US Senate: Pennsylvania Democrat concedes year's final seat after ultra-close race

Democratic Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania conceded his reelection bid to Republican David McCormick on Thursday, as a statewide recount showed no signs of overturning the latter's tiny margin of victory.

Casey's concession comes more than two weeks after the 5 November elections, and leaves the Democrats with 47 Senate seats to the Republicans' 53 — an upset from the 51-49 advantage with which the Democrats entered the election cycle.

Pennsylvania's presidential contest was called for Donald Trump not long after the polls closed, and the Associated Press called the race for McCormick on 7 November, concluding that not enough ballots remained to be counted in areas Casey was winning for him to take the lead.

However, Casey did not concede the race, and the ballot-counting process became grindingly slow, a saga of hours-long election board meetings, social media outrage, lawsuits and accusations that some county officials were flouting the law.

While Republicans claimed that Democrats were trying to steal McCormick's legitimate victory by seeking to count "illegal votes", Casey's campaign accused Republicans of trying to exclude just enough legitimate votes to prevent the senator from squeaking his way back into office.

But in a statement released on Thursday evening, Casey, a stalwart of Pennsylvania's Democratic establishment and the longest-serving Democratic US senator in the state's history, said he had called McCormick to congratulate him.

"As the first count of ballots is completed, Pennsylvanians can move forward with the knowledge that their voices were heard, whether their vote was the first to be counted or the last," Casey wrote.

Edged out

Casey's campaign said the last of the ballots cast before polls closed on 5 November had finally been counted on Thursday, with McCormick leading by about 16,000 votes out of nearly 7 million ballots counted.

That was well within the 0.5% margin threshold to trigger an automatic statewide recount under Pennsylvania law.

But no election official expected a recount to change more than a couple hundred votes or so, and Pennsylvania's highest court dealt Casey a blow when it refused entreaties to allow counties to count mail-in ballots that lacked a correct handwritten date on the return envelope.

Casey did win efforts to get counties to tabulate thousands of provisional ballots that might otherwise have been thrown out because of an error by an election worker, including ballots from voters whose registrations hadn't been properly processed.

But the campaign failed in its other efforts to get counties to count ballots that were disqualified over garden-variety errors by voters, such as failing to sign a provisional ballot in two places or not putting the ballot into an inner "secrecy" envelope.

McCormick, formerly the CEO of the world's largest hedge fund, raked in tens of millions of dollars in campaign donations from allies in the financial sector, making the Pennsylvania race the US's second-most expensive in this year's campaign cycle.

It was McCormick's second run at a seat in the state; in 2022, he narrowly lost a primary to TV doctor Mehmet Oz, who was backed by Trump. Oz went on to lose to Democrat John Fetterman, but has now been nominated by Trump for a post overseeing government healthcare programmes Medicare and Medicaid.

He has no public healthcare administration experience.