HARRISBURG (TNS) — They got the wrong Philadelphia.
In a breathless attempt to score political points in Pennsylvania’s increasingly combative U.S. Senate campaign, the minders of U.S. Senate candidate Dave McCormick’s social media accounts appeared to confuse a news report involving a series of shootings in Philadelphia, Miss. for our own.
The story, on its face, pushed a lot of buttons for a campaign eager to paint their opponent, incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey Jr., as weak on border security, as law enforcement has stated they believe the suspected shooter was in the U.S. illegally from Mexico.
“MS-13 gang members are terrorizing Philadelphians because of (Vice President Kamala) Harris & Casey’s radical open border policies,” posted McCormick in response to the Mississippi shooting.
Only thing is, the Philadelphia at issue here, population 7,118, is a little more than a thousand miles southwest of Philadelphia, Pa., population 1,567,000.
McCormick’s campaign quickly took the post down, but not before it was caught, and amplified, by Casey’s campaign staff, which probably watches McCormick’s social media more closely than anyone else.
Maddy McDaniel, Casey’s communications director, responded on X saying, “Dave, this story is from Philadelphia, Mississippi — not Philadelphia, PA” and shared a picture of a City of Philadelphia police car, contrasting it with the Philadelphia, Miss. squad car captured in the McCormick Tweet.
It wasn’t long before Democrats, who have made a big deal in this campaign about McCormick’s part-time residency in Connecticut as leaving him out of touch with Pennsylvanian’s issues, piled on in a social media frenzy.
Take this, from U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, who holds the other Pennsylvania Senate seat that McCormick ran an unsuccessful Republican primary campaign for in 2022: “Things like this tend to happen for people who live in Connecticut but run for the Senate in Pennsylvania.”
McDaniel herself added: “Since David McCormick lives in Connecticut, it’s not surprising he can’t tell the difference between Pennsylvania and Mississippi. We can help, Dave — Pennsylvania is the state that is going to reject you in November.”
PennLive asked the McCormick campaign how this happened, and got this response.
“We made a mistake in our tweet, and that’s not nearly as bad as what Bob Casey did when he enabled illegal immigrant gang members to terrorize Americans because of his and Harris’s radical open border policies,” a spokeswoman said.
The campaign did not respond to additional questions about how much, or little, of a role McCormick has in the ‘X’ feed.
It had already turned the page, putting out a news release of its own touting the fact that the arbiters at Politifact had ruled Casey’s attacks on corporate greed as being a major driver of inflation as “mostly false.”
The McCormick campaign’s mistaken Tweet reposted a Mississippi television station’s clip reporting on a shooting involving an alleged MS-13 gang member who police say shot multiple people after entering the United States illegally.
The man, who allegedly shot 15 vehicles and injured three people last week, was arrested on Saturday.
Casey has defended himself against McCormick’s attacks on border security by pointing to recent proposals he has introduced to increase funding for U.S. Border Patrol personnel and technology, and criticizing Senate Republicans for blocking a bipartisan border security bill from getting to President Joe Biden’s desk earlier this year.
