McCormick beats Casey; Perry re-elected to Congress as high turnout reported for rural, Republican areas of Cumberland County

The Associated Press on Thursday afternoon called the U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania for Republican challenger Dave McCormick.

The former CEO of the world's largest hedge fund beat three-term Democratic Sen. Bob Casey in Tuesday's election after accusing the incumbent of supporting policies that led to inflation, domestic turmoil and war.

The win pads Republicans' majority in the Senate, which they wrested from Democratic control this week.

The Associated Press called the race at 4:09 p.m.

McCormick, 59, recaptured a GOP seat in Pennsylvania that Republicans lost in 2022, paying off a bet that party brass made when they urged McCormick to run and consolidated support behind him.

McCormick drew on contacts from across the worlds of government, politics and finance to secure backing for his campaign after he was CEO of the world's largest hedge fund and served at the highest levels of former President George W. Bush's administration.

Casey is the namesake of a former two-term governor and Pennsylvania's longest-serving Democrat ever in the Senate. Until Tuesday, Casey had won six statewide general elections going back to 1996.

Also on Thursday afternoon, the Associated Press called the 10th Congressional District race for incumbent Republican Scott Perry.

Perry faced Democratic challenger and former WGAL anchor Janelle Stelson for the seat, which skews Republican but has long been challenged by Democrats since it was redistricted and featured more blue-leaning areas, such as Harrisburg, Carlisle and York City.

The race had remained close since results started coming in Tuesday evening, but the AP declared Perry the winner at 1:47 p.m. Thursday.

Perry's re-eleection was another win for the Republican Party in Pennsylvania, with all Republican state House incumbents in Cumberland County retaking their seats as well.

According to precinct-level information provided by Cumberland County, residents of Republican strongholds in the county were the most likely to show up to vote or cast a ballot.

President-elect Donald Trump won most of the rural municipalities in the county by a large margin, and almost all of them had turnout of about 80% to 85%. Some larger municipalities, like South Middleton Township and Silver Spring Township, had 80% or more turnout across nearly all of their precincts, with only one Silver Spring precinct going to Kamala Harris.

Meanwhile, more Democratic areas had lower turnout, with Carlisle seeing turnout mostly in the 60% area, with only one of the precincts peaking at 82.87%, and Lemoyne seeing turnout mostly in the 70% range. Shippensburg Borough, which is one of the few municipalities that usually leans Democratic, had turnout of 62.32% and 71.17% at its precincts, and Trump won those precincts by small margins.

Camp Hill Borough had higher turnout rates, but its ratio of Trump to Harris votes were also much narrower than Carlisle's.

There were also a number of municipalities that were split among which precincts had majority votes for Trump or Harris. Hampden Township and New Cumberland Borough each had an equal number of precincts vie for one candidate, while Mechanicsburg Borough leaned more right to Trump, with four precincts going to the president-elect and two others going to Harris.

Precinct numbers also show that voter turnout wasn't very high in precincts that included colleges and universities, despite efforts to register students to vote.

For the voting precinct at Bosler Memorial Library where Dickinson College students on campus would have voted, the turnout was 64.05%. The lowest turnout in the borough was in precinct 4-1 at 45.88% turnout, which is between North Hanover Street and North West Street.

Shippensburg University students would have to vote at the Shippensburg Township polling place, which had a turnout of 54.74%. Likely because of student voters, the rural municipality went to Harris, but only by four votes.

The precinct where Messiah University students would have voted did have a high turnout of 80.54% and went to Trump. Only two precincts in Upper Allen went to Harris, including the precinct 10, which only had a turnout of 66.22%.

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