In September, Politico ran an article about a memo it had obtained from Tom Steyer’s Next Gen PAC. The article amounted to so much free publicity for the billionaire donor to Democratic causes that Harry Reid likes to pretend doesn’t exist as he rails on upon Republican excesses.
In particular, the Politico piece addressed a section of the Next Gen memo that explained how attacks against the Koch brothers would be effective in helping Democrats win the midterm elections. But its author, Maggie Haberman, conveniently website omitted the section of the memo where Steyer’s group outlines its goal to “suppress Republican votes” in 2014 just as it did during the recent Virginia gubernatorial elections.
An attempt to suppress the GOP vote would seem to be an important news story, especially because voter suppression is a common complaint among Democratic candidates and their enablers in the media.
In the section that Haberman ignored, Next Gen discusses research it conducted to learn how to dampen “Republican enthusiasm levels.” This eclipsed section of the memo goes on to report tactics that worked in the 2013 Virginia governor’s race and that Next Gen plans to implement in the 2014 midterms in Florida, Iowa, and Michigan.
An image of the document appears at the end of this post. Here is a key passage of text from it.
We also used our opinion research to determine whether there was effective messaging to degrade Republican enthusiasm. The election results in many states may be as narrow as a few thousand votes, so we sought to determine whether we could have an impact at the margins of the race by dampening Republican enthusiasm levels. [Emphasis added]
During the 2013 Virginia gubernatorial campaign, Republican turnout in the Tri-County area was impacted as the result of revelations about the Republican nominee’s support for an out-of-state energy company over local landowners — while the Republican vote over-performed throughout Virginia in 2013, the notable exception was the Tri-Counties, which underperformed by approximately 11,000 votes.
Our opinion research has identified issues potentially relevant to Republican voter enthusiasm that have a common denominator — the Republican candidates side with their corporate donors against the tangible interests of Republican voters.
If a Republican memo explaining how to suppress Democratic turnout was found, it would likely be a major story on Politico and no doubt picked up by the mainstream news media. The fact this liberal effort was was ignored even though Politico had the evidence in-house reeks of media bias.
Cross-posted at The Lid
