Maddow Blog | Senate hopeful’s claims about ‘growing up on a farm’ draw scrutiny

In Montana, Republican Senate hopeful Tim Sheehy realizes that he’s running in a rural state against incumbent Sen. Jon Tester, who has a lot of experience as a farmer. It’s probably why the GOP challenger has told voters that he grew up “rural Minnesota,” adding, “[A]lthough we were not farmers, I grew up in an old farmstead and we were surrounded by farmland.”

A Daily Beast report recently called these details into question, noting that Sheehy actually grew up in an expensive home in suburban St. Paul and attended an elite private high school.

But as it happens, Sheehy isn’t the only Republican Senate candidate who’s made curious claims about a rural past.

In Pennsylvania, Dave McCormick is a very wealthy, Connecticut-based former hedge fund CEO, though he wants voters to believe he’s a man of humble origins. The candidate has spoken and written, for example, about “growing up on a farm” and starting with "nothing."

The New York Times reported, however, that the available evidence suggests that McCormick “has given a misleading impression about key aspects of his background.”

The Times’ report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added that the Republican’s family did own a farm, which the candidate described as the “McCormick Tree Farm” in a holiday-themed ad during his first unsuccessful Senate campaign. But the farm was “also often known locally as a place where his mother raised Arabian horses,” which was “something of a family hobby, according to local news reports from the 1970s and ’80s.”

There appears to be a disconnect, in other words, between McCormick’s claims about starting “with nothing” and his actual family background.

The point isn’t that there’s something wrong with the candidate’s personal history, and there’s no reason to criticize McCormick for being the son of a college president and someone who raised Arabian horses. Plenty of senators have grown up in privileged families and gone on to champion the interests of working people.

It becomes a political problem, however, when political candidates pretend to be something they’re not.

For his part, the GOP candidate issued a statement describing discrepancies in his personal narrative as “hair-splitting, frivolous, cherry-picked distortions of what I have always said.” This defense seems unlikely to stop a barrage of Democratic criticisms.

Primary Day in Pennsylvania is today. McCormick is running unopposed and is slated to face incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey in the fall.

This article was originally published on MSNBC.com