LANGHORNE, Pa. — GOP Senate candidate Dave McCormick met with Jewish voters in multiple Pennsylvania communities in a long day on the campaign trail — and blasted Democratic incumbent Sen. Bob Casey’s support for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal that funded the regime to the tune of billions.
“The original sin is Iran,” McCormick declared at his Monday roundtable in Harrisburg. “Senator Casey was the deciding vote on that Iran deal, which has underwritten terror” — especially in Israel.
McCormick is not Jewish but visited Israel over the holiday season, meeting with political and military leaders, as well as survivors of Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre. He said the experience made him resolve to speak out with “moral clarity” against the terrorist group and its funder as a “pure evil” in the region.
He hopes his staunch support for Israel will pay dividends among Jewish voters dissatisfied with the Democrats’ growing split on how to handle the war the massacre sparked.
“The question is: Does he stand with our ally in the fight of its life against Hamas?” McCormick said of Casey. “Does he speak up or does he duck?”
“He ducks.”
Casey campaign spokeswoman Kate Smart told The Post, “Senator Casey has been a leader in the Senate both supporting Israel and fighting back against antisemitism — that’s why America’s leading pro-Israel organizations have endorsed him.” AIPAC is one of those groups.
Smart didn’t address questions about Casey’s vote for the Iran nuclear deal, instead calling out McCormick’s investments in Rumble and ties to certain GOP leaders.
“On the other hand, it’s David McCormick who invested millions in a social media platform that hosts videos about Holocaust denial, who welcomed the endorsement of Doug Mastriano, and who refused to condemn Donald Trump’s attacks on Governor Shapiro’s faith,” she said.
On the trail, McCormick also discussed the “horrible antisemitism” prevalent on college campuses and recalled one of his campaign volunteers being assaulted at the University of Pittsburgh while carrying American and Israeli flags.
The candidate blamed university presidents such as UPenn’s Liz Magill “twisting themselves into pretzels” to avoid directly condemning antisemitic violence for the climate of fear many Jewish students face today.
McCormick was joined in Harrisburg by Republican Jewish Coalition CEO Matt Brooks and former George W. Bush White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, who noted the GOP’s recent gains within the Jewish community.
Jewish support for Republican presidential candidates has nearly tripled in the last three decades — from 11% for George H.W. Bush in 1992 to 30% for Donald Trump in 2020.
A recent poll shows Trump carrying just 25% support among Jewish voters, with frequent Israel critic Vice President Kamala Harris taking 68%.
At Monday evening’s event at a Philadelphia-area synagogue, McCormick discussed Israel and antisemitism in America with renowned Jewish podcaster and author Dan Senor, along with Brooks and Fleischer.
The Pennsylvania Republican said he mistakenly supported the invasion of Iraq as an alum of the George W. Bush administration, though not in a national-security capacity.
“I wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times that said we should go in and root out those weapons of mass destruction,” McCormick told one attendee who asked if the Iraq War strengthened Iran’s grip on the Middle East. “As you look at the 20 years since that time, it was undoubtedly a terrible mistake.”
“As it turned out, Iraq didn’t have the weapons of mass destruction; as it turned out, it was a war that was devastating . . . destroying the hope of a peaceful rise of Iraq,” he said. “It eliminated a counter-balance to Iran.”
He concluded: “Now we have a single point of funding and power and military capability in Iran that we don’t have an adequate check against, which is part of the problem.”
