HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Democratic U.S. Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania on Thursday proposed a series of debates with his Republican challenger David McCormick ahead of the November general election, and McCormick immediately accepted.
The race for a Senate seat in this state is expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars and help determine control of the chamber next year.
Casey said in a statement that he plans to participate in three debates, one per debate, in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Harrisburg in the fall before the Nov. 5 election.
He made the proposal “in keeping with Pennsylvania’s proud history of political debate,” he said. Asked about it at a campaign event, McCormick said it’s a good way for the candidates to make their case to the public.
Both Casey and McCormick were uncontested for their party’s nominations in Tuesday’s primaries, putting them on track for a six-month campaign against each other.
The likelihood of a debate during this year’s presidential election is doubtful — and the long-standing tradition of televised debates as a forum for voters to evaluate candidates has waned in recent years.
A series of three debates in the Pennsylvania Senate race would be the most robust conversation between candidates since 2006, when Casey and then-Republican Sen. Rick Santorum had four debates.
In the last five U.S. Senate elections in Pennsylvania since then, debates have not been a major feature. All of these debates took place in mid-to-late October, with two debates each in the 2010, 2016 and 2018 campaigns, and one debate each in the 2012 and 2022 races.
In the 2022 Senate race, Democratic nominee Johannes Fetterman — who went on to win the election — agreed to participate in just one debate as he worked to recover from a stroke that he said nearly killed him and adjust to the lingering effects.
In particular, he sometimes struggled to speak fluently and had reduced auditory processing speed, making it difficult to respond quickly to what he heard.
Fetterman agreed to the debate after weeks of his Republican rival, Dr. Mehmet Oz, who pressed Fetterman and aggressively questioned the severity of his ongoing health problems due to the stroke.
Meanwhile, Democrat Josh Shapiro and Republican Doug Mastriano did not debate at all during Pennsylvania’s 2022 gubernatorial race.
Instead, Mastriano rejected a media-moderated debate and instead reserved a hotel ballroom two weeks before the election and chose a partisan moderator for himself: a former White House aide who served as director of strategic communications for former President Donald Trump.
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