PENNSYLVANIA, USA — The race for Pennsylvania's open U.S. Senate seat between Democratic incumbent Sen. Bob Casey and Republican Dave McCormick is among the nation's most highly contested and expensive races.
It could also help determine which party controls the narrowly divided Senate.
Casey, 64, the son and namesake of a former two-term governor, has one of the most recognizable names in state politics, but this year he faces what has shaped up to be the toughest race of his Senate career.
McCormick, 59, is a former hedge fund CEO who served at the highest levels of former President George W. Bush’s administration and sat on Trump's Defense Advisory Board along with being an Army combat veteran. He ran for Pennsylvania’s other U.S. Senate seat in 2022 but lost the GOP nomination to Mehmet Oz, who went on to lose to Democrat John Fetterman.
Also up for election to the seat are the following candidates:
Cory Widmann (R) - U.S. Senate
Marty Selker (C) - U.S. Senate
Leila Hazou (G) - U.S. Senate
John Thomas (L) - U.S. Senate
Quincy Magee (I) - U.S. Senate
Scroll over the map below to see vote totals for each candidate for each county in Pennsylvania.
When will all the votes be counted in Pennsylvania?
Several factors contribute to a relatively slow vote counting process in Pennsylvania.
Under Pennsylvania law, elections officials must wait until 7 a.m. ET on Election Day before they can begin to process ballots cast by mail and prepare them to be counted. The release of mail voting results cannot begin until after polls have closed. Because of the overall volume of mail ballots — they comprised almost a quarter of the total vote in the 2022 midterm elections — and the varying amounts of time it takes the state’s 67 counties to tally these votes, determining a winner in a highly competitive race could take several days, as it did in the 2020 presidential election.
The first vote results reported after polls close are expected to come from mail ballots. Results from later in the night are expected to be a mix of mail votes and votes cast in person on Election Day. Once the vote counting stretches into the day after Election Day and beyond, the vote results are once again expected to come mostly from mail ballots.
Overall, votes cast by mail have tended to favor Democrats, ever since the issue of early and mail voting became highly politicized during the 2020 election. This means the Democratic candidate in a competitive contest could take an early lead in the vote count in the initial vote reports after polls close, even though the race may tighten considerably as more votes are tabulated.
In 2020, Biden took an early, temporary lead after mail voting results began to be released shortly after polls closed at 8 p.m. ET. By about 10 p.m. ET, Trump took the lead as more results from Election Day voting were released. By early Wednesday morning, Trump led Biden by nearly 700,000 votes, but that lead would gradually shrink as more mail ballots were tabulated. Biden eventually retook the lead by Friday morning.
The suburban “collar counties” around Philadelphia are key battlegrounds and have been trending toward Democrats in recent years. In statewide elections, Republican candidates tend to win overwhelmingly in rural areas statewide, while Democrats rely on lopsided support in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
Erie and Northampton counties on opposite sides of the state may also hold clues on election night. They are two of only 10 counties across all the presidential battlegrounds that voted for Trump in 2016 and flipped to Biden in 2020.
The Associated Press doesn’t make projections and will declare a winner only when it has determined there is no scenario that would allow the trailing candidates to close the gap. If a race hasn’t been called, the AP will continue to cover any newsworthy developments, like candidate concessions or declarations of victory. In doing so, the AP will make clear it hasn’t declared a winner and explain why.
In Pennsylvania, races with a vote margin of 0.5 percentage points or less are subject to an automatic recount. The AP may declare a winner in a race that is eligible for a recount if it can determine the lead is too large for a recount or legal challenge to change the outcome.
>Below: A map showing U.S. Senate election results across the country and the balance of power:
