For Democrats and Progressives, voting is a minefield. There’s nothing the Republican Reich won’t do to steal your vote through trickery, of failing that, through depriving you of your vote. Republicans have a long history of dirty tricks to win elections. They do this because, if they depended on their policies, they would lose.
Be Prepared to Protect Yourself and Fight Back
Once considered liberal and progressive, the Republican Party has been taken over by right-wing conservative con artists who lie, cheat and steal to gain and maintain power. From voter fraud and suppression to smear campaigns, personal attacks and media manipulation, they have been using the same strategies for more than a hundred years.
While Democratic Dirty Tricks prominently show up around FDR’s first election in ’32, Kennedy/Nixon (Chicago) in ’60 and Lyndon Johnson in ’64, these lead to The New Deal, Social Security and Civil Rights while Republican Dirty Tricks give us depressions, poverty and massive national debt.
Republicans know if most people vote, they would never win so they try to demoralize the Democratic base and suppress the vote as much as possible, they buy some people off with tax cuts and scare the rest into voting against their own interests and that’s how they win. It’s a divide and conquer strategy that has worked well and they refine and expand it every election year.
Republican Strategy:
- Demoralize the Democratic base with phony press releases and whisper campaigns.
- Attack oponents strength with character assasination.
- Suppress the vote in every possible way.
- Buy some people off with tax cuts.
- Scare the rest into voting against their own interests.
In the 2004 election there was massive GOP voter fraud and suppression; from black box voting fraud, vote tabulating fraud, re-registering people into different precincts, destroying voter registration forms, misinformation in poor neighborhoods, moving polls close to election day, old ballot machines in poor and black neighborhoods that spoil votes, ballot checking machines in wealthy neighborhoods that allow wealthy voters to re-cast spoiled ballots, police intimidation, caging lists and on and on and on. The result was an 8 million vote discrepancy between the official results and exit polls. The official results had Bush winning by 3 million votes but the exit polls had Kerry winning by 5 million votes.
Republicans have two major factors on their side; a fanatical base willing to carry out the dirty tricks and the greediest billionaires to finance them. They deceive good people by raising the red flag of abortion and gay marriage to divert attention away from their arrogant and greedy policies which cause the poverty, war and pollution we are facing today.
The next time a Republican tells you “America, love it or leave it.” Tell them you love America. You just want right-wing conservatives to stop molesting her. If they act like they don’t know what you’re talking about, send them here… [emphasis original]
Inserted from <GOP Dirty Tricks>
The above article is over ten years old. Click through for a history of right wing dirty tricks from the founding fathers on. We need to be clear that Trump is just a symptom. The Republican Reich is the disease.
Rachel Maddow covered contemporary Republican dirty tricks in this 18 minute video.
Don’t let Republicans steal your vote!
PS. Apologies to the rat.
RESIST!!
VOTE BLUE!!
14 DAYS!!
11 Responses to “Republican Dirty Tricks”
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Excellent piece, TC.
Shows how the R’s want to change the landscape, and grab the goods for the win. No matter either,….. how low they can and will go.
Love how you and Rachel explained this also.
I honestly don’t remember any Democratic dirty tricks in my lifetime – at least not in national politics – I do remember Daley in Chicago. But I grant that Watergate was so beyond the pale it could have erased my memory a little. We generally get into trouble by NOT using dirty tricks.
I was in medical school in Chicago when Richard J. Daley was mayor. For non-Illinoisans he’s probably best remembered for his thuggish and disastrous mishandling of the 1968 DNC in Chicago (where he famously said: “The policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder”) that ruined Hubert Humphrey’s chance for victory and gave us Richard M. Nixon.
Not a “dirty trick” per se, but pretty clever gambit by Daley.
You have to remember this was in the early 1970s – even before VCRs were common – when TV stations typically went off the air around midnight with the Star-Spangled Banner followed by their test pattern. So to watch a TV show back then you had to watch it when it was broadcast.
A lot of politicians during election season would buy the last commercial time-slot (because it was cheaper) from TV stations to run a type of infomercial.
There was a close race for some state-wide office in Illinois, and Mayor Daley’s team learned that the Republicans had spent a huge sum money to buy the last 15 or 30 minutes of TV time on all the stations across the Chicago Metro a day or two before the election. It was a GOP “GOTV” project aimed at getting suburban voters to the polls.
So Daley’s people bought the 5 minutes right before it was scheduled to air on all the Metro TV stations, and then ran a 1-minute infomercial for the Democrat, played the national anthem and then put up a generic test pattern for a couple of minutes.
People turned off their TVs and went to bed … and no one saw the Republican infomercial. And it worked!
So not really a dirty trick – but damn clever!
The GOP knows that they cannot win any election with honesty is why they pull every dirty trick they can, think they can get away with it.
Love Rachel Maddow. Have a listen.
I still advocate that voters vote by law. The GOP would become extinct.
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Perfect Logo for the repugs. Real rats out to destroy. We will all fight back and change it all around on November 6th. We Must. Hopefully we will be hearing about how sad the large rodent in the W.H.is the day after the elections. We the people deserve some positiveness in our daily lives. We’ve suffered enough ever since January 20, 2017.
Lies, dirty tricks, go way backing U.S.history, but the current, and recent, GOP has honed the art to something like venal perfection. Voter fraud is a leftover from the days of Jim Crow, sadly. Fox News is not “broadcast” in the UK, because the network realized that Brits are not as dumb and gullible as the Yanks. To my knowledge, there is also no major Evangelist, or similar, movement in the much more secular UK. I do not think this is a coincidence!
VOTE YOUR ASSES OFF!!!!!!!!!
You had me there, TomCat; only at the end your comment made me realize the article was 10 years old! So nothing has changed, only has gotten worse with a “president of all people” threatening his people with civil and criminal action action in case of voter fraud. Thank goodness the little fraud there was in the past was perpetrated by Republicans. ?
I’m not all that fond of Oz’s mandatory voting; becoming a registered voter just by being registered somewhere as a citizen, i.e. birth certificate or driver’s licence, should suffice. Considering the terrible trickery around votes, however, mandatory voting does have it’s appeal. Then undue purging and reporting wrong voting dates would become fraudulent when “the mistake” wasn’t rectified as soon as it was noticed. Lee Zeldin would have to throw good money after bad by rectifying his “mistake” by printing and distributing the same amount of correcting fliers and publicly correcting it at every opportunity, not having his spokeswoman make a brief statement that nobody heard.
Making a rat the new symbol of Republicans is unfair – to rats.
Honest Abe (Lincoln) = the last time honesty and Republican would appear together without being an oxymoron!
Deception and dirty tricks = the only way Republicans can win
Thanks all. Hugs!
For all who feel sorry for the rat, see the Cartoon in today’s Open Thread.