Monkey Cage: “The media has routinely reported on these falsehoods, making it seem like misinformation is rampant in politics. But are candidates for Congress actually sharing more misinformation in 2022 than 2020?”
“Yes, according to our analysis of congressional candidates’ Facebook posts. We found that politicians in the 2022 election are sharing more links to unreliable news sources than they did in 2020, and the increase appears to be driven by nonincumbent Republican candidates.”
“A third candidate for public office has come to forward to say a sheriff on Florida’s Space Coast offered help in getting a job in exchange for leaving a race and backing his favored candidate,” the AP reports.
Tim Miller has a good look at the Democratic efforts to prop up extreme candidates in Republican primaries.
An anonymous group is sending a misleading text to Kansas voters telling them to “vote yes” in order to protect choice, the Kansas City Star reports.
The only problem is that it’s the exact opposite: a “yes” vote would mean that “there is no Kansas constitutional right to abortion,” while a “no” vote would mean preserving the current language on the state’s constitution, which protects a women’s right to an abortion.
“They’re playing with matches, and they’ve got lighter fluid on their hands. If one of these political candidates win, it’ll be arson.”
— GOP strategist Doug Heye, quoted by the Washington Post, on Democrats boosting extreme right candidates in Republican primaries.
Jonathan Bernstein: “That doesn’t mean that Democrats shouldn’t contest the seat, which is in a western Michigan district where Democrats seem to be strong, and is therefore one of a small number of pickup opportunities for the party. Of course they should.”
“But the case for trying to take Meijer out in a primary by helping him to lose to an extremist is a lot weaker. Incentives matter in politics, and if Democrats treat those who stood up for democracy when it mattered the same way they treat those who didn’t, what kinds of incentives will that create? The more that those who stood up to Trump lose in primaries, the more Republican party actors will believe in Trump’s influence, which in turn will make him that much more influential within the party.”
Frederick Frazier (R), a Texas House candidate backed by Donald Trump “has been indicted on a charge of impersonating a public servant,” the Texas Tribune reports.
“Jestine Iannotti, one of three ‘ghost’ candidates who ran as independents for Florida Senate seats in 2020, has been arrested on several criminal charges, alongside a political consultant involved in launching her campaign and Seminole County’s Republican Party chairman,” the Orlando Sentinel reports.
Ashley Biden’s diary — kept as she recovered from addiction — was passed around at a Donald Trump fundraiser in September 2020 at the home of a Trump donor who ultimately helped steer it to Project Veritas, the New York Times reports.
New information about the case suggests that the effort to make the diary public reached deeper into Trump’s circle than previously known.
New York Times: “Mr. Prince’s role in the effort, which has not been previously disclosed, sheds further light on how a group of ultraconservative Republicans employed spycraft to try to manipulate the American political landscape. Mr. Prince — a former C.I.A. contractor who is best known as the founder of the private military firm Blackwater and whose sister, Betsy DeVos, was Mr. Trump’s education secretary — has drawn scrutiny over the years for Blackwater’s record of violence around the world and his subsequent ventures training and arming foreign forces.”
“His willingness to support Mr. Seddon’s operation is fresh evidence of his engagement in political espionage projects at home during a period when he was an informal adviser to Trump administration officials.”
FBI agents and the House panel investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol have both learned of an alleged plan by allies of retired army Lt Gen Michael Flynn to gather “intelligence” on top Republicans to “move” them to back election audits in key states Trump lost, The Guardian reports.
“In the weeks after the 2020 election, then-President Donald Trump’s allies sent fake certificates to the National Archives declaring that Trump won seven states that he actually lost. The documents had no impact on the outcome of the election, but they are yet another example of how Team Trump tried to subvert the Electoral College — a key line of inquiry for the January 6 committee,” CNN reports.
“The fake certificates were created by Trump allies in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and New Mexico, who sought to replace valid presidential electors from their states with a pro-Trump slate.”
Michigan Live: Republicans who falsified Michigan electoral college vote under scrutiny from Congress.
“Polish Sen. Krzysztof Brejza’s mobile phone was hacked with military-grade spyware nearly three dozen times in 2019 when he was running the opposition’s campaign against the right-wing populist government in parliamentary elections,” the AP reports.
New York Times: “In the final two months of the 2020 campaign, President Donald J. Trump, his grip on power slipping because of his handling of the pandemic, desperately tried to change the narrative by attacking the business dealings of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son Hunter, invoking his name publicly over 100 times.”
“At the same time, another effort was underway in secret to try to expose the contents of a diary kept the previous year by Mr. Biden’s daughter, Ashley Biden, as she underwent treatment for addiction.”
“A few weeks ago, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) falsely claimed that the centerpiece of President Biden’s domestic agenda, a $1.75 trillion bill to battle climate change and extend the nation’s social safety net, would include Medicare for all,” the New York Times reports.
“It doesn’t, and never has. But few noticed Mr. Crenshaw’s lie because he didn’t say it on Facebook, or on Fox News. Instead, he sent the false message directly to the inboxes of his constituents and supporters in a fund-raising email.”
“Lawmakers’ statements on social media and cable news are now routinely fact-checked and scrutinized. But email — one of the most powerful communication tools available to politicians, reaching up to hundreds of thousands of people — teems with unfounded claims and largely escapes notice.”
Republican operatives have deployed a massive network of fake local news sites to weaponize “critical race theory” in political campaigns, Popular Information reports.
Newt Gingrich told Fox News that if the Virginia gubernatorial race comes down to a narrow margin, Democrats will try to “steal it.”
Said Gingrich: “First of all if it’s really tight they’ll steal it, so you can’t afford to have a really tight election. You have to win by a big enough margin that they can’t steal it.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.