David McCormick's origin story is as follows. He grew up in rural Pennsylvania, southwest of Scranton.He baled hay, pruned Christmas trees, etc. worked on his family's farm. And from that humble beginning, he rose to achieve the American Dream.
“I've lived most of my life in Pennsylvania, growing up on my family's farm in Bloomsburg,” McCormick, now a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, told the Pittsburgh Quarterly in 2022.
“I have truly lived the American dream,” he wrote in an October fundraiser. “My life's journey from growing up on a farm in Bloomsburg, graduating from West Point to 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 the family farm since I was a kid,” he said at a farm show in Pennsylvania in January.
However, interviews in Mr. McCormick's hometown, a review of public records, reports from his childhood, and his own words suggest that he gave misleading impressions about important aspects of his career.
He has explicitly stated and strongly hinted that he grew up on a farm, claiming in 2022 that he “started from nothing” and “had nothing,” and recently announced that he His camp says his parents are school teachers.
In fact, Mr. McCormick is the son of a prominent university president who later became chancellor of the higher education systems of Pennsylvania and Minnesota. He grew up primarily in what students called the President's Mansion, a vast hilltop mansion at what is now Bloomsburg University.
In a 2011 interview with local newspaper the Press-Enterprise, McCormick said it was a “big old house” with “all kinds of trap doors and all kinds of history.”
Today's campus bears many traces of the McCormick family's influence. Mr. McCormick and his brother sponsored the Garden of Tranquility, which is dedicated to his mother, and the building bears his father's name.
Indeed, the family owns a farm a few miles from the school, which McCormick dubs “McCormick Tree Farm” in a holiday-themed ad released ahead of his 2022 Senate race. It was called. But according to local news reports from the 1970s and 1980s, it was also well known as a place where his mother bred Arabian horses, a hobby for his family. (Mr. McCormick still owns the farm, he said, but he rents out part of it, according to a woman who said she has rented it from his family for about 30 years.)
Mr. McCormick, a former hedge fund executive and member of a field of extraordinarily wealthy Republican Senate candidates, is taking on Democratic Sen. Bob Casey in one of the year's most high-profile House control races. He has no Republican opposition and is scheduled to become a candidate on Tuesday.
Mr. McCormick, already facing intense scrutiny over whether he resides in Pennsylvania, appears to have fabricated facts from his background during this campaign and during his unsuccessful Senate primary run two years ago.
When Linda Cromley, 76, entered Bloomsburg University's Center for the Performing Arts on Sunday evening, she expressed frustration with the way McCormick portrayed herself.
Cromley gently mocked his past ads, saying he had lived in the area for nearly 60 years and believed he may have overlapped with the McCormick family at church. Country,” she rephrased in a fake wistful tone, which she said made him look “disingenuous.”
“He had a very privileged childhood,” said Cromley, a former nurse and Democrat, stressing that he didn't always vote along party lines. “He didn't grow up a poor kid. That doesn't mean he has to, but don't pretend you did.”
McCormick declined a request for an interview and instead shared a photo on social media that a reporter emailed for comment.
He reveals, “When I was a kid, we lived on the campus of Bloomsburg State University and my parents owned a farm 10 minutes down the road,” and in the summers he spent “baling hay and… He added that he had been working on “trimming Christmas trees at a nearby farm.”
He also noted that his parents started their careers as school teachers in the traditional sense. His father taught at Punxsutawney High School, and his mother taught grades four through six at a public school near Pittsburgh, he said.
And in a statement, McCormick dismissed questions about discrepancies in his career as “a chillingly frivolous and convenient distortion of what I have always said.”
His father, James H. McCormick, was appointed by Governor Milton Shapp to lead the university in Bloomsburg in 1973. That year, when David McCormick was eight years old, the family moved to Buckalew Place, the official residence of the university president.
McCormick's spokeswoman, Elizabeth Gregory, said her parents believed that James McCormick's salary was $29,000 when he first became president. Now that would be over $200,000.
David McCormick “got a great education in college,” said Diane Banks, 67. When she was in college, she sometimes babysat the McCormick children, and she said her parents were well-loved and she was approachable on campus.
She said she watched McCormick and his brother Doug play hide-and-seek in the presidential mansion. She often took them to eat at the campus cafeteria or to the student union.
“No one would have known that their father was the president of Bloomsburg,” she says. “They blended in well with the people at the university. They all had fun together.”
A few years after moving to Bloomsburg, the McCormicks purchased land that would become the family farm, which they continued to expand on over the decades, public records show. The area is currently about 600 acres, McCormick said.
During a recent visit to the property, which includes a bright red barn, Mary Gummerson, who is in her 70s, told The New York Times that she and her husband had rented part of the farm for about 35 years. She said they and her niece lived on the property, along with other animals, including horses, a dog named Alvin, and 149 cats that Gummerson rescued.
The McCormicks also spend time on part of the property, where they keep their collection of antique cars, she said. Gregory did not answer questions about how much of the farm is leased or how much time McCormick spends on the farm.
Gummerson said McCormick sometimes rode by on his Harley motorcycle, but added that the McCormicks also liked to drive the Gator, which she described as “a really nice golf cart.” .
She called her family “tree lovers” and praised them for preserving significant acreage rather than developing it. She noted that Mr. McCormick “wasn't really a farmer” but had spent some of his upbringing in the countryside.
“They were hunters and he grew up in a farm-type environment, but no, he’s not planting corn,” she said.
Indeed, McCormick has said many times that he doesn't consider himself a farmer, but in a roundtable discussion this year he did refer to himself as “a farmer with a large farm in Columbia County.”
And in some cases, he provided a more complete picture of his background. In his 2023 book about his family's time in school, he said his family also owned farmland, although he grew up “in town” rather than on a farm. .
Supporters don't seem to mind the fact that he doesn't always make that distinction.
“He's one of us,” said Keith Eckel, former director of the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, adding that McCormick has done extensive outreach to farmers. “Growing up in rural Columbia County, he worked on a farm. He loaded hay. He understands the challenges that farming has.”
Todd Kreischer, a friend of McCormick's since middle school, said he remembered spending time both on the farm and in Buckalew.
“I never went there thinking, 'Oh my god, I'm at the president's house,'” he said, noting that McCormick, like many of his friends, had summer jobs. emphasized.
Kreischer, who had a career in the U.S. Secret Service and now works in corporate security at BMW, said he was a “humble, hard-working kid who was raised the right way. Nothing was given to him.” It's like,'' he said. America region.
The McCormicks “were part of the community just like anyone else,” he said. He also added that “they weren't isolated in college or anything like that.”
Bloomsburg Mayor Justin Hummel (D), like many college towns, sees social divisions between university officials and the rest of Bloomsburg, typical “neighborhood association” tensions. He said that there is a tendency to exist.
However, he noted that McCormick attended public schools in the area and moved to West Point after his high school wrestling success. He's very much a hometown boy, Hummel said.
“Growing up in a small town like this with people from all walks of life, I don't think it's unfair of him to say, no, he's from Bloomsburg,” Hummel said. he said.
Still, he said of the McCormick family: I know they are academics. ”