Margins have narrowed, but Republicans still look likely to win Pennsylvania's U.S. Senate seat
Pennsylvania's tight race for U.S. Senate has become tighter as outstanding ballots, including provisional ballots, have been tallied by counties around the state. Per ABC News's reports on the count, Republican Dave McCormick now leads Democratic Sen. Bob Casey Jr. by 0.24 percentage points, 48.81% to 48.57% — with a raw vote margin of about 17,000 votes. It's unclear exactly how many uncounted votes are still outstanding, with different estimates ranging from 17,000 (according to the Decision Desk earlier today) to 24,000 last night (according to NBC News).
Also affecting the count will be a ruling from the state Supreme Court favorable to McCormick that ordered counties to not count mail-in ballots that lack a correct handwritten date on the return envelope. As Democrats have a greater propensity to vote by mail, there's a good chance that ballots that aren't properly dated are at least somewhat more Democratic-leaning. The court's order came in response to the actions of Democratic-majority election boards in Philadelphia, Montgomery and Bucks Counties, which decided to tally ballots that didn't have this information despite earlier court rulings against doing so. Not surprisingly, McCormick's 2022 campaign for U.S. Senate fought for such ballots to be tallied in his razor-thin defeat in the GOP primary against Mehmet Oz, whereas McCormick's 2024 campaign has fought against their inclusion.
Regardless, Casey will have to win an extremely high percentage of any remaining votes to narrow the margin to a point where the state's impending recount might have some chance of giving him a lead. His current deficit (0.24 points) is four times larger than the largest margin reversed by a recount in the past two decades (0.06 points), according to an analysis by FairVote.