PITTSBURGH — Sen. Bob Casey, a Scranton Democrat who is facing Republican challenger Dave McCormick, released his first attack ad Friday morning. It claims McCormick owned a home in Connecticut and lives there currently.

McCormick, a Pennsylvania native, owns a home and lives in Pittsburgh but temporarily rented a place in Connecticut where he and his second wife, Dina Powell, could stay to be near two daughters. One of her daughters from a prior marriage just graduated from high school there, and his own daughter from his prior marriage attends the same high school while living with her mother, McCormick’s former wife.

The lease for that home expires at the end of June, and a new family is already under contract to purchase the property. In a phone interview with me, current property owner Stephen Sander confirmed all this and said McCormick moved out last month and that Powell would be there with their daughter until the end of next week.

“A new family has bought the property from me and the home is now under contract for them to move into,” Sander said.

McCormick himself owns no properties in Connecticut.

The negative ad opens with imagery of the state of Connecticut with an ominous voice-over:

“Gold Coast. For Dave McCormick it’s been home for years, but now McCormick is trying to fool you.”

Then it cuts to commentary clips stitched together by the local ABC news affiliate:

“He says he is a Pittsburgh resident now, but public records raised some questions about his residency. He has a $16 million home in Connecticut and did not vote here for 15 years.”

The 28-second ad began running statewide Friday morning. It implies that McCormick does not currently live in Pittsburgh and is running for U.S. Senate from a different state.

McCormick has said in numerous interviews that he rented the home so that he had a home base for Powell’s daughter and a place to be close to his daughter, a rising senior. When McCormick and Powell married, they became the parents of six daughters: four from McCormick’s first marriage and two from Powell’s first marriage.

“I have a daughter who is my sixth daughter — I have six — and she is finishing high school in Connecticut. I’m divorced and remarried and so she lives with her mom there. So I do go to Connecticut to see my daughter. That is part of being a good dad and I’m going to continue to do that. … If that is a political cost associated with that, so be it,” McCormick told an ABC affiliate in Johnstown.

McCormick was born in Washington County, Pennsylvania, and raised in Columbia County by two educators. In high school, he was nominated to West Point and went on to serve in the 82nd Airborne Division as a paratrooper, deploying to the Middle East during the Gulf War.

After the Army, McCormick attended Princeton University for his Ph.D. in international relations. He then moved to Pittsburgh, where he began his career in business, becoming the CEO of one of the first big tech companies, FreeMarkets, in the region.

He left for Washington, D.C., in 2005 after an appointment to a position in the Department of the Treasury, then moved to Connecticut when he became the CEO of Bridgewater Associates. But he retired and returned to his hometown of Pittsburgh in the fall of 2021 when he purchased his current home here in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood.

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McCormick made his decision to run for the U.S. Senate in the primary election in January 2022, something the late Allegheny County Republican Party Chairman Jim Roddey had been encouraging him to do since the late 1990s when he was CEO of FreeMarkets.

McCormick narrowly lost the Republican primary to Dr. Mehmet Oz in 2022, remaining in Pittsburgh since that loss and eventually deciding 18 months later to challenge Casey.