Senate candidate McCormick denies he misled voters by saying he ‘started with nothing’

The New York Times published a story on April 19 exploring Pennsylvania Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dave McCormick’s background and contradicting his previous claims that he grew up economically disadvantaged on a family farm. McCormick has responded by denouncing the newspaper and lying about his previous statements.

McCormick is challenging incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey in November’s election. 

During an April 21 appearance on WHTM’s “This Week in Pennsylvania” program, McCormick was asked about the Times report. “I‘ve never said I grew up poor,” he told the Harrisburg-based television station. “What I said is I had a modest beginning and that everything that I have I earned myself. I was very fortunate: My mom and dad were both public school teachers, my dad went from the public schools to being a professor and ultimately became president of Bloomsburg State College, which is a source of great pride, and I grew up on that campus. But we had a family farm, and I worked in the summers baling hay and trimming Christmas trees.” 

On April 19, he said in a tweet,“The @nytimes deliberately lied about my childhood in their partisan hatchet job of a piece.” He called the Times “a liberal out-of-state paper” trying to help reelect Casey. 

But during his unsuccessful 2022 Senate campaign, McCormick told right-wing talk show host Hugh Hewitt, “I started with nothing and I ended up in a great spot due to a lot of good luck and some hard work.” 

During that same race, he told Pittsburgh television station KDKA: “I’ve been very fortunate. I started my life and grew up in Pennsylvania in Bloomsburg, and I didn’t have anything.”

As recently as this January, he told voters at the Pennsylvania Farm Show in Harrisburg, “I grew up on a family farm from the time I was a kid,” according to PennLive. “But I’m not a farmer… That’s a title that you earn and I haven’t earned that title. But I’ve worked around it, and I worked around enough to know how important it is to Pennsylvania.”

McCormick, whose 2022 salary running the Connecticut-based hedge fund firm Bridgewater Associates exceeded $22 million, is running on a plan that includes making the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent. The law slashed tax rates for millionaires and billionaires from 39.6% to 37%, likely saving him hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. 

He opposed President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which has saved older Americans and working families money by reducing health care and clean energy costs for consumers.

This is not the first time he has been caught misleading voters about his background. 

He has presented himself as a “Pennsylvania job creator and a business leader,” but a January HuffPost report found that his firm eliminated hundreds of jobs after accepting Connecticut state funds to increase hiring.  

McCormick’s 2022 campaign website claimed, “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.” But he told the conservative American Enterprise Institute in March 2023 that at Bridgewater, “we had an investment strategy, I think while I was there, like 2% of our assets were in China. But we had $160 billion, so 2% is not an insignificant amount, was in China.“ This April, Bloomberg reported that the fund invested in Chinese businesses that manufacture  military planes, ships, and other equipment.