GOP Senate candidate in PA tours natural gas plant as VP Harris pivots from anti-fracking comments

The shake-up at the top of the ticket made political waves down-ballot when President Biden suspended his re-election campaign and endorsed Vice President Harris to run his office last Sunday. On Friday, U.S. Senate candidate Dave McCormick toured a natural gas plant in Warren, Pennsylvania, to contrast his “all of the above energy” goals with Harris’ resurfaced comments from her 2020 campaign that she would ban fracking.

McCormick was quick to pivot to Harris this past week as he vies for Sen. Bob Casey’s seat, considered one of the most likely pickups for Republicans to regain control of the chamber. McCormick released an ad Tuesday clipping Harris’ most liberal comments with Casey’s endorsement, calling Harris “the most liberal presidential nominee in U.S. history.” The McCormick campaign points to Casey endorsing Harris as proof that he is “deeply out of step with the needs of Pennsylvanians.” A 60-second version of the ad will air Monday during the Olympics in the Scranton-Wilkes Barre and Pittsburgh markets.

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Former President Trump and McCormick, who have both committed to unleashing American energy as pillars of their campaigns, latched onto comments made by then-presidential candidate Harris, including at a CNN town hall in 2019: “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.”

Reacting to Harris’ resurfaced comments at a rally in North Carolina on Wednesday, Trump said, “She wants no fracking.” Harris and her campaign have since walked back those now-viral comments about fracking.

“Trump’s false claims about fracking bans are an obvious attempt to distract from his own plans to enrich oil and gas executives at the expense of the middle class,” a spokesperson for the Harris campaign shared in a statement with Fox News. “The Biden-Harris Administration passed the largest ever climate change legislation and under their leadership, America now has the highest ever domestic energy production. This Administration created 300,000 energy jobs, while Trump lost nearly a million and his Project 2025 would undo the enormous progress we’ve made the past four years.”

When asked by Fox News about Harris’ comments, McCormick pointed instead to the Biden-Harris administration’s record on energy, painting a conflicting view from the one presented by the Harris campaign.

“In this crazy effort to eliminate fossil fuel consumption in our country with all the EPA regulations, the ban on fracking, the LNG pause and killing the Keystone pipeline, the Biden administration has put hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies to transition to EVs and to solar panels,” McCormick said. “The majority of those solar panels and lithium batteries come from China, so in this crazy strategy of the radical environmental left, we’ve made ourselves more dependent on our greatest adversary. That’s the folly of the Biden administration’s energy policy: bad for security, bad for our economy and bad for the environment. We need pro-energy policies that open up the opportunity here in Pennsylvania.”

In a Fox News exclusive, McCormick toured Bull Run Energy in Warren, Pennsylvania, on Friday. Co-founded by Justin Hansen and Sam Harvey, the duo oversees 19 employees, 1,400 oil wells and drill and frack five or six wells a year. Most of the oil they produce becomes products like lipstick and other lubricants and everyday products.

“Our company is very small,” Harvey told Fox News Friday. “We have 21 total employees, including myself and Justin. All the shallow conventional operators in northwest Pennsylvania are small businesses, so this is not Big Oil. This is people trying to make a living. It’s a very marginal business. It’s hard to make a living doing this.”

Harvey outlined the difficulty of a one-size-fits-all approach to energy regulation, advocating to scale restrictions to the size and operation of an oil or gas business. Under the Biden-Harris administration, he said the top-down approach hasn’t matched the reality on the ground. 

“Over the past three or four years, we’ve had a lot of regulations that have been rolling down from the federal government,” Harvey said. “They roll down to the state government, and then they’re just now starting to get implemented toward us. What we’re seeing is that a lot of these regulations are designed for Big Oil companies that are drilling unconventional, deep horizontal wells. It doesn’t seem like the folks who wrote the regulations in D.C. have ever come out and visited what these shallow, conventional operations are like. The language doesn’t even fit what we’re doing here.”

Vice President Harris (ALLISON JOYCE/AFP via Getty Images)

McCormick told Fox News he visited Bull Run energy to do just that – see how small gas and oil operations are run so he’s equipped to legislate on Pennsylvania’s energy economy.

“I want to make sure I understand all the issues associated with our energy economy,” McCormick said. “So that when I’m a senator, I can be a pro-energy senator that does all the things necessary to make sure our energy sector develops.”

Earlier this year, McCormick unveiled his “Keystone Agenda,” which includes “unleashing Pennsylvania energy.” The policy platform lays out a plan to remove Biden-era restrictions on gas and oil projects, embrace “all of the above” energy production, and use America’s natural resources to build energy independence and national security.  

“We’re blessed in Pennsylvania with the fourth-largest natural gas reserves in the world,” McCormick added. “We just can’t get access to them, and we can’t get them into the hands of consumers around the United States and around the world. That’s the key. Pennsylvania’s senator should be fighting for those things. Bob Casey has been weak every step of the way and has been for more regulations and eventually the elimination of fossil fuels. That’s bad for Pennsylvanians and bad for America.”

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In response, the Casey campaign doubled down on the senator’s commitment to “responsible fracking” and his voting record against fracking bans.

President Biden (Fox News)

“David McCormick is grasping at straws because the people of Pennsylvania have figured out what he really is – a Connecticut hedge fund mega-millionaire who lied about where he lives, supports a dangerous abortion ban, built up the Chinese military, and invested millions in China’s largest fentanyl producer,” a Casey campaign spokesperson shared with Fox News. “Meanwhile, Bob Casey supports fracking and is actually delivering for the Commonwealth by holding greedy corporations accountable, lowering costs, and supporting veterans and seniors.”

“This race and this election is about two fundamentally different views of the world and how we should lead our country forward; how we can have an economy that’s for working people, how we have secure borders, how we have a robust energy sector so we can be an energy superpower,” McCormick told Fox News on Friday. “That’s the choice between Biden-Harris-Casey. Now, Harris-Casey versus McCormick-Trump at the top of the ticket. It’s a fundamentally different view.”