Senate candidate Dave McCormick has a history of overstating his record on job creation
According to a new report, McCormick’s Connecticut hedge fund took millions in state subsidies to add jobs but slashed more than 400 positions.
Dave McCormick, the Pennsylvania Republican Party’s endorsed candidate to challenge Democratic Sen. Bob Casey in November, is running as a business leader with a history of creating jobs. A new report undermines that claim.
McCormick, who reportedly still lives in his $16 million mansion in Westport, Connecticut, served between 2009 and 2022 as a top executive of Bridgewater Associates, an investment firm based in that same town. His Senate campaign site says, “He’s a Pennsylvania job creator and a business leader.”
A Jan. 9 HuffPost report says, however, that McCormick has a history of overstating the number of jobs he has helped create.
In 2016, Bridgewater accepted $52 million in subsidies under the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development’s First Five Plus jobs initiative based on a promise to keep 1,402 jobs and add 750 new ones over the next five years.
After McCormick became co-CEO in 2017 and CEO in 2019, Bridgewater began laying off hundreds of workers.
More than 400 positions were cut on his watch. The Wall Street Journal reported in July 2020 that sources described one round of layoffs as McCormick putting his imprint on the company. According to his April 2022 financial disclosure, McCormick’s annual CEO compensation at Bridgewater was more than $22 million.
An agreement signed in March 2023 between Bridgewater and the Department of Economic and Community Development terminating the loans did not require Bridgewater to return all of the subsidies. According to the website CT Insider, Bridgewater kept $12 million in tax credits that it had earned.
The McCormick campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But spokesperson Elizabeth Gregory told HuffPost that the firm’s workforce grew 50% during McCormick’s full tenure as a Bridgewater executive, from 2009 to 2022.
“Dave is a proven job creator,” Gregory told the outlet. “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.”
During his unsuccessful 2020 Senate bid, McCormick falsely claimed to have created 1,000 jobs in Pittsburgh between 1999 and 2004 when he ran a software company called FreeMarkets. His campaign later walked back that claim, saying he created 600 jobs in Pittsburgh and 1,000 at the company.
Pennsylvania Democrats seized on HuffPost report. “David McCormick’s only accomplishments as a hedge fund executive were to lay off workers, outsource American jobs, and sell out to China,” state party spokesperson Maddy McDaniel said in a press release on Jan. 10. “Now, he’s pretending he was a successful business leader and job creator, but just like the rest of his campaign, that’s a blatant lie.”
McCormick also claimed in a January 2022 radio interview that his companies had never outsourced jobs, as Republican primary opponents had alleged. This contradicted a 2005 Pittsburgh Tribune-Review interview in which McCormick reportedly said his experience helping companies move jobs offshore would help him in his position as President George W. Bush’s undersecretary of commerce for export administration.
