Dave McCormick’s business record: Putting profits over Pennsylvanians

At an Indiana County campaign rally on Sept. 24, Pennsylvania Republican U.S. Senate nominee Dave McCormick spoke about his business record: “I ran a business. Came back to Pennsylvania. Helped create jobs. I have lived the American dream, and that American dream is slipping away.” But media reporting throughout his campaign has shown that his career as a hedge fund CEO has been more focused on his own profits than helping Pennsylvanians.

After narrowly losing a Republican Senate primary in 2022 to television personality Mehmet Oz, McCormick is challenging Democratic incumbent Sen. Bob Casey in this November’s election. 

Casey has highlighted his work creating jobs and helping Pennsylvania’s workers and contrasted his record with McCormick’s. “While I was fighting for union rights and fighting for working families in Pennsylvania, he was making a lot of money investing in China,” Casey said during a recent campaign stop near Harrisburg, according to the Associated Press. “He not only invested in Chinese companies, he invested in companies that built the Chinese military.”

From 1999 to 2004, McCormick was CEO of FreeMarkets Inc., an online auction business based in Pittsburgh. Though he claimed during his 2022 race to have created “over 1,000 jobs” in Pittsburgh, his campaign later acknowledged that the actual number was just 600. Indeed in 2007, FreeMarkets had to return half of a $500,000 grant from Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development after it failed to create the 1,000 jobs McCormick had promised six years earlier.

After FreeMarkets was purchased by Ariba in 2004, McCormick became president of the new combined company, which provided procurement businesses with supply chain and sourcing information. He and his company provided information to American businesses on how best to outsource jobs to other countries.

In 2005, McCormick was appointed undersecretary for export administration at the U.S. Commerce Department in the George W. Bush administration. At the time, he gave an interview to the the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in which he said that his experience as CEO helping companies send jobs offshore would help him in his new post.

After a stint working in the Treasury Department, McCormick moved to Connecticut and became the president of Bridgewater Associates, a hedge fund business, in 2009. He was appointed co-CEO in 2017 and served as the firm’s sole CEO from April 2020 to January 2022. Though he resigned from the firm prior to his 2022 U.S. Senate campaign, tax records show McCormick continued to live in a $16 million Westport, Connecticut, mansion while claiming residency in Pittsburgh. 

During his tenure at Bridgewater, it too accepted government subsidies to increase its workforce and failed to do so. According to a 2016 report by the Connecticut Mirror, Bridgewater accepted $52 million from the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development’s First Five Plus jobs initiative after promising to preserve 1,402 jobs and add 750 new employees over five years. Those promises weren’t met; under McCormick’s leadership, the firm laid off more than 400 people.

McCormick’s annual compensation at Bridgewater was more than $22 million, according to his April 2022 personal financial disclosure.

“Dave is a proven job creator,” a McCormick campaign spokesperson told HuffPost in January. “Dave also created hundreds of jobs in the greater Pittsburgh area while at FreeMarkets, helping to take the company from a little over a hundred jobs when he joined in 1999 to nearly 900 by the time he sold the company as CEO at the end of 2004.”

While McCormick campaigns as someone who will stand up to China, on his watch Bridgewater invested billions of dollars there, including in businesses reportedly involved with the Chinese military, a fentanyl producer, and companies with ties to Iran. 

“We served the biggest global investors in the world, and they want access to markets all around the world. So they wanted to diversify their portfolios, including in China. So we had an investment strategy that ultimately, I think while I was there, like 2% of our assets were in China,” he told the conservative American Enterprise Institute in March 2023. “But we had $160 billion, so 2% is not an insignificant amount, was in China.”

According to a November 2023 report by the digital newsroom Heartland Signal, McCormick invested between $4.5 million and $92 million of his own funds in businesses that outsourced American jobs, including 2,600 jobs that had previously been located in Pennsylvania. 

At a January 2024 campaign appearance at Penn State University, McCormick told students that he is fine with outsourcing American jobs, so long as they are not in industries he deems vital. 

“There are certain industries that should be here at home or in the hands of our closest allies,” he said, noting that pharmaceuticals and steel were vital to national security. “I don’t really care if we’re not manufacturing T-shirts, or rugs, or a variety of other things that aren’t critical to our economy. I don’t really care if those jobs are elsewhere.”