Patrick Erin Murphy (born March 30, 1983) is an American businessman, accountant, and politician. A Democrat, he served as the U.S. representative from Florida's 18th congressional district from 2013 to 2017. He is a former Republican, having switched parties in 2011.
Murphy was elected to the House of Representatives in 2012, defeating Republican incumbent Allen West by 0.8% in the second-most expensive U.S. House race in history. Despite the narrow Republican lean of Murphy's district, he was re-elected with 59.8% of the vote in 2014. In March 2015, he announced his intentions to run in the 2016 United States Senate election in Florida; in August 2016 he won the Democratic primary. He faced Republican incumbent Marco Rubio in the November general election, losing 52% to 44%.
Early life and education
Murphy was born in Miami and raised in Key Largo, the son of Tom Murphy Jr., a construction company CEO, and his second wife, Kathleen. Murphy's parents divorced when he was a child, and Murphy was later adopted by his father's third wife, Leslie. Murphy graduated from Palmer Trinity School in Miami and then went on to take a post-graduate year at the Lawrenceville School, a private prep school in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, in 2001–2002.
As a 19-year-old freshman college student in 2003, Murphy was arrested outside a Miami Beach nightclub on charges of disorderly intoxication and possessing a fake driver's license. The charges were ultimately dropped. Murphy called the incident "the biggest mistake of my life" and the "biggest learning experience of my life."
Murphy studied business administration at the University of Miami, earning a bachelor's degree with dual majors in finance and accounting in 2006. (In the past, Murphy's official biographies said that he had dual degrees, but in fact he earned a single degree with dual majors; Murphy's campaign said that the error was "inadvertent" and corrected the biographies.)
Murphy worked for his family's construction business as a construction laborer beginning at age 19, and then in the company's estimating and purchasing departments and as an assistant project engineer.
Business career
After college, Murphy worked for his father's business, Coastal Construction, for about a year before spending two and a half years (from September 2007 to May 2010) working as an auditor for Deloitte and Touche in Miami.
After passing the Certified Public Accountant (CPA) examination, he chose to become certified in Colorado, because his degree had insufficient credits to meet Florida's higher education requirement. After obtaining certification in September 2009, he was promoted from "audit assistant" to "audit senior" at Deloitte. Politico reported that Murphy had overstated his experience as an accountant, saying he had worked for "several years" as an accountant when in fact he worked as a practicing CPA for less than a year, although he did much of the same accounting work as others at the firm.
He was hired, in May 2010, as vice president of his family's construction business. After the 2010 BP oil spill, he was tasked with creating a subsidiary of his father's company, called Coastal Environmental, that secured contracts to remove oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Murphy served as vice president of Coastal Environmental, and was one of its three directors from 2010 to 2012 (after being elected to Congress, Murphy stepped down as a director but remained an owner). As vice president, he ran the company's day-to-day operations for six months, until October 2010, when the Coast Guard called off oil skimming operations in the Gulf. PolitiFact.com found that "Murphy's description of his past employment is based on actual circumstances, but at times he omits a full explanation."
A 2011 gift of stock from his father boosted his personal net worth by $1–5 million. His father also gave $100,000 to key Democrats the same year he started to consider running for Congress.
U.S. House of Representatives
Elections
2012
In 2012, Murphy moved from Fort Lauderdale to Jupiter and ran for the 18th congressional district. The district had previously been the 16th District, represented by Republican Tom Rooney. It had historically been one of the more Republican districts in South Florida, having been in Republican hands for all but one term since its creation in 1973 (it had been the 10th from 1973 to 1983, the 12th from 1983 to 1993, and the 16th from 1993 to 2013). However, it had been made significantly more compact in the 2010 round of redistricting, losing most of its heavily Republican western portion to the new 17th district. Rooney opted to run in the 17th, leaving the 18th as an open seat.