"It's clear there's no
law Donald Trump and his right-wing machine won't bend, break, or ignore to try
to win the presidency."
Saturday, December 21, 2019
Reporting on Friday shows a
top advisor for President Donald Trump's re-election campaign caught on tape in
November bragging of the Republican Party's history of voter
suppression—and promising to go on the offensive in 2020.
The revelation came from the Associated
Press in a
report Friday on comments by Trump re-election advisor Justin
Clark at an event in Madison, Wisconsin.
"Traditionally it's
always been Republicans suppressing votes in places," said Clark.
"Let's start protecting our voters. We know where they are... Let's start
playing offense a little bit. That's what you’re going to see in 2020."
AP reported that Clark's
remarks show the Republican Party determined to use relaxed civil rights
regulations to their advantage:
The roughly 20-minute audio
offers an insider's glimpse of Trump’s re-election strategy, showing the
campaign focusing on voting locations in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania,
which form the the so-called "blue wall" of traditional Democratic
strength that Trump broke through to win in 2016. Both parties are pouring
millions of dollars into the states, anticipating they’ll be just as critical
in the 2020 presidential contest.
Republican officials publicly
signaled plans to step up their Election Day monitoring after a judge in 2018
lifted a consent decree in place since 1982 that barred the Republican National
Committee from voter verification and other "ballot security"
efforts. Critics have argued the tactics amount to voter intimidation.
One Wisconsin Now deputy
director Mike Browne expressed his outrage over the remarks and the alleged
strategy.
"The strategy to rig the
rules in elections and give themselves an unfair partisan advantage goes to
Donald Trump, the highest levels of his campaign and the top Republican
leadership," said Browne. "It's clear there's no law Donald Trump and
his right-wing machine won't bend, break, or ignore to try to win the
presidency."
Dan Froomkin, editor of Press
Watch, said that
Clark's comments showed that the GOP plans to go beyond suppressing the vote
and "will now supplement with aggressive voter intimidation at
polls."
Clark told AP that
he was speaking in jest about a Republican history of voter suppression. But
elections observers weren't buying it.
"This should be one of
those things that Democrats never stop talking about," said Media
Matters editor-at-large Parker Molloy. "This is a scandal.
"
HuffPost senior
enterprise editor Nick Baumann wasn't suprised at the content of the remarks
but rather at the fact they were made in the first place.
"This seems like a
noteworthy admission of something many people believe to be true but few people
involved acknowledge," said Baumann.
Progressive advocacy group For
Our Future Wisconsin treated the report as a call to action.
"Fight back by
voting," the group tweeted.
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