Republican Robo Calls Dirty Trick
Check out the latest innovation from your friends in the winning-is-better-than-actual-democracy National Republican Congressional Committee. The way it works is this: The NRCC is funding automated “robo calls” to voters in key Congressional districts where the Democratic and Republican candidates are running neck-and-neck. So far no big deal. But the calls actually begin with a line like, “Here is important information about [insert name of Democratic candidate].” If the recipient listens to the whole call, they get a misleading smear against that candidate. But if the recipient hangs up before the message is finished, the call is automatically repeated up to 5 or 6 times in quick succession, making sure that the recipient gets well and truly pissed — at the Democratic candidate, who the recipient assumes is the one behind the annoying calls.
See Joshua Marshall’s Talking Points Memo for the emerging details:
- More GOP dirty phone tricks in New Hampshire…
- The news out of New Hampshire…
- More on what we’re hearing about GOP dirty phone tricks in the New York 19th Congressional District.
- We’re getting reports from a number of congressional districts…
- A number of readers have written in to ask…
It’s a win-win scenario for the people paying for the calls. See, the downside of robo calls (and of phone canvassing generally, but robo calls in particular) is their potential to annoy the recipient. But this way, the folks at the NRCC can have their cake and eat it too. If the recipient listens to the whole thing, they get a misleading attack ad. And if they get annoyed at the message, the misleading nature of the message makes it so the bad karma accrues to the Democratic candidate, not the Republican. And the repeat-calls-in-response-to-hangups technique serves to maximize the annoyance factor.
It’s fiendishly clever. And misleading, and evil, and anti-democracy. That is to say, it’s just the sort of thing we’ve come to expect from today’s Republican Party.
November 6th, 2006 at 12:20 pm
I fear I’m going to turn into one of those idiots that I despise so much at the moment. I don’t know if I’ll ever recover and be able to vote for a Republican ever again. That’s the same problem that we’ve been confronted with as a country right now. Some people will just never vote for a Democrat because of prejudices they’ve built up from their past experiences.
Oh well, at least the current election is clearcut.
November 7th, 2006 at 1:03 pm
I liked the bit on Marshall’s site about the GOP recruiting homeless people to hand out flyers at heavily Democratic polling areas. What a bunch of simps! Any good Democrat knows that if you can get homeless people to hand out flyers for a shirt and hat, you could at least go the extra mile and give them some smokes to vote for you.