Mick Mulvaney’s Biography

I’ve assembled a lot of information about Mick Mulvaney: his record, his funding, his ideology, but it’s probably best to begin with his biography.

Mick Mulvaney’s official biography includes what would seem to be the basic facts about his life and career. It’s the stuff we all have at our fingertips: where we’re from, what we’ve done, what we do.

The first paragraph checks out. Rep. Mulvaney was, in fact, elected in November 2010 and represents the citizens of the five big towns listed. (He also represents those of us who don’t live in any of those towns, though apparently we don’t rate high enough to get a mention.) No problems there.

The second paragraph notes that “Mick” is “a lifelong Carolinas resident,” though plenty of sources, including his biography on the GOP party page, list that he was born in Alexandria, Virginia, right across the Potomac River from Washington D.C. That’s not the Carolinas. But maybe that’s picky and the family home was in Charlotte and he was born on a vacation to Mount Vernon.

Facts suggest that’s not the case. His younger brother was actually born two years later in Minnesota — so not only were the “Carolinas” (apparently North and South Carolina are the same in Mick Mulvaney’s mind) not his home from birth, they weren’t even the first place his family moved after he was born. (I can’t link from behind the paywall at ancestry.com, but the record is in the Minnesota Birth Index as 1969-MN-052010.) Mick Mulvaney’s father starts to turn up in corporate records in Charlotte in 1975, and his sister was born in Charlotte the following year, so Mick apparently got to Charlotte sometime when he was a little kid. He also spent 4 years after finishing high school at Georgetown University in Washington D.C., near his birthplace in northern Virginia. So it would be accurate to say he’s lived in the Carolinas for most of his life, or since childhood except college, but “lifelong” is a stretch.

And let’s be honest — does living in Chapel Hill (where he lived during law school) or Charlotte and lumping it in as the “Carolinas” somehow make him more of a local? He voted in Charlotte in November 2002 and bought land to build his house in South Carolina at the end of December 2002. According to Lancaster County records, the house wasn’t finished until 2005. Presumably he was still in Charlotte in 2005. He may have even been there later, since he used the address of a home he owned in Charlotte for a campaign donation in 2008, by which time he was already serving in the South Carolina house. A January 2007 donation to the South Carolina Republican Party was made from a residential address in Columbia.

At best, he’s been a South Carolina resident for 11 years, 4 of which he worked in Columbia and 5 and a half of which he’s been in DC. Lifelong resident of the Carolinas, indeed.