It was Dec. 13, a few weeks before Bob Casey’s final day as a senator, but the mild mannered Democrat that Pennsylvanians had known for so long already seemed to have left office.
In his place was a man tired of appealing to the GOP — even if he was speaking to a room full of Republicans in rural Pennsylvania, packed into an 18th-century inn for what would be his last official event as a U.S. senator for the state.
The election was long over. Casey had conceded the tight race. And instead of touting his ability to work with Republicans — as he did for much of his reelection campaign — Casey was shaming Republicans for their collective inability to work with Democrats.
“All the federal money for this initiative in Washington County is because of the American Rescue Plan, passed with the votes of one party and passed only — only! — because at 5:34 a.m. on that day in March of 2021, the vice president cast the deciding vote along with people like me,” Casey, a famously soft-spoken senator, yelled to the crowd.
He was there to promote the county’s broadband program, which had been expanded through the American Rescue Plan. But he couldn’t help but reflect on what his party had done and what he thinks is to come.
“I’ve got a little leeway here, because I’m leaving office,” Casey continued. “On the other side of the aisle, the counteroffer for the American Rescue Plan was zero. Zero for everything. That was their position.”
“You can afford to make these investments, if you have your values straight. But I worry about what comes next year in a big tax bill,” Casey said. “I won’t be there. I won’t have a vote on it.”
Washington County, a 40-minute drive south of Pittsburgh, was a fitting spot for Casey’s final event in Pennsylvania. When he first ran for the Senate in 2006, he won the county with 60% of the vote over Republican Rick Santorum, one of 34 counties he won that year.
This is the feistiest I’ve ever seen him.
This election, it was Casey’s Republican opponent, Dave McCormick, who won with 60%. Swaths of Pennsylvania like Washington County, once dominated by union jobs, have taken on a new political identity in the last decade. It’s a place now dominated by Trump flags.
Larry Maggi was one of the few Democratic leaders in the crowd for Casey’s speech at the inn. The longtime commissioner on the county board has known Casey since he was a teenager, back when Maggi was on the security detail of Casey’s father, Gov. Bob Casey Sr.
“He’s always been very even-keeled. Boring, some might say,” Maggi said of the son. “But boring’s good, I think, sometimes.”
“It’s uncommon now, politically. It’s all about who can scream and yell the loudest, get the attention. Sen. Casey was never like that,” he said. “This is the feistiest I’ve ever seen him.”
But 2024 has proved itself to be an entirely different political environment from 2018 — or 2012 or 2006, for that matter, when Casey largely sailed to election. Maggi said he sees the shift right in his backyard. More yelling, less cooperation. More showmanship, less showing up.
“Sen. Casey’s personality, maybe that’s a thing of the past,” he said.
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Is a calm — sometimes boring — senator looking to reach across the aisle really a thing of the past? To Bob Casey, even after losing, the answer is no.
“People expect when they hire you in a legislative position — whether it’s in the state legislature or in the House or the Senate — they hire you to do a job,” Casey told NOTUS during an interview in his office. “It’s a totally different determination than voting for president, governor or mayor, when they’re electing an executive.”
“They don’t care if you do the job with a lot of fanfare or whether you just roll up your sleeves and do the job, whether you’re even-keeled or whether you have a different personality; they don’t really care,” he said.
“In some ways, it’s like hiring a plumber,” he said.
But in a lot of other ways, it’s like hiring a politician — a politician whose incentives change with the whims of the voters.
For President-elect Donald Trump, that means disrupting the status quo, just as he already did with the carefully negotiated spending bill that blew up shortly before Congress left for the holidays. For the new class of incoming Republican senators, it means following Trump and approving even his most controversial cabinet nominees. For McCormick, who narrowly beat Casey, it means appeasing the Trump fans who elected him while also not totally ostracizing the other half of the electorate who voted against him.
McCormick has said he wants to get Trump “the team he needs” while also doing the due diligence of meeting with the nominees and not automatically supporting them. It’s an answer that almost perfectly mirrors how he ran: support Trump, strategically associate with him, but wink at independence.
Casey, meanwhile, ran on his bipartisan credentials, even releasing an ad on how he “sided with Trump” on trade.
“In the last four years, in terms of delivering for a state, I’d put my record up against any senator in the history of the state,” Casey said.
It’s rare for a three-term senator to lose their seat. Only 33 senators have ever been defeated after their second term in the last 100 years, according to records from the U.S. Senate Historical Office. Yet three from the 2006 class were voted out in 2024: Casey, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown and Montana Sen. Jon Tester.
Brown and Tester were different from Casey, however, as their states were not presidential battlegrounds. Pennsylvania was the exact opposite.
The Kamala Harris campaign spent more time and money in Pennsylvania than any other state. Casey consistently polled ahead of McCormick. And even as the polls narrowed in the final month, Casey still led.
“I went into Election Day thinking we would win very, very narrowly by maybe a point, maybe less than a point,” Casey said. “As it turned out, we lost by a point, too, so I wasn’t that far off.”
Trump, of course, swept the battlegrounds, but in Wisconsin and Nevada, incumbent Democratic senators Tammy Baldwin and Jacky Rosen eked out victories. In Michigan and Arizona, where Trump also won, Democrats Elissa Slotkin and Ruben Gallego also beat their opponents.
Meanwhile, Casey lost by 16,000 votes, finally conceding to McCormick on Nov. 22.
“Bob’s race was the ultimate canary in the mine. If Casey loses, we were going to lose all of it,” Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman told NOTUS in his office.
“Losing Bob Casey was the only surprise in the ’24 cycle for me,” Fetterman added. “I wasn’t surprised to see Trump win my state and win the presidency.”
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Casey’s mild-mannered style of legislating was ultimately no match for voter anger over inflation, the economy and broader discontent with Democrats. The smaller number of ticket splitters — people like Fetterman’s parents, who he said voted for Trump and for Casey — weren’t enough to counteract the other factors.
“What hurt him is the same thing that hurt me, which was a surge of low-propensity, and to some extent, low-information voters who didn’t like the top of the ticket and took it out on the entire Democratic ticket,” said Democratic Rep. Matt Cartwright, who represents Casey’s town of Scranton and lost his reelection bid.
“When the price of eggs goes up $1, that tends to focus the mind on what’s wrong with the people in Washington, and they paint with a broad brush and all of the incumbents get tarred,” he said.
Casey said the headwinds of Trump were too much to overcome. Lower turnout in Philadelphia, combined with new, low-propensity voters for Trump, meant that the Trump-Casey ticket splitters didn’t make much of a difference.
“We faced a yearning for change in the electorate, and I was an incumbent. That’s a bad place to be,” Casey said.
“We probably could have survived the super PAC spending and some of the unpopularity of incumbents, but not those two with a Trump wave,” he said. “And we could survive a Trump wave, but not with that much spending.”
“That combination was impossible,” Casey added. “It was kind of a wipeout across the state.”
Voters seemed to want change — big, sweeping changes. Wrenches thrown into the gears of government, not incremental advancements that career politicians tout to local Rotary Clubs.
The latter is exactly the kind of change that has defined Bob Casey.
Cartwright pointed to a “low-key” bill he and Casey spearheaded last Congress, the STREAM Act, as an example of the kind of work Casey did that never got through to voters. It’s a simple bill that would have set aside part of the funds allocated to clean up mine-scarred lands for periodic maintenance, which would have a monumental impact in Pennsylvania coal country.
“That kind of thing doesn’t make national headlines. It’s hard to get on cable news with common sense, practical measures like that. But if we didn’t have guys and gals like Bob Casey working on practical solutions to that, you’d be in a bad way in this country,” he said.
“It’s just emblematic of the kind of low-key, quiet way he makes life better,” Cartwright said.
Fellow Pennsylvania Rep. Chrissy Houlahan echoed Cartwright’s concerns.
“I see what’s devolving in terms of the behavior and how members of this body and that body comport themselves, and it seems to be almost encouraged by the electorate,” Houlahan said.
One of those politicians who has potentially benefitted from comporting himself in a different way is Fetterman, with his untraditional dress and uncaring attitude toward Democratic activists. But even Fetterman sees a place for the traditional, suit-wearing politicians like his fellow Democratic senator from Pennsylvania.
“The Senate needs people just like Bob Casey,” Fetterman told NOTUS. “We’re losing quality people, some because they’re retiring and some because they came up just short.”
“We’re losing a kind of energy here,” he said. “And I don’t think that’s a good thing.”
Beyond the loss for the Senate, Fetterman said it was a loss for him personally.
“After I had my stroke, Bob Casey gave me my voice when I had to learn how to speak again,” he said, choking up. “I’ll never forget that.”
Fetterman said he was the “embarrassing younger brother” to Casey.
“It’s like I’m losing a big brother here in the Senate,” he said. “To have the fight for your political life and just to come up just short. Bob Casey deserved better.”
There aren’t any plans for a comeback or another statewide run. Casey didn’t entirely rule out a run for public office again, but said if he did, it would be “down the road a bit.”
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is up for reelection in 2026, but if he runs for president over another term in Harrisburg, Casey said he’s not interested in vying for the job his father once held.
“No, no, there’s no way, in the short run, to spend the kind of time and energy to put together a big campaign,” he said, though he added that he was “taught a long time ago, you never say ‘never.’”
He said he’s leaving feeling good about his political career, even though the end was a surprise.
“If you can win six statewide general elections in Pennsylvania and come damn close on the seventh, you’re pretty damn lucky,” he said.
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For as traditional as Casey’s time in the Senate was, his final week in the chamber was marked by much of that same normalcy — at least as much normalcy as can be summoned when your office is in boxes, dozens of your family and friends are in town for your farewell speech and the government is on the precipice of shutting down.
But even if Casey seems to be a bit angry, a bit bitter, he also seems to be at peace.
About 100 disability advocates gathered in the Hart Senate Office Building to celebrate Casey, who had been their champion after former Sen. Tom Harkin, author of the Americans with Disabilities Act, passed on the baton when he retired in 2014.
“I remember when I had announced I was leaving the Senate back in 2013, many of you came to see me saying, ‘Look, who’s going to pick this up?’” Harkin told the crowd. “And Bob said, ‘Look, I’m going to be your go-to person.’ And boy, has he ever been your go-to person.”
The day after the event, Casey told NOTUS he wondered whether he could really “shoulder that responsibility” after Harkin left the Senate.
“There was, after those years, kind of a void, which gave me an opportunity to dive into it. And there’s so much work there to do that you could spend, you know, you can allocate a lot of your time just to that,” Casey said.
He dove headfirst into the Senate’s Special Committee on Aging, where, over the last eight years as ranking member and chair of the panel, he “took that committee and made it into the disability committee, all while no one noticed,” Casey said at his final hearing.
Casey said one of his proudest accomplishments was passing the Achieving a Better Life Experience, or ABLE, Act, which turned 10 years old this month. Before ABLE, people with disabilities couldn’t save more than $2,000 without risking access to their benefits. Now, anyone who develops a disability before age 26 can open up a savings account. Under a new provision passed this Congress, that age of disability will rise to 46, adding 6 million more people to the program.
But more than the programs he etched into law, members of the disability community said they would mourn the loss of someone who saw them on a more human level than other lawmakers.
Neil McDevitt, of North Wales, Pennsylvania, believed to be the first deaf person elected mayor in modern U.S. history, said Casey had a “deep internal understanding” of disability issues unlike any other senator.
“After I was elected, really, he was the first senior public official to really understand what I was talking about,” McDevitt said. “Most people will say, ‘Oh, that’s too bad,’ or ‘life is tough.’”
Between the receptions and final committee hearing honoring Casey, it was all a bit much for a senator who has prided himself on flying below the radar.
Casey said it’s “obviously gratifying when people offer commendation about your work.” But he paused.
“At the same time,” he said, “it’s also a little uncomfortable, because you don’t often feel — I don’t sometimes feel — worthy of all of it.”
“Obviously we got a lot of things done, but in some ways, it’s just uncomfortable for some of us to spend that much time talking about yourself,” Casey added. “It’s just the nature of it.”
***
Whether he wanted to talk about himself or not, Casey had one final act as a senator that would force him to do just that: his farewell speech.
Walking from his office to the Capitol on his way to deliver the address, Casey told NOTUS he was “feeling good.”
“It’s a lot of material to cover — 18 years in one speech,” he said.
If you can win six statewide general elections in Pennsylvania and come damn close on the seventh, you’re pretty damn lucky.
As he began, 50 staffers sat along the edge of the Senate floor, alongside Harkin and Pennsylvania Democratic Reps. Madeleine Dean and Chris Deluzio.
The upper galleries were full of family members, friends and other staff. Nearly every Democratic senator was there as well.
As his family shuffled in to watch, his four daughters and wife, Terese, in the front row of the gallery, tissue in hand, Casey sat at his desk in the back row, took out his pen to make final notes and look over his remarks one last time.
There was no mention of the Democratic or Republican parties. He didn’t mention the election or Trump. Instead, he talked about his accomplishments for the disability community and for children, along with the work of his staff.
He quoted Martin Luther King Jr.: “Everyone can be great, because everyone can serve.’”
“King taught us in that simple statement that the word ‘great’ in this context isn’t about fame or acclaim or notoriety or riches,” Casey said. “Great is about something much more valuable: the opportunity to help others.”
But as he delivered his speech, Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance were blowing up a bipartisan spending package — a deal that was negotiated between Democrats and Republicans to include help for a number of communities.
Casey’s final scheduled event in Pennsylvania as a senator — an event to commemorate the ABLE Act — would have to be cancelled so he could be on standby to vote on a new, more limited funding deal, whenever it was ready.
Ultimately, his bipartisan bill to crack down on U.S. investments in China — which was included in the original version of the spending deal — was axed from the final version of the continuing resolution. It would have been his 100th bill passed into law, if not for the new force taking power in Washington.
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Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.