Connecticut-based hedge fund manager David McCormick today announced he’ll try to buy Pennsylvania’s Republican U.S. Senate primary, guaranteeing that the Keystone state’s multimillion-dollar messy primary gets even nastier and more expensive for Republicans.
McCormick has indicated he plans to dump millions into the race to end the campaigns of longtime New Jersey resident Mehmet Oz, erstwhile Californian Carla Sands, failed 2020 house candidate Kathy Barnette, and failed 2018 Lt. Gov. candidate Jeff Bartos.
If he’s successful, it won’t be the first time that McCormick has eliminated Pennsylvania jobs. He has already faced scrutiny for a record of outsourcing that includes laying off Pittsburgh area workers in 2003 ahead of his company’s expansion in New Delhi. And McCormick’s opponents have already begun attacking him over his record over overseeing billion-dollar investment funds in China, with Oz campaign surrogate and U.S. Rep. Guy Reschenthaler calling that part of McCormick’s record “disqualifying.”
McCormick allies have for their part already launched attacks right back at Oz, and — combined with Bartos’ super PAC and Sands’ self-funding — the intra-GOP conflict is sure to only escalate further in the weeks ahead.
McCormick has lived in Connecticut since 2009, and has not lived in Pennsylvania since he first moved back there in the late 1990s, as a consultant for McKinsey and Co.
McCormick “was [at that time] a registered Democrat,” according to the Associated Press, and “insisted on going to McKinsey’s Pittsburgh office […] because he had ‘imagined that I might try to do something political and thought that coming back to Pennsylvania, I’d be able to figure that out.’”
In a late December editorial, the York Dispatch’s editorial board slammed out-of-staters McCormick, Sands, and Oz’s efforts to buy Pennsylvania’s GOP primary as “downright troubling.” And Bartos’ campaign has already looked to highlight his opponents’ glaring lack of recent Pennsylvania ties.
###
Published: Jan 12, 2022 | Last Modified: Jan 16, 2022