A scant two weeks before the election, Dave McCormick boarded a predawn flight headed across state lines. The Pennsylvania Republican was making a last-minute trip that would eventually see him standing outside the gates of West Point before scrambling back to the state later that afternoon for a major campaign appearance with Elon Musk.
Top campaign aides would later say the impromptu travel was necessary to put the exclamation mark on a political strategy that helped him become the only Republican candidate to win a swing state Senate race this year.
For much of the campaign, McCormick’s top advisers — including Mark Harris, Brad Todd and campaign manager Matt Gruda — had been fixated on a politically disengaged group of hard-to-reach voters who supported Donald Trump but not McCormick. Even in October, many of these Trump supporters still didn’t know who McCormick was, much less planned to vote for him.