NOTE: This post was updated at 6:45 p.m. with quotes from Sen. Casey’s concession and Sen-elect McCormick’s response. At 6:58 p.m. we loaded in Casey’s videotaped statement.

U.S. Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. has conceded defeat to his Republican opponent in Pennsylvania’s 2024 Senate race, Wall Street hedge fund manager David McCormick.

Casey’s concession comes after Pennsylvania’s 67 counties were already in the midst of a statewide recount, triggered by state law that authorizes a new tabulation of the votes in any statewide election when margin between the two leading candidates is less than 0.5 percentage points.

At midnight Wednesday, McCormick’s lead of 16,367 votes equated to .24 percentage points. Early returns from counties that had completed their recounts were showing little to no change from their initially-reported results.

“I want to thank the people of Pennsylvania for granting me the privilege of serving them for 28 consecutive years in public office,” Casey said in a video statement posted online this evening after, he said, he had spoken with McCormick.

“Thank you for the trust you’ve placed in me for all these years. It’s been the honor of my lifetime,” Casey concluded.

McCormick, in turn, set down the bare-knuckled language of the campaign and issued his own statement thanking Casey for his years of service.

“Senator Bob Casey dedicated his career to bettering our Commonwealth. Dina and I want to extend our sincere gratitude to Senator Casey, Terese, and their family for their decades of service, hard work, and personal sacrifice,” the Senator-elect’s statement said.

“I am so honored to represent every single citizen in Pennsylvania in the United States Senate and will fight for you every day. Thank you!”

McCormick was declared the winner by The Associated Press’s analysts on Nov. 7.

But Casey and his campaign, down by about 40,000 votes at that point, dug in for the methodical vote certification process, hanging onto slim hopes that pro-Democratic tilts in the mail-in and provisional counts could bring about a political miracle for him.

Many Republicans publicly lost their patience over the last two weeks, accusing the Casey campaign and Democratic Party of trying to unlawfully expand the field of available votes, and throwing Casey’s criticisms of former President Donald J. Trump’s refusal to concede in 2020 back in his face.

That fails to note two important distinctions, however: Casey has never questioned the integrity of the count, and he has never suggested that he would not accept the final results. And now, it appears, he’s done just that.

Casey himself publicly leaned into the idea that he wanted to make sure every legal vote was counted. He didn’t back off of that sentiment in his concession, expressing pride Thursday that his staff helped, by their count, more than 6,000 votes cure mail-in ballots over the last two weeks.

“That’s democracy,” Casey argued, stating that he was conceding now because initial counts in all counties had been completed and reported to the Pennsylvania Department of State.

But the Casey campaign seemed to lose its last flicker of hope when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court stuck by its prior rulings Monday that there would be no counting of undated or incorrectly dated mail-in ballots in this election.

The 2024 senate race made state political history on several levels.

First, it’s on track to be the closest by percentage margin of difference between the top two candidates in a Pennsylvania senate race since U.S. senators began being directly elected by the voters in the early 20th Century.

The previous record was 1958, when Democrat Joe Clark unseated Republican incumbent James Duff in 1958 by 0.39 percentage points.

For Casey, 64, it’s the end of an 18-year tenure in the Senate, and 28 straight years in some sort of statewide elected office.

For the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, it’s the end of an era in which the Casey family held statewide office for 36 of the last 38 years, beginning with the election of the senator’s father, Robert P. Casey Sr., as governor in 1986.

McCormick’s victory would give President-elect Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party a slightly more comfortable 53-47 majority in the Senate in the 2025-26 session of Congress, to go along with a narrow GOP majority in the U.S House of Representatives.

McCormick will be sworn into office on Jan. 3, at the U.S. Capitol.