Former President Donald Trump endorsed Senate candidate David McCormick of Pennsylvania on Saturday, urging his supporters in the state to “go out and vote for him” in one of the year’s most hotly contested Senate races.

Trump’s endorsement came two years after he endorsed McCormick’s opponent in Pennsylvania’s Senate GOP primary, forging a new bond between the two men who will share the ticket in a state that is critical to control of the White House and Senate.

“He’s a good man. He wants to run a good ship,” Trump said during a rally in the eastern Pennsylvania town of Schnecksville. “He’s a smart guy. He was a very successful guy. He’s given up a lot to do this.”

McCormick — who splits his time in Connecticut, where he has a home — did not attend the rally. He was at a parents’ weekend with his daughter, a campaign spokesperson said.

McCormick responded on social media, writing on the X platform: “Thank you, President Trump! Together we will deliver a big win for Pennsylvania and America in November.”

McCormick, ex-CEO of hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, is trying to unseat Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., who is seeking his fourth term and is called Pennsylvania’s best-known politician by The Associated Press reporter who filed this report.

Most Americans would not know Casey at all, as Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., or even President Joe Biden are far more connected to Pennsylvania, despite the local AP reporter’s claim.

Many would-be Republican nominees in Senate battlegrounds had endorsed Trump early in the GOP presidential primary, campaigned for him, or otherwise sought his approval.

McCormick endorsed Trump after Nikki Haley suspended her presidential campaign following her Super Tuesday defeats, leaving Trump as the last remaining major candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination.

In 2022, McCormick — like others in the seven-way GOP primary to succeed retiring Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa. — had sought Trump’s endorsement.

According to McCormick’s telling of it, Trump told McCormick during their meeting at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida that to win the primary McCormick would need to address election integrity concerns after the 2020 election that featured the Biden home state of Pennsylvania deploying mass mail-in balloting and accepting ballots after polls closed merely by Democrat leadership fiat and not by the constituational duty of law passed by the state legislature, the Trump campaign argued.

McCormick declined to relitigate the 2020 election integrity issues and, three days later, Trump endorsed Dr. Mehmet Oz, critizing McCormick when GOP allies lamented his losing the coveted Trump endorsement.

The AP reporter resurfaced some potential attack points for Democrats, using Trump’s past criticisms.

In one setting, a rally in western Pennsylvania days before the 2022 primary, Trump told the crowd McCormick is “not MAGA,” using the acronym for his Make America Great Again campaign slogan.

Then he derided McCormick as having been with a company — the hedge fund — that “managed money for communist China,” describing him in the next breath as “the candidate of special interests and globalists and the Washington establishment.”

But, now in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania, with the narrow Senate majority held by Democrats in reach, Trump and McCormick are forging a new alliance.

Material from AP comprised the majority of this report.

© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.