[EL] “‘Stop the Steal’ Didn’t Start With Trump"

[Hess, Douglas (Doug)]

A good article in the NYTimes by Janelle Bouie about ACORN and the history of “Stop the Steal” rhetoric and conspiracy theories:
“‘Stop the Steal’ Didn’t Start With Trump”  https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/opinion/voter-fraud-capitol-attack.html?referringSource=articleShare

Excerpt:

“Over the ensuing years, under pressure from the White House ahead of the presidential election in 2004, the Justice Department ramped up its crusade against voter fraud. Of particular interest was ACORN, a now-defunct advocacy organization that was working — as the presidential election got underway — to register hundreds of thousands of low-income voters. Swing-state Republicans accused the group of “ manufacturing voters ,” and federal prosecutors looked, unsuccessfully, for evidence of wrongdoing. Later, Karl Rove would press President Bush’s second attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, to fire a number of U.S. attorneys for failure to investigate voter fraud allegations, leading to a scandal that eventually led to Gonzales’s resignation in 2007.

ACORN and voter fraud would remain a bête noire for Republicans for the rest of the decade. Conservative advocacy groups and media organizations produced a steady stream of anti-ACORN material and, as the 2008 election campaign heated up, did everything they could to tie Democratic candidates, and Barack Obama in particular, to a group they portrayed as radical and dangerous. ACORN, Rush Limbaugh said in one characteristic segment , has “been training young Black kids to hate, hate, hate this country.”

During his second debate with Obama, a few weeks before the election, the Republican nominee, John McCain, charged that ACORN “is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.” And his campaign materials similarly accused Obama, Joe Biden and the Democratic Party of orchestrating a vast conspiracy of fraud. “We’ve always known the Obama-Biden Democrats will do anything to win this November, but we didn’t know how far their allies would go,” read one mailer…”


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Douglas R Hess
Assistant Professor, Political Science/Policy Studies
Grinnell College
On sabbatical until fall 2021
My latest op-ed using Grinnell College National Poll: https://bit.ly/hesshess102020

Website: http://www.douglasrhess.com
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