Thought Theater

GOP Robocalling Scheme: The Party Of Values? genre: Polispeak & Six Degrees of Speculation

The GOP has added robocalling to their final get out the vote / suppress the vote effort in a number of Congressional districts. The gist of robocalling is to make repeated calls to voters at annoying times and with outrageous messages that appear to be from the Democratic Party or the Democratic candidate. They are lengthy messages that frequently lead those receiving the call to hang up after hearing the inference that the call is coming from a Democrat and before hearing that the Republican Party sponsored the calls. John Cole at Balloon Juice provides the following advice:

When you get a call, do this:

Record the call, making sure that you get the end where the RNC announces its sponsorship.

Record the phone number.

Make sure that Metro desks at your local newspaper, TV stations and radio stations hear about it. If you know anybody who has also received the calls, have them call in as well.

Contact Josh Marshall with the details and the phone number, especially if you live in a state not listed above.

Tell EVERYBODY you know. The only thing that will kill this is word of mouth. In fact, outrage about this behavior (interrupting people repeatedly during dinner, waking them up repeatedly at ridiculous hours) should spark a major backlash. But that will only happen if people know about it, so start calling around now.

Again, if you know anybody who woke up at 3 AM to take an irritating automated phone call make sure he or she knows that the call came straight from Ken Mehlman at the RNC. Let’s help revolting behavior get the reward it deserves.

We now know that the bogus robocalls are a single coordinated campaign targeting fifteen races: CA-04, CA-50, CT-04, CT-05, FL-13, ID-01, IL-06, IL-08, KS-02, NC-11, NH-02, NY-19, PA-06, WA-05. If you know of any more please leave the information in the comments.

A more thorough list of targeted races at TPM. The perpetrator is definitely Conquest Communications of Richmond, Virginia.

This is one of many tactics employed by the GOP at the last minute to create confusion and to impact voter turnout. The RNC amassed a huge cash advantage over the DNC for this very type of last minute campaigning. Rather than have their candidates debate the issues, they have encouraged them to distance themselves from the President if necessary while at the same time the RNC will fund efforts like this to discredit their opponents. One would expect nothing less from the values party!