GOP Senate candidate denies outsourcing jobs despite bragging about it previously

A Republican candidate for Senate claimed Friday that his businesses had never been involved in outsourcing of jobs. But in a 2005 newspaper interview, he bragged of his experience sending jobs offshore.

Dave McCormick, a Connecticut-based hedge fund CEO turned Pennsylvania Senate hopeful, was asked during an appearance on a Pittsburgh radio station about allegations that he had outsourced positions, costing 50 jobs in the city.

McCormick, who is framing himself as a job creator, has been accused by both Republicans and Democrats of having outsourced jobs during his business career. Most recently, a conservative super PAC that supports Dr. Mehmet Oz’s Senate campaign released an ad accusing McCormick of outsourcing Pennsylvania jobs.

McCormick denied the accusations and slammed his opponents for questioning his patriotism during a radio interview on Friday.

“The things that are being said in those ads are not true,” McCormick 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 2% of its revenue coming from China.”

But McCormick appeared to contradict his recent claim in a 2005 Pittsburgh Tribune-Review interview.

Days after being confirmed by the Senate to be then-President George W. Bush’s undersecretary of commerce for export administration, McCormick told the newspaper that his work sending jobs overseas would be an asset to him.

Though that story did not include the direct quote, its author wrote, “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 same paper also reported in February 2003 that McCormick, then the CEO of an online auction company called FreeMarkets Inc., announced a new monitoring center in New Delhi with more than 100 jobs. The company had announced 50 layoffs at its Pittsburgh headquarters just one month earlier — though the company disputes the idea that the two moves were related.

“The two moves were totally unrelated, and the opening of the India office resulted in no layoffs of American workers,” a former company spokesperson told the New York Post in November 2021.

In an email, a campaign spokesperson told the American Independent Foundation that McCormick had worked to keep FreeMarkets’ jobs in Pennsylvania when the company was later sold. The campaign spokesperson said no Pittsburgh jobs were ever outsourced to India but did not specifically respond to questions about the 2005 news article.

Earlier this month, McCormick received an endorsement from Republican Sean Parnell, who dropped out of the race after his estranged wife accused him of verbal and physical abuse and a Pennsylvania judge denied him full custody of their three children.

More than a dozen Republican candidates, including McCormick, are running to replace retiring Republican Sen. Pat Toomey in a state that President Joe Biden narrowly won in 2020. The Cook Political Report has rated the race a toss-up.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.