GOP senator: ‘I was not expecting Donald Trump to win’

by Jordain Carney - 11/10/16 11:35 AM ET

Republican Sen. Pat Toomey (Pa.) said Thursday that while he voted for Donald Trump, he wasn’t expecting the GOP nominee to win the presidential election.

“I’ve got to be totally candid with you: I was not expecting Donald Trump to win,” Toomey told a CBS radio station in Philadelphia. “I didn’t anticipate that he would pull this off. I thought it would be close, but I’m still amazed by that.”

{mosads}Facing a tough reelection bid, Toomey waffled for months on whether to support Trump, despite disagreeing with him on his controversial statements. He announced roughly an hour before polls closed in Pennsylvania on Tuesday that he voted for his party’s nominee.

He added Thursday that making a decision on Trump was a “genuine dilemma.”

“It wasn’t a dilemma choosing between Trump and Clinton. Clinton was very easy to rule out from day one,” he said. “That was never a possibility. I had and I still have a lot of concerns about things that Donald Trump has said, about issues regarding his temperament, about positions.”

Toomey was reelected on Tuesday night, beating Democrat Katie McGinty, Gov. Tom Wolf’s former chief of staff, by roughly 2 percentage points, according to The Associated Press. Trump was the first GOP presidential nominee to win Pennsylvania since 1988.

Tags Donald Trump