UNC FactCheck: Are NRCC ad’s claims about McCready on point?

Story by Matthew Langston

The National Republican Congressional Committee released an attack ad on July 31 titled “Not Gonna Sell” that made a number of claims about Dan McCready, the Democratic candidate in the special election for North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District.

The NRCC’s ad is part of a multi-million dollar effort by various outside groups to boost state Sen. Dan Bishop, the Republican candidate for the district, who has raised less money than McCready. According to the most recent campaign filings, Bishop had about $344,000 in cash on hand, while McCready had a bit more than $1.7 million in cash on hand.

The NRCC has made some misleading claims about McCready before, which UNC FactCheck has previously covered.

Let’s examine the latest claims that the NRCC makes in its ad about McCready.

The Claims

The NRCC opens the ad by questioning McCready’s moderate and bipartisan image. 

A woman calls McCready an “Elizabeth Warren Democrat,” as a user-submitted Daily Kos article from December 2018 is pictured in the background. 

That article shows an email U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren sent to those on her presidential campaign’s email list. The email mentions the illegal ballot fraud scheme orchestrated by an operative working for then-Republican candidate Mark Harris, which led to the results of that election being thrown out. Warren then encourages people to donate to McCready’s campaign.

The ad also shows a citation for the News & Observer with the date March 21, 2019. That appears to be a reference to this article, which discusses the support some Democratic presidential candidates have provided for McCready, though the ad does not seem to reference anything written in that article.

While it is truthful that Warren has supported McCready’s campaign, it might be misleading for the NRCC to suggest he is an “Elizabeth Warren Democrat.”

The two candidates differ on a number of prominent issues. Warren supports Medicare-for-All, the Green New Deal and impeaching President Donald Trump, while McCready has said that he does not support any of those positions.

The woman also claims “[Nancy] Pelosi’s team has spent millions on him,” as an article titled “DCCC SPENDS $1,018,486 TO ELECT DAN MCCREADY” is shown in the background. The DCCC is the acronym for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

UNC FactCheck could not find any article with that actual title, but the text of that article comes directly from this story written by the Center for Responsive Politics. While that story talked about Pelosi’s fundraising abilities and her donations to several Democratic candidates in 2018, it never mentioned McCready or the DCCC’s support for him.

McCready has previously said that he is opposed to Pelosi being speaker of the House, arguing that new leaders are needed in Washington to reduce its dysfunction.

The $1 million figure instead comes from the Center for Responsive Politics’ tracking of the DCCC’s spending in the 2018 midterms. For the 9th District race, the DCCC spent $928,486 on independent expenditures against Harris and $90,000 on coordinated expenditures for McCready.

Image from NRCC’s ad showing the two articles

While it is accurate for the NRCC to say the DCCC spent more than $1 million to elect McCready, it is unclear why the NRCC put an accurate title about the DCCC’s spending onto an unrelated article.

Members of Democratic leadership in the House have also donated to McCready’s campaign, though their donations alone do not total in the millions. Some outside groups have supported McCready. Most would not be considered “Pelosi’s team” unless a group that has supported Democrats is part of “Pelosi’s team.”

The woman in the ad says McCready is not a “fiscal conservative” and claims he opposed “the middle-class tax cuts,” which is a reference to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that was passed by Congress in December of 2017. The legislation is often referred to as the Trump tax cuts.

Tax cuts have previously been used as an attack line against McCready. The Congressional Leadership Fund, one of the outside groups supporting Bishop, claimed in a 2018 ad that McCready completely “opposes middle-class tax cuts” because he does not support the Trump tax cuts.  PolitiFact called that claim false in a story from October of 2018.

McCready said he opposed the Trump tax cuts in a Facebook post because he believed they did “far too little for working and middle-class families while adding an estimated trillion dollars to an already massive national debt.” McCready also says he will fight to cut taxes for middle-class families on his campaign website.

Simply referring to the Trump tax cuts as “the middle-class tax cuts” could also be considered misleading. Calling them that might suggest the tax cuts were only for the middle class (a group that can be difficult to define) or that the middle class benefitted the most from them. That would overlook the fact that tax rates for the wealthy were also lowered by the Trump tax cuts, which may have disproportionally benefitted the wealthy.

As seen in the table below, which comes from a PolitiFact article that uses data from the Joint Committee on Taxation, the Trump tax cuts do provide every income range with some kind of tax reduction, on paper. People making $500,000 or more get 23 percent of the benefits from the tax cuts, despite less than 1 percent of all taxpayers falling in that income range.


Table from PolitiFact article about Tax Cuts and Jobs Act

The table below from the Tax Policy Center also provides a perspective into how the Trump tax cuts changed the tax rates for people in different income groups for 2018. It is worth noting that some deductions were eliminated as part of the Trump tax cuts.


Table from Tax Policy Center article showing impact of Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on tax rates

A single filer with an income of $500,000 or more saw their tax rate go from 39.6 to 37 percent. A married couple filing jointly with an income of $500,000 or more saw their tax rate go from 39.6 to either 35 or 37 percent, depending on whether their income exceeded $600,000.

For a household of three, the Brookings Institution says that middle-class incomes range from $37,000 to $147,000. Using that range, a married couple filing jointly would previously have been paying a tax rate of 15 or 25 percent. After the Trump tax cuts, a married couple filing jointly would see their tax rates fall to either 12 or 22 percent.

While most people in the middle class did get lower tax rates, calling the Trump tax cuts “the middle-class tax cuts” omits the fact that they were also tax cuts for the wealthy.

Last, the woman in the ad calls McCready an “insider” and says, “His board hired lobbyists to get tax breaks for his investors.”

This appears to be a reference to the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association, which describes itself as a “non-profit advocacy organization that drives policy and market development to create clean energy jobs, economic opportunities and affordable energy.”

According to his LinkedIn profile, McCready was a board member for the NCSEA from December of 2014 to December of 2017. McCready co-founded Double Time Capital, a solar investment firm, in 2013 and has made clean energy a pillar of his campaign. It is true that McCready was on the NCSEA’s board, though it could be misleading to call it “his board” as the ad did.

The ad cites the North Carolina Secretary of State, the NCSEA’s Form 990 it filed for the 2016-2017 fiscal year and a NCSEA press release from Sept. 14, 2015.

Online reports from a lookup provided by the Secretary of State’s office show that the NCSEA has hired several lobbyists over the years, which is typical for most interest groups.

The NCSEA’s Form 990 for the fiscal year ending on June of 2017, as reported by ProPublica, shows that its total lobbying expenses were $138,348.

It is unclear why the NCSEA press release was cited. An online press release from that date mentions a conference on renewable energy it was hosting, but it does not say a word about taxes, lobbying or McCready.

It appears the mentioned “tax breaks” refer to a 35 percent tax credit for renewable energy projects that North Carolina enacted in 2007. Until it expired at the start of 2016, the tax credit was part of Double Time Capital’s business model, which involves its investors being able to use state and federal tax credits.

Senate Bill 372, which was passed in April of 2015, enacted a “sunset” provision that allows people to keep claiming tax credits for existing projects when certain conditions are met. Since the tax credit was likely of interest to the NCSEA, there is a good chance NCSEA lobbyists may have advocated for the legislation.

No Comments Yet

Comments are closed