DV Journal

Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who unsuccessfully challenged her former boss Donald Trump in the GOP presidential primary earlier this year, was back in Pennsylvania promoting another Republican: U.S. Senate candidate Dave McCormick.

“What I am excited about is Pennsylvania actually has a candidate who’s a fighter,” said Haley, a former South Carolina governor. “He’s a combat veteran. He knows what it means to sacrifice for our country. He’s a business guy. He knows what it means to balance a budget and save dollars. He’s a dad, not of one daughter, but of six daughters. But more than that, he’s a servant.  He wants to serve. He wants to do this for our country.”

And while she and Trump may not be on the best of terms, Haley urged Delaware Valley voters to give the Republican another four years in the White House.

Nikki Haley stumping for Dave McCormick in Pennsburg.

“We have to do more than elect Dave McCormick.  We have to elect Donald Trump. Because if Donald Trump wins Pennsylvania, Dave McCormick wins Pennsylvania.”

Haley also had harsh words for McCormick’s opponent, three-term incumbent U.S. Sen. Bob Casey Jr.

“Bob Casey has been in this position for 18 years. What has he done for 18 years?”

Someone called out, “Nothing.”

“That’s the problem. We need normal people. Dave McCormick has already signed a term limits pledge. We need everybody to sign a term limits pledge,” said Haley.

Haley is popular among suburban Republicans in places like Chester, Delaware and Bucks Counties, where she significantly outperformed her statewide average in the April presidential primary. She received more than 150,000 votes in the primary, despite having dropped out of the race in early March, and she received nearly a quarter of the vote in the Philadelphia suburbs, compared to 17 percent statewide.

Haley brought up the traditionally-GOP issue of federal spending and the national debt.

“Casey voted with Kamala Harris on the American Rescue Plan. It didn’t rescue anybody,” Haley said.

“They took all of our taxpayer dollars, flushed it into the sink of wasted projects costing $2 trillion. Then they go and pass the CHIPS Act. They were saying they were going to build and manufacture [silicon] chips in America. All in the name of national security. You know what they did? They gave all of our tax dollars to these companies and didn’t even require the companies to stop manufacturing in China. What a waste.

“Do you know over 70 percent of government employees are still working remotely? Seventy-five percent of our federal buildings are sitting empty. And we are paying for that. Bob Casey did that to you,” Haley added.

She also dinged Casey over his record on illegal immigration and the flow of deadly fentanyl over the southern border and increased inflation, saying it causes the average household to spend $29,000 a year.

“The one thing that can really bring that down is to become energy dominant. Bob Casey voted against expanding fracking six times. I think he forgot the state he lives in. Who does that?”

Haley also praised McCormick’s support for making America “energy dominate again, which is good for our national security.”

“And [Casey is] willing to support a candidate for president who has said she’s willing to pack the courts and get rid of the [Senate] filibuster. That’s who Bob Casey is.”

McCormick said that while it’s routine to say every election is the most important in our lifetimes, this one really is.

“This is for our children. This is for our children’s children, and right now we’re in trouble.”

After he lost the primary in 2022 to Dr. Mehmet Oz, McCormick said he planned to leave politics but kept “getting pulled back” because he believes in America, “the greatest country in the world for individual freedom, for religious freedom, a force for good in the world,” he said. “It’s my belief America is exceptional.”

“I’m going to be a voice for getting our country back on track, a leader for getting our country back on track,” said McCormick. “Kamala Harris is the most extreme liberal nominee in modern political history. Just look at her own words, ban fracking. Transition energy workers. Legalize illegal immigration. Mandatory buybacks of your guns. Eliminate private health insurance. Defund the police. These are what she said in her own words. That’s the choice, right?

“Don’t underestimate how important this is. Pennsylvania needs someone who is willing to fight and lead in the United States Senate.”

McCormick plans to draw on his experience as a college athlete for the final spring of the campaign.

“I wrestled in college. If I got into the third period within a point or two, I always knew I’d win because the third period in wrestling is not about wrestling. It’s about mental toughness. It’s about heart. It’s about staying on offense every single second. That’s what I’m going to do in the next six days,” McCormick said.

Pennsylvania’s primary election is over. What do the results say about the general election in November?

Primary turnout was low, perhaps because both parties have already picked their presidential nominees. And both U.S. Senate candidates, incumbent Democrat Sen. Bob Casey and Republican challenger Dave McCormick, ran unopposed.

Only 22.5 percent of registered Democrats and Republicans voted in Delaware County, 15.69 percent in Montgomery County, 31.6 percent in Bucks County, and 22.96 percent in Chester County. Pennsylvania primaries are closed, meaning only voters registered with a party can participate.

Despite having dropped out of the GOP presidential primary after Super Tuesday, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley still received 150,000 votes — about 16 percent of the total — on Tuesday. But she did far better in the Delaware Valley, winning 18 percent of the vote in Bucks County, 22.87 in Delaware County, 24.22 percent in Chester County and 24.7 percent in Montgomery County.

And while President Joe Biden received a higher percentage of the total (92 percent) than Trump (83 percent), campaign pro Jeff Jubelirer says the numbers “don’t portend well for either candidate.”

Trump has to bring in “those Haley voters, particularly in southeastern Pennsylvania,” said Jubelirer, vice president at Bellevue Communications Group. And while the vote for “uncommitted” and U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips “wasn’t as impressive,” the race in Pennsylvania is likely to be so close in November that Biden needs to get them back, too. It won’t be easy.

“They’re particularly upset about the situation in the Middle East,” Jubelirer said.

Commonwealth Foundation Senior Fellow Guy Ciarrocchi, who has run for office as a Republican, agreed the candidates have to focus on their base, rather than count on pulling in swing voters.

“These two candidates will spend some time trying to persuade the three undecided voters in Pennsylvania,” he quipped. It’s going to be a contest to turn out the party’s base, “particularly with two people that have 100 percent name ID and 99 percent of Americans have made up their minds.”

Polls show Pennsylvania’s presidential race remains too close to call, and Republican strategists didn’t see anything Tuesday to change that calculus.

“There’s a significant shift now to the general election, so we should be careful not to extrapolate too much from primary results,” said Charlie Gerow with Quantum Communications. “I continue to be very bullish on the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania. He will win this pivotal state and the question is how much ‘down ballot’ effect that will have.”

Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said, “Yesterday, President Trump continued his winning streak and delivered a resounding primary win in Pennsylvania. More importantly, President Trump continues to dominate Feeble Joe Biden in every battleground state poll including his home state. The Dishonest Biden campaign has spent millions in Pennsylvania gaslighting voters, but it is not enough to make everyone ignore Bidenflation and rising costs, Biden’s border bloodbath, and his war on American energy.”

And what about the other statewide elections? What do they say about the mood of the electorate?

Allegheny County resident Eugene DePasquale, the former auditor general, beat four candidates with ties to the Delaware Valley to become the Democratic Candidate for attorney general. He will face York County District Attorney Dave Sunday in November.

Jubelirer believes DePasquale benefited from his home county and that he had run statewide before.

“What did surprise me was Erin McClelland beating [Rep.] Ryan Bizzarro for treasurer,” he added. “Not a high-profile race, but Bizzarro had institutional support.”

Ciarrocchi credited geography and gender with McClelland’s surprise win.

“If I could go to central casting and run in a Pennsylvania primary, I would love Allegheny next to my name. So, that’s one and two, in a Democratic primary, if the race is between a man and a woman, put a nickel on the woman,” he said.

Bizzarro ran commercials against incumbent Treasurer Stacy Garrity, using abortion as an issue. Jubelirer believes Democrats will continue to use abortion as a cudgel against Republicans as long as it continues to work. Ciarrocchi agreed.

“I saw this almost two decades ago in Chester County around the issue of the Mariner Pipeline, in that when we started to see races for supervisor and school board where, when Chester County was a Republican county in the early 2000s, school board members would run for reelection, as Republicans. They would say, “I kept taxes down, and test scores are up,” said Ciarrocchi.

But, “environmental activists and some of the Democratic Party committee people that started to come forward as candidates and made the races about the pipelines and pipeline safety and clean water and clean air. And at first it seemed bizarre until it started to work.”

“The Democrats don’t have much else to run on,” Gerow said about abortion. They certainly can’t promote Biden. And their support on abortion is already baked in. Plus, there is going to be pushback against the radical ‘legal abortion for any reason, at any time, paid for by the taxpayers,’ which so many Democrats now support.”

Asked whether McCormick or Casey was happier with the primary results, Jubelirer said Casey while Ciarrocchi said McCormick.

McCormick might be harmed by the lack of enthusiasm of the Haley voters for Trump compared with the young, progressive Democrats for Biden, said Jubelirer.

“They’re not going to vote for Trump and McCormick, but they may not vote at all,” said Jubelirer.

McCormick “worked very hard since 2022 in losing by a hair… yeoman’s work of going to chicken dinners, listening to people and trying to be a leader and a healer. And all of that paid off last night, he ran unchallenged, which is very unique for such a major office,” said Ciarrocchi.

And Republicans are beginning to warm to using mail-in ballots, which will also help them, he said.

One potential bright spot for the Pennsylvania GOP, according to Gerow, is the left-wing politics of Democratic candidates like U.S. Rep. Summer Lee and the party’s nominee for auditor general, state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta.

“Except for Eugene DePasquale, who is much more moderate, the Democrats nominated far-left candidates. Additionally, they are not people with backgrounds or credentials for the office they’re seeking. For example, Kenyatta, who’s now their candidate for auditor general, has never audited anything bigger than his own checkbook. His entire background has been promoting far-leftist ideology, not much more.”

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Longshot presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has displayed an abrasive personality in previous debates. But in the NewsNation event in Alabama on  Wednesday night, he took his act even higher, calling Nikki Haley a “neocon fascist” and declaring the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was “likely an inside job” by the government.

“The only conspiracy theory Vivek didn’t endorse on stage was ‘Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer,’” a Republican strategist said after the debate.

Ramaswamy’s polls have been trending downward for the last two months. He never broke out of single digits and is currently hovering around 5 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling average. As a result, he was able to play spoiler, launching attacks on traditional Republicans like Haley and Chris Christie.

On the other hand, Haley has emerged as the most likely serious challenger to Donald Trump. Her support has steadily increased over the past two months, and many observers expected her to be the night’s top target from her fellow competitors.

They didn’t disappoint. Ramaswamy and Gov. Ron DeSantis attacked Haley for receiving support from “rich, Wall Street donors” who, DeSantis said, would influence Haley’s decision-making.

“Nikki will cave to those big donors when it counts,” DeSantis said, to which Haley replied: “He’s mad because those Wall Street donors used to support him, and now they support me.”

Ramaswamy repeatedly insisted Haley is “corrupt,” at one point holding up a handmade sign on the notepad provided reading “Haley = Corrupt.” The audience booed in response.

Ramaswamy also called Haley a “fascist” several times, at one point saying, “You can put lipstick on a Dick Cheney — it is still a fascist neocon.”

The debate took its strangest turn when Ramaswamy reached into the Alex Jones playbook.

“Why am I the only person on the stage who can say that January 6th now does look like it was an inside job?” Ramaswamy said. “That the government lied to us for 20 years about Saudi Arabia’s involvement in 9/11? That the Great Replacement Theory is not some grand, right-wing conspiracy theory but a basic statement of the Democratic Party’s platform? That the 2020 election was indeed stolen by Big Tech?”

Polls show most Americans consider Jan. 6 a disaster and a threat to democracy, and few believe the 2020 election was stolen. The “Great Replacement Theory” — the idea that America’s White, European population is being intentionally replaced by foreigners — inspired the chants of “Jews will not replace us” by White supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.

Ramaswamy’s antics came during what many observers considered DeSantis’ best performance. The Florida governor had some effective hits against Haley, particularly on her record of addressing transgender issues in school and her call to end anonymity on social media.

Haley had to backtrack from a previous call for “every person on social media (to) be verified by their name,” but DeSantis kept pressing.

“You can roll the tape. She said, ‘I want your name,’” DeSantis said. “She got massive blowback, and rightfully so.”

DeSantis also had another good moment when Christie, a former governor of New Jersey, laid out his reasons for opposing a ban on transgender surgeries for minors. Christie said he opposed the ban in the name of parental rights. “The minute you start to take those rights away from parents, you know, that’s a slippery slope,” Christie said. “What rights are going to be taken away next?”

DeSantis got a roar of approval from the crowd when he responded, “As a parent, you do not have the right to abuse your kids.”

There were more attacks and insults, like when Ramaswamy told Christie to “just walk yourself off that stage. Enjoy a nice meal, and get the hell out of this race.”

But the consensus is that nothing happened in the fourth debate to change the conditions since the first: Donald Trump has a big lead, and nobody is close to catching him.

“Christie was the adult in the room, but it doesn’t matter because he’s got no market,” said GOP strategist Pat Griffin. “Haley was the night’s punching bag, as expected. She handled herself well. DeSantis had the best night he’s had so far — but is that really a significant compliment? And despite the noise, Vivek was a non-factor. So nothing changes in the poll position.”

University of New Hampshire political science professor Dante Scala said he thought Christie’s straight talk about Trump and the rest of the field’s unwillingness to take Trump on helped him with voters who want an alternative to the former president. But that’s not necessarily good for the “Stop Trump” movement.

“Christie reminded Never Trump voters that he is the real deal. And that hurts Nikki Haley,” Scala said.

And he agreed DeSantis had a good night, too — for what it was worth.

“It’s a funny sort of debate when the two candidates with the least chance of becoming the nominee are the most dominant,” Scala said.

A GOP insider, speaking on background, told InsideSources the debate was a “dumpster fire” for the Republican Party, “bringing the brand to a new low.”

“It’s another step in Trump’s march to winning the party’s nomination in a landslide.”