PA Senate candidate Dave McCormick shares podium with election deniers at conference

Pennsylvania Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dave McCormick spoke at a Pennsylvania Republican conference on Friday that was keynoted by a prominent election denier who says the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.

McCormick spoke at the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference a couple of hours before featured speaker Dinesh D’Souza, a right-wing conspiracy theorist. D’Souza is the director of the film “2000 Mules,” which pushed lies that Democrats and left-wing nonprofit groups illegally used so-called ballot traffickers to stuff drop boxes with mail-in ballots in key swing states to steal the election from Trump.

D’Souza’s film has been debunked by experts, who said that not only was its methodology  flawed, but it also did not prove his claims of ballot trafficking. Nevertheless, Republicans have parroted the film’s baseless claims to try to intimidate voters as well as to justify their efforts to ban ballot drop boxes across the country.

During his speech, D’Souza brought up the film and claimed that Democrats would use other tactics to try to steal future elections.

Referring to the supposed vote traffickers, D’Souza said: “As far as I know, there were no mules in 2022. Why? Because there were a lot of patriots who were sitting at the drop boxes with their iPhone, and they were like, ‘We’re waiting for mules. You show up with a satchel of ballots, we’re going to be taking your photo, you’re gonna be on social media.’ And the Democrats knew that. So they’re like, time to move to another strategy.”

McCormick spoke just before D’Souza and gave the opposite message, saying Republicans have to encourage voters to vote early and by mail if they want to win elections: “It’s something we’ve got to embrace or we’re going to lose. We’ve got to do it.”

Politico obtained audio in which McCormick had been recorded saying that Trump was hurting the Republican Party by pushing baseless claims of voter fraud and promoting lies about mail-in voting that are discouraging Republicans from voting.

“However big you think the problem is, our voters think it’s a big problem,” McCormick said, according to Politico. “And so if our voters think it’s a big problem, and they’re not going to vote because they don’t trust the elections, we’ve got a problem. So this is a big deal.”

D’Souza wasn’t the only election denier at the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference.

Heather Honey, a so-called election integrity investigator who spread lies about the number of votes cast in Pennsylvania in 2020, also spoke. Honey falsely said more votes were cast in Pennsylvania than there were voters in the state, which she said was a sign of fraud. Trump used Honey’s false claims in a speech on Jan. 6, 2021, to supporters who then marched to the U.S. Capitol and rioted to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election.

“In Pennsylvania, you had 205,000 more votes than you had voters,” Trump said in the speech, a reference to Honey’s lie about vote totals. “This is a mathematical impossibility unless you want to say it’s a total fraud.”

McCormick is running for the GOP nomination for Senate in Pennsylvania to take on incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey.

A poll conducted from March 20 to March 31 by Franklin & Marshall College found Casey with a 7-point lead over McCormick, with Casey at 46% and McCormick at 39%.

Inside Elections, a nonpartisan political analysis outlet, rates the race “tilt Democratic.”