Pennsylvania Senate Candidate Dave McCormick Joins Us

CLAY: We appreciate all of you hanging out with us all over the world and, frankly, now around the world as we continue to power through and keep rolling on all of this. We are joined now by Dave McCormick. He’s a combat veteran, Pennsylvania Senate candidate. Dave is with us right now, and he is a seventh generation Pennsylvanian — which is pretty impressive — went to West Point, has been in the business universe for a long time.

He had a great “Let’s Go, Brandon” Super Bowl ad up at your website that was not allowed to run elsewhere. So, the first question that I have for you — and thanks for taking the time with us, Dave — what made you decide…? You’re highly successful in the world of business. You’ve been influential in so many different ways. I know you were a big Trump supporter. What made you decide to step off of the sidelines and run for the Senate in Pennsylvania? What was ultimately the tipping point for you?

MCCORMICK: Hey, Clay thanks for having me on. It’s great to be with you. I think the big driver of this was the sentiment I tried to capture in the ad, which is I believe the country is really headed in a terrible direction, and it’s a combination of the weakness that we see in our policies — 40-year high inflation — due to the socialist policies of the Biden administration, which is really hurting working families. We see it in our open border where the numbers…

I just was at the border last week. The numbers coming across our border of illegal immigrants is staggering but having huge consequences for Pennsylvania where fentanyl is on the rise. We have our sanctuary city of Philadelphia, all-time high murder rate. And we see it in the energy policy, which is really killing Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is one of the great energy resources of the world. If it was a country, it’d be the fourth biggest reserves of natural gas.

And, frankly, we see it in our culture, in our schools, the cancel culture, the inability to sort of have a teaching of history, anything like the history of America that I know, the exceptional America. So, I’m looking at that and I’m… Afghanistan was a breaking point for me, that tragedy. And my wife and I, who have both lived the American dream, said, “We’re gonna jump in,” and it’s a time for all patriots to ask themselves what they can do to make sure we save our country and push back against this weakness that we’re seeing across our leadership. So, that’s the reason behind it.

BUCK: Dave, it’s Buck. Thanks for being with us. You know, we see a number of places across the country — we’ve been following this very closely — of parents showing up at school board meetings sometimes with viral videos. Generally, they’re outraged about, well, CDC mask and school masking policies I should say. CRT being taught in schools, the school the shutdowns.

How has that been playing out in Pennsylvania? Clay and I talk about the mom revolts, which includes dads, too, but the mom revolt feels like that is the more fierce, tip-of-the-spear part of it in some ways. Are you having a similar moment where it feels like there could be real energy from parents that will change the political trajectory in Pennsylvania and maybe have ramifications beyond that?

MCCORMICK: Yeah. I absolutely do. At a big-picture level, I think what you see is a difference between two big ideas, the ideas that are being promoted by Biden and his administration — which is the government should play a big role in our lives and it should decide really important things to our future — and the ideas that we as conservatives believe in, which is it’s about individual freedom and individual responsibilities.

And there’s nowhere that that’s more clear than in our schools where you see these mask mandates and the test mandates and vaccines and so forth being dictated by government and by school officials or state officials, as opposed to parents. And it’s a complete distortion of what our country is based on in terms of the emphasis. And nobody knows better about what should be taught in our schools and the decisions around our children than our parents.

And so I see it. I hear it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Democrats or Republicans, doesn’t matter whether it’s Republicans in the outside — outskirts of Philadelphia or the Republicans in the center of the state, it’s a big issue and it’s reflective of a broader push by the Democrats to have government play a much more intrusive role in our lives.

CLAY: We’re talking to Dave McCormick, Pennsylvania Senate candidate in the Republican primary coming up. Dave, I know you’ve worked in business for much of your life in addition to the fact that you went to West Point and served in the military. I’m curious how often in your conversations — and I bet it’s often — you would talk to people involved in business who would say, “Man.

“Because of mob-like social media environment out there, our companies put out statements that I personally,” meaning the CEO or someone running those companies, “don’t agree with, but we feel like we have to do it, otherwise we end up being a target”? How often would you hear leaders of companies saying things like that privately that they wouldn’t say publicly?

MCCORMICK: It’s been a growing trend, and you see the push over the recent last three or four years where there’s much more of a focus on social issues within our business community. And the best example of this, which I’d point you to is Business Roundtable made a statement a couple years ago that a number of CEOs signed about stakeholder capitalism.

And it talked about all the different things that companies should be doing, and it really took on a much broader social agenda and involving CEOs and politics. And I think this is a trend across our country, and I think it’s really a terrible trend, because companies become political actors, our military leaders become political actors, and there is this drumbeat of pressure to take on these other priorities as the responsibility of business.

And I think we need to enter that world with great care, because our capitalist system is the envy of the world. It’s the reason we’re the most prosperous company in the world, the most dynamic country in the world, and we need to have our businesses focused on business and generating profit and serving their workers and employees in an excellent way.

BUCK: Dave, thanks so much for being with us here. Dave McCormick. He’s running for Senate in Pennsylvania. Sir, appreciate your time. We’ll talk to you again soon.

MCCORMICK: Hey, thanks for having me, guys.