Then and now: How Dave McCormick’s positions on the issues have changed since 2022

A page on the 2024 campaign website of Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dave McCormick, a Connecticut-based hedge fund CEO and multimillionaire who’s challenging Democratic Sen. Bob Casey in November’s election, sets down his views on issues that include abortion, guns and China. Those views have apparently changed significantly since his unsuccessful 2022 campaign for the other Pennsylvania Senate seat, judging by a comparison of the current website and the one that was up during the earlier run.

Political experts say that McCormick’s campaign is attempting to appeal to more moderate voters but that the result could be doubts among Pennsylvanian voters about the genuineness of his policy stances in a race in which he continues to lag behind his opponent.

McCormick’s current website, for example, specifies that he is opposed to a national abortion ban, a statement that was not on his 2022 site. His 2024 site also calls for “rigorous background check systems” for firearms and backs mail-in voting, neither of which his site did in 2022. 

In 2022, McCormick ran a more MAGA-friendly campaign during a seven-way GOP primary to succeed retiring Republican Sen. Pat Toomey.

“I always thought there was a little incongruence between the image he was trying to project and some of the policy issues. Who is the real Dave McCormick?” said John Kennedy, a political science professor at West Chester University whose research focuses on state politics. “I think he’s going to be vulnerable to an attack that he is a flip-flopper.”

A McCormick campaign spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Abortion rights

A year and a half after the conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the federal constitutional right to abortion, Republicans in Pennsylvania and around the country are discovering that the majority of Americans support the right to an abortion and that their anti-abortion stances are not helping them win elections. 

In 2022, McCormick’s campaign website stated, “Dave is staunchly pro-life and believes that life begins at conception.”

The Pennsylvania Capital-Star reported that in April 2022, a debate moderator asked McCormick, “If Roe v. Wade is overturned, should there be exceptions for rape, incest or the life of the mother?”

“I believe in the very rare instances there should be exceptions for the life of the mother,” McCormick responded.

“Dave recognizes that this is an incredibly polarizing issue and we need to seek policies that unify the country,” the candidate’s current website states. “Dave is pro-life, is opposed to a national abortion ban, and supports exceptions in the cases of rape, incest, and saving the life of the mother.”

Gun safety

Both McCormick’s 2022 website and his current site say the candidate supports “Second Amendment rights,” but the 2024 site goes into more detail about McCormick’s stance on firearms and calls for increased school security and expanded mental health programs. It goes on to say the country needs “rigorous background check systems, as we have in Pennsylvania.”

During the 2022 primary, McCormick criticized such gun safety legislation as an assault weapons ban and red flag laws. In a now-deleted 2022 campaign video, McCormick prominently featured firearms and fired a number of guns, including an assault-style rifle.

As the number of mass shootings has increased in recent decades, Pennsylvanians are growing increasingly supportive of gun safety regulations, as Muhlenberg College’s Institute of Public Opinion recently reported.

“A lot of higher-educated suburban women are very supportive of stronger restrictions on firearms, and he knows that he has to do better than other Republicans have in recent statewide cycles, like ‘22 and 2018, among that group, if he is to win,” said Christopher Borick, the director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion.

Borick’s institute recently found that a majority of Pennsylvanians back stronger firearm regulations.

Crime

McCormick’s 2022 page presented crime as an urban problem: “Crime and murder rates across American cities, including sanctuary cities like Philadelphia, are at record highs. Open border policies are flooding Pennsylvanian communities with illegal drugs like fentanyl, and defund the police movements are leading to more crime in our cities – crime that is creeping into the suburbs.”

At the time, the nation had seen an increase in murder rates in cities, suburbs, and rural communities coinciding with the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Crime rates dropped significantly in 2023, and homicides in cities dropped another 20% in the first quarter of 2024.

McCormick’s 2024 page frames the issue more broadly: “Every American deserves to feel safe where they live and work, but dangerous rhetoric and lax law enforcement policies have led to an increase in crime. Urban decay and skyrocketing murder rates are making sections of our great cities a terrifying place to raise children. Fentanyl is killing Americans in every community Defunding the police, which Bob Casey supported, and declining respect for our law enforcement is diminishing the ability to keep communities safe.”

Casey has opposed efforts to defund law enforcement and has helped secure public safety funds for Pennsylvania. He co-sponsored a bipartisan crackdown on fentanyl supply chains.

China

“Dave has been tough on China his whole life and is the only candidate with proven experience of standing up to the Chinese Communist Party,” McCormick’s 2022 site claimed, adding that he backed sanctions against China, a review of U.S. investments in China, and “seeking reparations for COVID.”

This March, the HuffPost reported that McCormick had made U.S. investment in China easier during his time as President George W. Bush’s undersecretary of the treasury for international affairs and that as a hedge fund executive he had utilized those looser rules for his firm’s profit. His firm invested $160 billion in China. Bloomberg reported in April that those investments included Chinese manufacturers of military equipment. 

McCormick’s 2024 issues page omits the specific tough-on-China language: “China poses the gravest threat to our security and well-being since the end of World War II, and career politicians like Bob Casey have gotten China wrong for more than two decades.”

Pennsylvania Democratic Party spokesperson TaNisha Cameron told the Pennsylvania Independent in an email: “David McCormick is trying to hide his dangerous, out of touch agenda. He’s been exposed for his support of an abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest, prioritizing his Wall Street friends over Pennsylvania workers, and lobbying to lower investment barriers with China that he later profited from. McCormick knows his record is disqualifying for Pennsylvania and he can’t run away from it.”