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Tag: david mccormick
David McCormick

Carpetbagger! GOP's Rich Senate Picks Don't Live Where They May Run

Wealthy hedge fund executive Dave McCormick differentiated himself from his former Pennsylvania Senate primary opponent, New Jersey resident Mehmet Oz, by touting his strong ties to the Keystone State. But the Associated Press reports that McCormick actually still lives in Connecticut.

National Republicans reportedly have been trying to convince the failed 2022 Senate candidate to challenge incumbent Democratic Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey in 2024 and he has indicated he is considering a race.

Politicoreported in March that the National Republican Senatorial Committee is attempting to find candidates for 2024 who can afford to self-fund all or some of their campaigns. After being outraised by Democrats in the 2020 and 2022 Senate campaigns, NRSC Chair Steve Daines acknowledged that it was helpful to find candidates who can provide their own funds, telling the outlet, “We’ve got some work to do to catch up.”

But most of the wealthy candidates Daines, a U.S. senator from Montana, and his team have been recruiting are like McCormick: conservative male business executives who are recent transplants or may not even live in the state in which they’re seeking office.

In the 2022 Pennsylvania Senate primary, Democrats accused both McCormick and eventual nominee Mehmet Oz of not really being Pennsylvania residents.

In a March 2023 interview with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, first flagged by the progressive super PAC American Bridge 21st Century, McCormick suggested that Oz lost to Democratic nominee John Fetterman in part over the issue: “That explains a lot, I think, because people wanna know that the person that they’re voting for kind of gets it, and part of getting it is understanding that you just didn’t come in yesterday.” (Disclosure: The American Independent Foundation is a partner organization of American Bridge.)

The AP report noted that McCormick listed his Westport, Connecticut, mansion in public documents as his primary residence and has done remote interviews from the property as recently as this spring. McCormick has said he is considering a challenge to Democratic incumbent Sen. Bob Casey.

In Wisconsin, as prominent elected officials declined the chance to challenge Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin in 2024, national Republicans are reportedly eying wealthy real estate developer and banker Eric Hovde. Hovde reportedly owns a multimillion dollar home in Laguna Beach, California in addition to his Madison, Wisconsin home. He lost a bid for Senate in 2012.

In May, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Hovde spends a significant amount of time in California and was named one of Orange County, California’s top 500 most influential people by the Orange County Business Journal in 2020.

“We hope California Hovde had a safe trip to La Crosse from his Laguna Beach mansion. As Republicans continue to scramble to find a candidate for U.S. Senate, California Hovde is back once again to pitch his extreme and out of touch policies in Wisconsin,” Democratic Party of Wisconsin rapid response director Arik Wolk quipped in a June press release.

Daines has also urged New York Stock Exchange vice chair John Tuttle to run for retiring Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow’s open seat in Michigan next year. As of last September, Tuttle listed a New York City address as his home when making a campaign donation.

Former Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers, who moved to Florida to run a consulting business and reportedly registered to vote there in 2022, is also reportedly considering a run in his former state.

In Nevada, the NRSC recruited business owner Sam Brown to challenge first-term Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen. Prior to moving to Nevada, he unsuccessfully ran in the 2014 Republican primary for a seat in the Texas Legislature.

Brown will face another wealthy newcomer in the GOP primary. President Donald Trump’s controversial former ambassador to Iceland, Jeffrey Ross Gunter, announced on August 7 that he will also run for the Nevada Senate seat. The GOP mega donor told theNevada Globe two days earlier that he has been a full-time Nevada resident for four years, though the Daily Beastnoted in June that he has been registered to vote in the state only since 2021.

The U.S. Constitution requires that every senator “be an inhabitant of that state for which he shall be chosen” as of Election Day, but it does not specify what that means.

On August 10, Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler noted that Republican Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville appears to reside primarily in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida.

Reprinted with permission from American Independent.

McCormick Sues Over Undated Mail Ballots In Pennsylvania Senate Primary

McCormick Sues Over Undated Mail Ballots In Pennsylvania Senate Primary

(Reuters) - Senate candidate David McCormick has filed a lawsuit in a Pennsylvania court to compel counties to count undated mail-in ballots in his primary race against TV personality Dr. Mehmet Oz, whom he trails by less than 1,000 votes.

The race between McCormick, a former hedge fund executive, and Oz, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump, for the Republican Party nomination is close enough to trigger an automatic recount under Pennsylvania state law.

While McCormick is slightly behind Oz after the May 17 vote, he is well ahead of his opponent in absentee ballots, according to polling firm Edison Research. McCormick has received 45,794 mail-in votes, compared with Oz, who has 32,944.

In a statement, McCormick's campaign said it sued on Monday in Pennsylvania's Commonwealth Court "to compel the counties to follow the [Republican-leaning] Third Circuit Court order from last week stating that undated ballots returned on time be counted."

The statement added that the ballots "are postmarked upon arrival to county boards of elections and, therefore, already dated and proven to be timely."

It was not clear how many mail-in ballots lack a handwritten date, and whether counting them could help McCormick or make a recount less likely. State election officials expect to know this week whether a recount will be needed.

Pennsylvania's Department of State, which oversees elections, said it agreed that undated ballots must be counted in the May 17 race, but advised they be "segregated" and "appropriately logged pending litigation."

"A determination on whether the segregated tabulations will be used in certifying elections has not yet been made, given the ongoing litigation," it said.

The Pennsylvania Republican Party said on Twitter that they "absolutely object to the counting of mail-in ballots. Pennsylvania law and our courts have been very clear that undated ballots are not to be counted."

In a statement on Twitter, Oz called McCormick's lawsuit "a tactic that could have long-term harmful consequences for elections in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania."

(Reporting by Rami Ayyub; editing by Ross Colvin and Jonathan Oatis)

McCormick Vote Climbs With Mail Ballots In Pennsylvania, Enraging Trump

McCormick Vote Climbs With Mail Ballots In Pennsylvania, Enraging Trump

A recent run-in with a familiar enemy, mail-in ballots, has left former President Trump intensifying his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud in Pennsylvania’s GOP Senate race, which other Republicans, even the candidate he endorsed, Mehmet Oz, have refused to embrace.

After urging Oz to “declare victory” in his party’s too-close-to-call senate race — which Trump did himself in 2020 — the former president has again resorted to questioning the legitimacy of votes that arrived by mail, seething in fury as his candidate’s lead dwindles rapidly.

"Here we go again! In Pennsylvania, they are unable to count the Mail-In Ballots. It is a BIG MESS," Trump wrote on Truth Social, his much-ridiculed social media platform.

Oz still holds a narrow 980 vote lead over his rival, David McCormick, a former hedge fund manager Trump labeled a “Liberal Wall Street Republican.” However, mail-in ballots have appeared to favor McCormick, putting him in proximity with Oz in a race that’s well within the threshold for an automatic recount.

State officials have continued working long hours tallying ballots, including those mailed in. There has been no evidence of wrongdoing in the process — which is the same in every other election.

However, Trump appears to care little about the hardworking Pennsylvanian election officials as he did those in Georgia, Arizona, and other states he accused of engineering and facilitating voter fraud in 2020.

“It’s very reminiscent of what we saw in 2020,” said Al Schmidt, a former Philadelphia city election commissioner. According to the Washington Post, Schmidt faced death threats after Trump tweeted at him in 2020. “It’s an indication that he’s not confident that his candidate is going to win. When it looks like you’re losing, you want to flip the board game over — you’re clearly afraid of the outcome,” Schmidt added.

Pat Toomey, the Republican senator whose retirement has opened the hotly contested seat, voiced his admiration for Oz and McCormick, neither of whom has disseminated Trump’s false fraud claims.

“That’s not the least bit surprising given his history and what we know about Donald Trump,” Toomey said, reacting to Trump’s relentless fraud claims. “It’s much to Mehmet Oz’s credit that he hasn’t adopted that rhetoric and seems to be adhering to what used to be the conventional view that all the legal ballots should be counted.”

Haunted by ghosts of election losses past, Trum, posted Thursday morning on Truth Social: “The Pennsylvania Oz race is ridiculous. How long does it take to count votes. France, same day all paper, had VERIFIED numbers in evening. U.S. is a laughingstock on Elections. Stop FINDING VOTES in PENNSYLVANIA! RIGGED?”

Naturally, Trump’s bogus claims, which have no basis in fact, mirror the false allegations he made before, during, and after Election Day in 2020.

According to MSNBC's Steve Kornacki, Oz is still on track to score big in mail-in ballots because he’s fairing better in Lancaster County’s mail-in voting, which has the biggest stack of uncounted GOP mail-in ballots.

Kathy Barnette Blames Everybody Else For Her Muslim-Baiting Tweets

Kathy Barnette Blames Everybody Else For Her Muslim-Baiting Tweets

Kathy Barnette, a Trumpist conspiracy-peddling Republican candidate in the Pennsylvania Senate race who has been rising through the ranks, speeding even past big-spending rivals, is facing waves of criticism and public backlash for her past anti-Muslim tweets.

On Sunday, in an interview with Fox News Sunday host Shannon Bream, after bobbing and weaving on questions probing her military service, Barnette tried to downplay the gravity of Islamophobic tweets that she had penned.

“If you love freedom, Islam must NOT be allowed to thrive under any condition,” Barnette declared in a 2014 tweet. However, her anti-Muslim rant didn’t end there. Her later tweets would hone in on an even bigger target: former President Barack Obama.

"Obama is a Muslim. Doing Muslim like THINGS!" Barnette tweeted in 2016, pushing false claims about the former president’s faith. Referencing the Iran nuclear deal, Barnette targeted Obama, a devout Christian, again later that year in another tweet. "Obama would NEVER lie or evade the American people. He's a Muslim, errrr, American."

When Bream pressed Barnette about the anti-Islam tweets, the GOP Senate candidate took a leaf from the GOP playbook and blamed others for her actions. She lobbed the blame for her social media rant on Obama and Syrians fleeing the civil war in their country.

"Let me just say in almost all of those tweets...especially when you look at the timeframe we were living in, at that particular time, we had the Obama administration bringing in a lot of Syrian refugees at that time,” Barnette told Bream.

Barnette also tried to pass off the resurfacing of her old tweets as a political attack that showed how desperate her opponents are.

“I can’t provide a lot of context because, again, it’s almost ten years ago. That’s how far they have to go back to find anything on me,” she said.

The media was also to blame, according to Barnette. “I have not embellished on my record,” she said. “I have been running this race now for about 13 months, and if you listen to the mainstream media, you would think I crawled from under a rock yesterday.”

In 2020, after losing her first run at Congress by an eye-popping 19 percentage points, Barnette became a willing mouthpiece for former President Trump’s bogus claims of widespread voter fraud, particularly in the votes that were cast by mail.

"I even secured more votes than the president, showing that my American message had a crossover effect," she fumed after her stinging loss to the Democratic Incumbent, Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA).

"I have no idea how we as Americans have allowed the greatest nation to become the equivalent of having elections as the equivalent of Afghanistan with progressive liberals looking a whole lot like the Taliban,” Barnette had added.

After an unsuccessful blame-game attempt, Barnette distanced herself from her past tweets, which she called “incomplete thoughts.”

“At that time, I was hosting a show called ‘Truth Exchange’ and I would have all kinds of ideas and was leaning in to helping the public begin to have those conversations, and so those were some of the — that’s the context around a lot of those tweets,” Barnette said during the Fox interview.

“The overwhelming majority of the tweets that are now being presented are not even full thoughts. They’re not even full sentences and yet people take it and they begin to build their own narrative around it,” she added.

Trump has assailed Barnette, calling her unvetted and unelectable, according to the New York Times. “Kathy Barnette will never be able to win the general election against the radical left Democrats,” Trump said in a statement.