Bob Casey and Dave McCormick play nice and the attorney general race heats up at Pennsylvania Society

NEW YORK — Divisions between the parties are stark. The political stakes of the 2024 election are sky high.

But at Pennsylvania Society, the annual glitzy gathering of politicians in Manhattan, U.S. Sen. Bob Casey and Republican challenger Dave McCormick were perfectly nice.

Casey and McCormick both addressed a politically mixed audience of Pennsylvania movers and shakers Saturday at the Metropolitan Club.

Their remarks previewed what will be a hotly contested but perhaps cordial contest. Casey and McCormick are in for a brutal battle, but the attacks will likely come from outside groups supporting them.

“[Senator Casey] and I have very different visions,” McCormick said in his remarks. “But that doesn’t mean it needs to be mean-spirited, there doesn’t need to be vitriol, … personal attacks.”

McCormick also paid homage to Casey’s parents and a family connection. McCormick’s father, James McCormick, a former chancellor for the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, served under Bob Casey Sr. when he was governor.

Casey didn’t reference McCormick in his remarks but in an interview after, he said he appreciated McCormick mentioning his parents.

“It’s particularly poignant this year since my mother just passed away in August,” Casey said. “It was kind of him to do that.”

McCormick has so far cleared the field with the backing of the state Republican Party. Casey is hoping to fend off the challenge and win a fourth term.

It’s a marked shift from last year’s open Senate race between GOP nominee Mehmet Oz and now-Sen. John Fetterman, two big personalities whose campaigns liked trolling each other.

McCormick did make a subtle jab at a “greedflation,” report that Casey had released, in which the senator blamed rising prices on corporate price gouging.

“With all due respect … it’s not greedflation,” McCormick said. “... It’s because the Biden administration spent $5 trillion that’s distorted our economy and created this inflationary problem.”

And Casey told reporters that while he’s always ready for a tough fight in Pennsylvania, “I think I’ll win in the end.”

Philadelphia’s Mayor-elect Cherelle Parker continued her victory lap in New York City this weekend, celebrating alongside a politically powerful union that helped get her there.

Bill Sproule, the head of the EAS Regional Council of Carpenters, said from the union’s event near Times Square that his union chose to endorse Parker when she was still fourth in the race. They did so because of Parker’s long career as a “friend of labor,” Sproule said.

“That’s generous,” Parker said during her remarks. “I was more like seventh or eighth [place.]”

“Underdog?” Parker recalled a staffer telling her at the time. “No, you under the damn dirt.”

But from the 16th-floor nightclub off Broadway, Philly’s next mayor imagined a Philadelphia where everyone is working toward its success.

Parker said the room of movers and shakers in the Democratic Party will need to come together to create “One Philly, a city united,” asking the crowd to chant with her.

Parker added that early critics said she’d be “controlled” by the labor unions that supported her, which she rejected.

“They’re thinking about the past. That’s Old Philadelphia,” she said.

Parker said Friday night she has supported unions throughout her career because of how organized labor could have helped her grandmother, a domestic worker paid under the table.

If they’re hopeful for the city’s future, the mayor and organized labor should be working together to ensure the next generation gets trained for union jobs, she said.

“Everybody talks about this hope deficit in the city of Philadelphia: no belief in government, no belief that government can work for regular people on a daily basis,” Parker said. “We are working very hard to ensure that people can feel a sense of hope, and pride, and dignity. And we can’t do that unless we’re unified.”

The room was packed with Democrats from around the state, including at least three attorney general hopefuls and a handful of Dems who are still hoping to make their way into the Parker administration.

Pennsylvania’s Republican State Committee is mulling an early meeting to make an endorsement in the primary for state attorney general.

And one of the party’s three candidates claims that’s designed to box him out of the race.

The party, which voted during its fall meeting to not have an open primary with no endorsement, is scheduled to meet for its winter meeting Feb. 3.

But the two-week period for circulating nomination petitions starts Jan. 23. Clout hears the party is looking to call a virtual meeting Jan. 22 to endorse in the race.

That way, a candidate who does not get endorsed can decide if they want to go through the petition process or withdraw from the race.

State Rep. Craig Williams, who represents parts of Delaware and Chester Counties, said he heard about the meeting the day after he announced his campaign earlier this week. And he thinks that’s no coincidence.

“It’s Harrisburg insiders, Harrisburg lobbyists, who have their thumbs on the scale, trying to pick one guy over another,” Williams told Clout.

Party chair Lawrence Tabas declined to comment on that accusation.

York County District Attorney Dave Sunday, who has been building support since he announced in June, appears to be the front-runner for the endorsement.

Former Delaware County District Attorney Kat Copeland, who entered the race Nov. 20, told Clout she would drop out and support the endorsed candidate if she does not win the party’s nod next month.

Sunday and Copeland worked the crowd Friday at the party’s Pennsylvania Society kickoff luncheon.

Williams, who says he is “unlikely” to keep running if he does not get the endorsement, skipped the event to focus on campaigning in Pennsylvania.

His campaign was crosswise with Republican Party officials before it even started. The Republican Attorneys General Association in October accused him of “misleading” state committee members with a note that suggested he could win the group’s endorsement.

RAGA endorsed Sunday last month.

Clout provides often irreverent news and analysis about people, power, and politics.