If you can remember those hazy, long-ago days of 2022, you might recall that the Republican nominee for Pennsylvania’s US Senate seat, weird TV quack from New Jersey Mehmet Oz, lost to Democrat John Fetterman. That was in part because of the whole “weird TV quack” thing, but probably just as much because of the “actually lived in New Jersey” thing. You remember the jokes, the Snooki “endorsement,” the thing where Oz didn’t know the right name of Pennsylvania grocery chain Wegmans and Fetterman made fun of Oz’s “crudité” shopping.
This time around, the GOP nominee battling incumbent Sen. Bob Casey (D) will be hedge fund millionaire David McCormick, who lost to Oz back in the 2022 Republican primary; as we noted last week, McCormick overcame that by running unopposed this year. The most notable news about that election was that Zombie candidate Nikki Haley got 17 percent of the vote even though she ended her campaign weeks ago.
However, we kind of skipped over a thing about McCormick last week, because we were mainly focused on Haley. Like “Dr.” Oz, McCormick isn’t so much from Pennsylvania as from another state, but this time it’s Connecticut. We regret the oversight.
The Associated Press ran a long piece in August about how McCormick is, at most, a part-time Pennsylvanian, noting that he does indeed own a home in the Commonwealth, but that
a review of public records, real estate listings and footage from recent interviews indicates he still lives on Connecticut’s “Gold Coast,” one of the densest concentrations of wealth in America. The former hedge fund CEO rents a $16 million mansion in Westport that features a 1,500-bottle wine cellar, an elevator and a “private waterfront resort” overlooking Long Island Sound.
In September, Vanity Fair followed up with a look at public flight records showing that McCormick does so go to the Keystone State now and then, on one of four private turboprop planes he owns a fractional share of. Then he’s flown right back home to the airfield in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
After one visit to the state where he’s running, McCormick tweeted, speaking of Pittsburgh, “It’s just devastating to see how our city has declined under the Democrats’ one party rule.” And he should know, since he claims he lives there.
What’s more, as Rachel Maddow pointed out on MSNBC last night — as part of a segment on GOP candidates fibbing about their residency and other stuff — McCormick’s campaign also created a not-terribly-accurate backstory for him, claiming he “started with nothing” and grew up on his family’s “farm” in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania.
Spoiler: Not a rural urchin, not a farm boy, also not the Dread Pirate Roberts.
Here, have a gift link to the New York Times story about McCormick’s hardscrabble — in Pennsylvania, would that be hardscrapple? — boyhood near farmland that was close to the mansion he grew up in, a perk of his father’s job as a humble university president. Dad, that noble yeoman university president, later went on to become “chancellor of higher education systems in Pennsylvania and Minnesota.” But those jobs no doubt involved at least some shoveling of manure, so where’s the lie?
Oh, yes, McCormick has also described his parents, both of whom were university professors, as “schoolteachers.” In an old-fashioned one-room university with a coal stove, no doubt. They probably gave simple homespun lessons in all the university majors from Classics to Molecular Biology, using only slates and chalk.
Turns out that McCormick has been building up that simple bucolic childhood story for a while, claiming in 2022 that “I spent most of my life in Pennsylvania, growing up in Bloomsburg on my family’s farm,” and more recently, in an October fundraising message,
“I’ve truly lived the American dream. […] My life’s journey — from growing up on a farm in Bloomsburg, to graduating from West Point and serving in the 82nd Airborne Division, growing a business in Pittsburgh, and serving at the highest levels of government — reflects that.”
“I grew up on a family farm from the time I was a kid,” he said at the Pennsylvania farm show in January.
He hasn’t yet burst out into a chorus of “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” at campaign events, as far as we know.
Again, he grew up in a big hilltop house students called “the president’s mansion,” but formally named “Buckalew Place,” at what’s now Bloomsburg University. No, not Buckaroo Palace. Here’s a photo of the simple rustic farmhouse in 1960. We haven’t researched very extensively, so we can’t say for certain whether it had indoor plumbing.
But what about that “family farm” stuff, huh? Well don’t you go calling McCormick a liar, you, because as the Times explains, his family did own a farm “several miles from the school,” where
his mother raised Arabian horses, something of a family hobby, according to local news reports from the 1970s and ’80s. (Mr. McCormick still owns the farm, he has said. But he rents out part of it, according to a woman who said she had rented from the family for roughly three decades.)
McCormick also called the place the “McCormick Tree Farm” in a 2022 ad, where he briefly mentioned that his “ mission” was to trim the growing Christmas trees, a prelude to his “mission” in the Iraq war — and in a Festivus miracle, dear old dad, the rustic farmer/university system chancellor, even arranged to send a tree from the farm to his soldier son in Iraq! Inspiring! probably brought a rustic tear to the rustic lad’s rustic eye.
Asked by the Times for comment, McCormick declined, but offered clarifications that OK, he lived on campus growing up, but in the summers he did farm things too! And his parents were too public school teachers, for a time, very early in their careers.
And in a statement, Mr. McCormick dismissed questions about the discrepancies in his biography as “hair-splitting, frivolous, cherry-picked distortions of what I have always said.”
How dare you split hairs about his very selective biographical details!
A spokesperson for McCormick, Elizabeth Gregory, also said the elder McCormick’s starting salary as president of the college in 1973 was only $29,000, though the Times had to go and spoil that by pointing out that would be “more than $200,000 today” and we compounded it by adding that in all those years as a college head and state chancellor, it’s just possible James McCormick got the occasional raise, so his son didn’t have to cover his tattered shoes with bread bags to keep out the snow.
Mary Gummerson, who rented part of the McCormick farm with her husband for about 35 years, and who I love because she rescues cats (she said she had 149 of ‘em, but didn’t specify whether that was all at once or sequentially), acknowledged that, OK, it wasn’t exactly a farm farm:
She noted that Mr. McCormick was “not actually a farmer” but spent time in a rural setting growing up.
“They were hunters and he grew up in a farm kind of environment," she said. “But no, he’s not planting corn.”
Look, the man was farmboy-ish, and if you say that makes him a liar, well maybe you are a coastal elite, you, including me, a coastal elitist living in metropolitan Boise, Idaho.
Supporters don’t seem bothered by the fact that McCormick is neither a farmer nor a Pennsylvanian, but then, they’re mostly untroubled by the past of the guy at the top of the ticket, too, the end.
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[Maddow Blog / NYT (gift link) / Fact-Check.org]
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Farma Bro.
Greeeeeeeed acres is the place to be. Fraaaaud bio is the life for me.