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Just dropped · Trial Balloon · Ep. 195

Shake Up

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Trial Balloon · Ep. 195: Shake Up

How Trump Is Actively Trying to Suppress the Vote

October 27, 2016 · 8:16 am ET · Leave a Comment

A must-read Businessweek piece explains how Donald Trump’s campaign has “three major voter suppression operations under way” aimed at three groups: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans.

On Oct. 24, Trump’s team began placing spots on select African American radio stations. In San Antonio, a young staffer showed off a South Park-style animation he’d created of Clinton delivering the “super predator” line (using audio from her original 1996 sound bite), as cartoon text popped up around her: “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.” The animation will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook “dark posts”—nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as Parscale puts it, “only the people we want to see it, see it.” The aim is to depress Clinton’s vote total. “We know because we’ve modeled this,” says the official. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.”

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Taegan Goddard

Taegan Goddard

Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire -- which for more than two decades has been one of the nation's most influential political news sites.

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