Republican Senate candidate Dave McCormick is hitting Democratic incumbent Sen. Bob Casey on crime in a new ad featuring Pennsylvania police unions that have opted to back the GOP nominee.
The 30-second TV spot, titled “Switched,” is centered on the support for McCormick from the 40,000-member Pennsylvania Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which rejected Casey in July after backing him in an earlier re-election campaign.
“Another night, another tragedy in Philadelphia,” the ad’s narrator says. “It’s one of the most dangerous major cities in America. Kamala Harris would make it worse.”
The ad goes on to show an appearance from the now-vice president on “The View” during her failed 2020 campaign, when she claimed elected officials “have confused the idea that to achieve safety, you put more cops on the street instead.”
“And Bob Casey stands with her. He’s weak,” McCormick cuts in. “I stand with police.”
“We switched from Casey to McCormick — and you should switch too,” one of the law enforcement officers states in the ad.
The Republican candidate received the endorsement of the largest organization of sworn law enforcement officers in the Keystone State in the same month that Casey endorsed Harris, 59, for the presidency.
The 4,300-member Pennsylvania State Troopers Association also endorsed McCormick the same month.
The Pennsylvania Fraternal Order of Police had previously endorsed Casey for his 2012 re-election — but took no side during the Democrat’s 2018 campaign.
In 2022, the union supported Republican candidate Mehmet Oz against Democrat John Fetterman.
Harris was not the only official to attack law enforcement during nationwide protests in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.
Casey blasted out a “Black Lives Matter” post on Twitter, now X, June 8, 2020, declaring that he was proudly standing with the Lancaster mayor, the NAACP and other community leaders “in solidarity against systemic racism and police brutality in America.”
The same day, he joined Harris, then a senator from California, and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) in co-sponsoring a bill that would end qualified immunity for police officers, opening them up to lawsuits.
Earlier this year, the three-term senator was called out by members of Philadelphia-area law enforcement for receiving support from a group that supports defunding police departments.
“At a time when there were four shootings in four days on our local public transit system, and law enforcement across the Commonwealth is understaffed, Casey’s decision to align himself with these defund-the-police activists is alarming and extremely dangerous,” Folcroft Deputy Police Chief and Delaware County Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 27 president Chris Eiserman said at the March press conference.
That same month, Casey had held a campaign event with Indivisible Philadelphia, which has called for decreasing the number of cops on the street and pulling funding from their departments.
Casey has a 3.5 percentage-point lead over his Republican opponent in the 2024 election, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average.