In a campaign season when GOP grassroots voters have nominated a motley collection of quacks, cranks, election deniers, and toxic organisms to run for important public offices, Republican handlers are adopting an insanely rational strategy: Deleting what their candidates said.
In Colorado, a local Republican group “has quietly removed from its website a video of a conspiracy theory-laden speech by … congressional candidate Erik Aadland, in which he falsely claimed the 2020 election was ‘absolutely rigged’,” for which Aadland has no evidence, because it wasn’t. (Read story here.)
Aadland’s own campaign website uses less-apocalyptic language. It “does not directly question the results of the 2020 election, but says, ‘Election integrity is a non-partisan issue. In recent years we have seen concerns raised on both sides of the aisle, and we must address them.’”
This is true in the same sense that climate change is debated. On the Democratic side, there indeed are concerns about election integrity: Namely, Republican vote suppression, gerrymandering, targeting voters of color, death threats against election workers, and trying to overturn elections and overthrow democracy. Aadland is allied with that bunch. Don’t trust anything he says about elections, irrespective of how he phrases it.
In Arizona, GOP Senate nominee Blake Masters, another election denier, changed the wording on his campaign website about his abortion position from “I’m 100% pro-life” to “commonsense regulation around abortion,” then falsely accused his Democratic opponent of lying about his position. (Read story here.) As far as I can tell, his position hasn’t changed, only the euphemism he uses to label it.
You’re going to see a lot more of this. As the 2022 midterm elections approach, races thought to be in the GOP’s bag are tightening, Democrats’ prospects are rising, and Republicans are scrambling. Because of that, the gaggle of extremists running under the GOP label are getting busy erasing photos of themselves posing with gun-toting white supremacists, comments about “voting with bullets” (see story here), and so on.
This isn’t new, or something that was invented this year. Back in 2017, a GOP candidate in Tennessee who had praised Alabama politician Roy Moore played the “I don’t know him” card after Moore was exposed as a stalker of teenage cheerleaders. (See that story here.)
You don’t need to know what a Republican candidate said before he decided to play it safe, in order for you to play it safe. There’s a simple shortcut: Don’t trust or vote for any of them. They wouldn’t have been nominated by the Trumper mob dominating today’s Republican Party unless there was something wrong with them. Go by that. You shouldn’t vote for any Republicans until the MAGA madness blows over.