opposite, with those roles being dictated by their standing relative to their parties’ performance at the top of the ticket. This year, Casey has been consistently polling ahead of Harris, while McCormick is lagging Trump.

“In any context, if one candidate benefits from nationalizing, the other candidate usually does not,” he said. “Often it’s the case that one candidate looks at the polls and says, ‘Hey, I’m performing worse than [my party’s] presidential candidate in this race. I should nationalize.’”

A primary reason for the nationalization of local elections, Hopkins said, is the evolution of the media landscape, with fewer people getting their information from local sources like regional newspapers.

“Many more people are getting their news from nationalized sources,” Hopkins said. “So our media diets give us less of that state- or locality-specific information that would potentially set us up to be able to cast ballots that differed at the presidential level than at the state level.”

Another factor is fundraising. In his book, Hopkins found that in 1982, two-thirds of Senate candidates’ campaign funds came from donors in their home states. By 2012, that ratio had reversed, with two-thirds coming from out-of-state sources. That means Democratic candidates often have to appeal to the preferences of donors in more liberal places.

“The nationalization of campaign finance has partly meant that if you’re a Democratic candidate, you’re going to raise money in New York and Chicago and maybe even California,” he said.

Former U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb, a moderate Democrat who made national headlines for serving two terms in a Western Pennsylvania district that Trump had dominated, said it’s difficult to balance local and national interests.

“It’s definitely a big tension when you’re a day-to-day candidate and you’re trying to represent people, just because the media and fundraising happens at a national level and your constituents live at a local level,” said Lamb, who spoke as a surrogate for Casey’s campaign. “You’ve got to please both. You’ve got to excel at both.”

Lamb said he doubts McCormick’s attempts to paint Casey as a liberal in line with the national Democratic Party will work.

“The Caseys have just been around so much longer than Vice President Harris even has been,” Lamb said. “People in Pennsylvania have a gut-level sense as to what the Caseys are. … He’s the type of person that you can have your kids look up to as a candidate. I just don’t see that all being lost in the course of 90 days of television ads.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article inaccurately described the part of Pennsylvania where Dave McCormick was raised. He was born in Western Pennsylvania and raised in Northeast Pennsylvania.