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Tag: pennsylvania
Dave McCormick

GOP Senate Nominee McCormick Grew Up In A Mansion -- Not 'On A Farm'

David McCormick, who is Pennsylvania's presumptive Republican U.S. Senate nominee, has often suggested he grew up poor in a rural community. But a new report finds that his upbringing was far more affluent than he's suggested.

The New York Times reported Friday that McCormick — a former hedge fund executive who lived in Connecticut as recently as 2022 — has been cagey with voters about his childhood. McCormick has tweeted that he was "raised in Bloomsburg working on his family's farm," said on a 2022 podcast that he "started with nothing" and told CBS News that same year that he "didn't have anything" growing up as the son of two schoolteachers.

But according to the Times, McCormick's father, Dr. James H. McCormick, was appointed president of what is now Bloomsburg University by Gov. Milton Schapp (D) in 1973. He moved his family into Buckalew Place — the official mansion for presidents of the school that currently spans 5,500 square feet — when his son was just eight years old. The Times reported that he was paid a salary of $29,000 at the time, which is more than $200,000 in today's dollars.

"He had a very privileged childhood," 76-year-old Linda Cromley — a lifelong Bloomsburg resident who attended church with the McCormicks for a stretch — told the Times. "He didn’t grow up a poor kid. Which doesn’t mean that he has to — but don’t pretend that you were."

During a roundtable discussion earlier this year, McCormick referred to himself as a "farmer that's got a big farm in Columbia County." However, that's a reference to his family's 600-acre Christmas tree farm that they purchased after the McCormicks had already been living at Buckalew Place for several years.

Mary Gummerson, who rented part of the farm with her husband for more than three decades, told the Times that while David McCormick had spent some summers baling hay and trimming trees, his description of himself as a "farmer" was somewhat misleading.

“They were hunters and he grew up in a farm kind of environment," Gummerson said. “But no, he’s not planting corn.”

McCormick didn't respond to the Times' interview request, but clarified in a statement that "growing up, we lived on campus at Bloomsburg State College and my parents owned a farm 10 minutes down the road." He added that the Times' highlighting of the discrepancies between his descriptions of his biographical details and the actual details of his upbringing were "hair-splitting, frivolous, cherry-picked distortions of what I have always said."

Pennsylvania's U.S. Senate primary is Tuesday, though McCormick has no Republican opposition. He will face off with Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) in the November election, who is seeking a fourth six-year term. According to RealClearPolitics' polling average, Casey leads McCormick by more than five points.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Dave McCormick

'I'm Prospecting With Really Wealthy People' Boasts Senate Candidate McCormick

Wealthy Connecticut former hedge fund executive Dave McCormick, who has been endorsed by the Republican Party of Pennsylvania to challenge Democratic Sen. Bob Casey this November, has backed a series of policies that would help very rich individuals and hurt working families. On January 22, he indicated that he is spending half of his time fundraising with out-of-state rich people.

In a discussion at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, titled “View from the Top with Dave McCormick, U.S. Senate Candidate,” the millionaire former CEO of Bridgewater Associates and unsuccessful 2022 Senate primary candidate told students: “I’m spending half my time with donors. Essentially, it’s going to be the most expensive race in the country.”

In an audio recording of the event, posted by Heartland Signal, he said: “I’m nationalizing the race. if you vote for me you’re voting for winning the Senate, blah blah blah. So I’m everywhere, prospecting mostly with really wealthy people, where you will all be in 20 years, or many of you. And I’m also spending half my time in Pennsylvania, where the median income is $55,000 to $60,000.”

His campaign has said it raised $6.4 million in the last quarter of 2023, including $1 million of McCormick’s own money.

The only policy issues mentioned in the agenda section of McCormick’s campaign site are his plans to counter the influence of China, where his old investment firm invested more than $1 billion during his tenure.

In remarks at last year’s annual Pennsylvania Society reception, an event attended by Pennsylvania politicians and business leaders in New York City, heard in a recording obtained by the Pennsylvania Capital-Star in December, McCormick argued that wealthy business executives are not greedy price-gougers and that their taxes should be cut permanently. “We need to make this a more business-friendly commonwealth and more business-friendly country,” he said, according to the Capital-Star. “We need to make permanent the Tax [Cuts] and Jobs Act. We need to get rid of this onerous red tape and regulation which has gotten a lot worse under the Biden administration.”

The 2017 tax law in question, signed by President Donald Trump, slashed tax rates for the wealthiest Americans and large corporations while actually raising them for 10 million American families. For top earners like McCormick, whose 2022 salary exceeded $22 million, the law dropped his tax rate from 39.6 percent to 37 percent, likely saving him hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. The individual cuts are set to expire in 2025; making them permanent would add an estimated $3.5 trillion to the national debt through 2033, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

In October 2023, McCormick said he opposed President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which boosted climate investments and reduced health care costs. Though the law has lowered prescription drug prices and the cost of insulin for Pennsylvanians on Medicare, McCormick implied he would like to scrap most or all of it along with Biden’s bipartisan 2021 infrastructure investments: “We’ve got to roll that back. … So the big Biden legislation was a terrible mistake. The Green New Bill, all these things were disasters. And so we’ve got to roll that back.”

Biden has not signed a “Green New Bill,” but the infrastructure law has already provided funds to help Pennsylvania families afford air conditioning and heating bills, repair the commonwealth’s unsafe bridges, and improve water infrastructure in Pennsylvania.

McCormick said in March 2023 that the public education system is not doing enough to teach kids that America is exceptional, “And that’s why we’ve got to break the back of our teachers’ unions and our public school system and give kids choice and get parents more involved.”

He has come under fire for actually living in Connecticut, rather than in Pennsylvania, according to tax records. Although he calls himself “a Pennsylvania job creator and a business leader,” a January 9 HuffPost report found that his firm cut hundreds of jobs after accepting Connecticut state funds to boost hiring.

Though he claimed in a January 2022 radio interview never to have outsourced jobs, he boasted in a 2005 Pittsburgh Tribune-Review interview that his experience helping companies move jobs offshore would help him in the role to which he had just been appointed, as undersecretary of commerce for export administration in the George W. Bush administration.

Reprinted with permission from Pennsylvania Independent.

Dave McCormick

Connecticut Republican Declares Candidacy For Pennsylvania Senate Seat

Connecticut-based millionaire and former hedge fund CEO Dave McCormick on Thursday announced that he will challenge incumbent Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA), following months of recruitment efforts by national Republicans. McCormick, who has run for the Senate before, has a long record of opposing public education, reproductive rights, and American workers.

Hours before a scheduled Pittsburgh announcement speech, McCormick released a campaign video, promising: “I will fight for pro-growth economic policies, for America-first energy policies. I will fight on day one to secure borders. I will lead the fight on China.”

In 2022, McCormick sought the Republican nomination for the seat of retiring Republican Sen. Pat Toomey. He narrowly lost in a primary to television personality Mehmet Oz after Democrats criticized both candidates as carpetbaggers from out of state.

McCormick told the right-wing American Enterprise Institute this March, in an interview first flagged by the progressive super PAC American Bridge 21st Century, that part of the reason Oz lost to Democratic nominee John Fetterman in the November 2022 general election was a lack of authentic connection to the state.

Telling the interviewer that he himself has deep roots in Pennsylvania, McCormick said: “He didn’t have enough anything like that. And so that explains a lot, I think, because people want to 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.)

Though McCormick repeatedly claimed to be a Pennsylvania resident during his 2022 campaign and earlier this year, an August 14 Associated Press investigation of tax filings and property records revealed that he still appears to live in a $16 million mansion in Westport, Connecticut.

The American Independent Foundation later reviewed additional tax records that show he paid Westport town motor vehicle taxes on two vehicles, indicating that they were still registered in Connecticut as of October 2022.

In his 2022 campaign, McCormick spoke about his opposition to abortion. He endorsed a nearly total abortion ban during an April 2022 debate: “I believe in the very rare instances, there should be exceptions for the life of the mother.”

A spokesperson told the Philadelphia Inquirer last June that McCormick now supports exceptions in cases of rape and incest.

Recent polls have shown more than 60 percent of Pennsylvanians support abortion being legal in most or all circumstances. Casey has backed legislation to restore the right to an abortion in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned Roe v. Wade.

During his 2022 campaign, McCormick opposed gun safety legislation and, on his campaign website, accused the “extreme left” of wanting to abolish the Second Amendment.

McCormick attacked public education during a March radio interview, also flagged by American Bridge. Asked on the Rich Zeoli Show about “wokeness” in the education system, McCormick complained that schools were not teaching that America is exceptional:

And this all became clear during COVID, because all of a sudden, parents could see that the history that was being taught, the sexualization that was happening, particularly in our elementary schools, they could see that teachers were making decisions that were not in the best interests of their children. And that’s why we’ve got to break the back of our teachers’ unions and our public school system and give kids choice and get parents more involved.

McCormick said in April 2022 that he opposes efforts to increase the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage, which has not been adjusted since 2009. “I wouldn’t change the minimum wage we have now,” he said on the Politics PA podcast. “But I wouldn’t raise it.”

Asked that January about allegations that his businesses had outsourced Pennsylvania jobs, he told Pittsburgh radio station KDKA: “Certainly, there was never any outsourcing of jobs to any country, and there was certainly no outsourcing of jobs to China. And the businesses I ran had very, very little business at all with China. The firm I led had two percent of its revenue coming from China.”

This appeared to contradict a 2005 Pittsburgh Tribune-Reviewstory about McCormick’s assumption of the position of undersecretary of commerce for export in the George W. Bush administration, which said, “McCormick said his experience as a corporate CEO helping companies to move work offshore, and as a platoon leader in the Army during the first Gulf War, will serve him well in his new post.”

The American Independent Foundation reported in March 2022 that McCormick had repeatedly called himself a former Army Ranger, though he never earned that title.

According to the Army’s Special Operations Command, only military members who serve or served in the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment can call themselves a U.S. Army Ranger. McCormick completed the Army’s Ranger Course training program in 1988, entitling him to say he was “Ranger qualified,” according to U.S. military standards, but he never served in the 75th.

In his 2022 campaign, he touted the endorsement of Sean Parnell, a former primary opponent who had dropped out of the race. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had reported that Parnell sought to seal custody records after his estranged wife filed protection-from-abuse orders against him.

“The real David McCormick is a mega-millionaire Connecticut hedge fund executive who is lying about living in Pennsylvania, and has spent his life looking out for himself and his rich friends at the expense of working families,” Pennsylvania Democratic Party spokesperson Maddy McDaniel told the American Independent Foundation. “Bob Casey has spent his career fighting for Pennsylvanians who work for a living, while McCormick has shown he will do and say anything to benefit himself and his wealthy Wall Street friends.”

Casey has introduced 54 bills so far in 2023, addressing gun violence, Medicare and Medicaid expansion, public health, and costs for Pennsylvania families.

The Cook Political Reportlists the race as competitive, but leaning Democratic.

Reprinted with permission from American Independent.

Patients From Other States Straining Pennsylvania Abortion Clinics

Patients From Other States Straining Pennsylvania Abortion Clinics

There are only 18 freestanding abortion care providers serving Pennsylvania, down from 145 before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. Pennsylvania Department of Health reports that in 2021, 33,206 patients obtained abortion care in the state.

Abortion rights advocates and lawmakers in Pennsylvania are working hard to remove the existing barriers to care as more patients from abortion-restrictive states travel to the state seeking care.

“Throughout this fiscal year, there’s an estimated 74 percent increase in abortion patient volume, and that’s because as states continue to ban abortion, folks are looking for health care elsewhere, and they’re turning to states like Pennsylvania,” Signe Espinoza, executive director of Planned Parenthood Pennsylvania Advocates, tells the American Independent Foundation.

Although abortion care is legal in Pennsylvania through the 23rd week of pregnancy, the state’s Abortion Control Act requires a patient to have state-mandated counseling that Planned Parenthood says “includes information designed to discourage [a person] from having an abortion,” and to submit to a 24-hour waiting period before having the procedure. Parental consent is required for a minor to obtain abortion care.

“I think a lot of folks would refer to Pennsylvania as some kind of safe haven state where abortion was not as restricted. But that’s actually not the case,” Espinoza says. “There are a lot of restrictions on abortion care in Pennsylvania.”

Such restrictions include limits on insurance coverage of the costs of abortion care. Pregnant patients who have Medicaid and plans purchased through the Affordable Care Act can only have their abortion care covered if their life is in danger, or in the case of rape or incest.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the Hyde Amendment banned the use of federal funds for abortion care when Congress passed the fiscal 1977 Medicaid appropriation. The Amendment only allows for abortion care in cases where the pregnant person’s life is in danger.

When the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010, several states began restricting abortion care for those with private coverage obtained through the ACA, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Other states have elected to use their own Medicaid funding to cover the cost of abortion care for residents.

In April, Pennsylvania state Rep. Leanne Krueger introduced H.B. 1140, a bill that would amend the Insurance Company Law of 1921, which allows “employers to be exempt from Affordable Care Act mandates to provide birth control to employees if they object due to religious or moral values,” a summary of the bill reads.

“We’ve been in constant defense when it comes to abortion in Pennsylvania. And at the same time, when we’re talking about abortion gaps, there’s also other sexual reproductive health care gaps. We’re living in a Pennsylvania where there are contraceptive deserts, where a lot of women are living in areas where there’s no provider with a full range of methods for birth control,” Espinoza says.

Espinoza adds that lawmakers in the state are also working on a bill to increase access to abortion care by allowing more clinicians to provide it. Under current Pennsylvania law, only licensed physicians can prescribe or perform abortion care.

“This isn’t the case for many other states. This isn’t the case for our neighboring state, New Jersey. We know midwives and nurse practitioners that are duly certified, and they can’t provide abortions in Pennsylvania, but when they cross the bridge to go to New Jersey, they’re able to do that,” Espinoza says. “There’s no other reason why this doctor-only provision exists other than because abortion is stigmatized. It’s outdated, unnecessary.”

In July, Democratic state Sens. Amanda M. Cappelletti and Judith L. Schwank announced they would be introducing a package of bills intended to “protect individuals seeking and providing reproductive health services in the Commonwealth.”

“These measures will ensure that everybody within our borders is protected in their right to access an abortion and the doctors and nurses who provide it are freely able to provide health care,” Cappelletti and Schwank said in an official memorandum.

According to a Franklin & Marshall College poll taken in July 2023, 52 percent of registered voters in Pennsylvania said abortion should be legal under certain circumstances, and 37 percent felt it should be legal under any circumstance.

“Ultimately, this is everybody’s fight,” Espinoza said. “This is a fight about having the control over your own body, and I think everybody should be on board with that.”

Reprinted with permission from American Independent.