Earlier this week, DailyKos staffer Mark Sumner posted on a new report to the U.S. Senate regarding Russian cyberhacking of the 2016 election. In his piece, Sumner recounts how as part of its widespread social-media campaign, paid and free, Russia’s cyber-hacking organization, then called the Internet Research Agency, put an emphasis on messaging African American voters.
As we learn more about the Russian government's attempts then and now to hack U.S. elections, intriguing coincidences continue to emerge. And as former intelligence officer Malcolm Nance likes to say, it sometimes takes a lot of work to arrange a coincidence.
I noticed during the 2016 campaign a similar, concurrent effort by some Republican Party campaigners to likewise dissuade African Americans from voting. Not just via the GOP's usual exclusionary trickery, such as onerous Voter ID requirements, vote-caging, gerrymandering, and mass voter-registration cancellations. Rather, some Republican and domestic, Republican-friendly campaigns tried to convince African Americans that there really were few if any differences between the GOP and the Democratic Party; so why bother voting?
Gee, and the Russians were sending out this message at the same time? What a coincidence!
Most of the Russian effort -- which relied in part on fake black-activist sites at Facebook and other social outlets -- was to dump on Democratic party candidates on up to presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
The Russians knew there were virtually no opportunities to persuade a new class of “blacks for Trump,” so their effort focused on persuading black voters that Democrats were “only interested in them at election time,” a theme that the Russian social media effort hit over and over.
Radio ads of that same sort, authorized by Republican campaigns or the party’s special-interest supporters, peppered central city Milwaukee where many African Americans live and vote in large numbers. Such radio ads ran, for example, during the 2016 U.S. Senate race pitting Wisconsin incumbent Republican Ron Johnson against former Democratic senator Russ Feingold.
No one as far as I know has yet quantified the impact of such ads on the election result (Johnson unexpectedly won). But domestic conservative interests, like the Russians, clearly thought they'd found a message that would help them to avoid ceding the black vote.
And just like the Russian effort, which sought to disguise itself as activist Americans, the anti-Democratic radio ads run by Republicans or their backers were designed to sound like a community-originated project, with scripts read by black males.
Now, as Saturday Night Live's old "church lady" character would say, isn't that convenient? Very convenient that Russian hackers and Republican campaign strategists would independently hit upon -- and deploy -- very similar campaign tactics against the African American vote in the very same election.
Earlier reports examining the 2016 election hacks have suggested a possible joint mode of operation: Russia supplied techno-muscle and money while Republican tacticians (including but not necessarily limited to the Trump campaign) fine-tuned the Russian operation by picking targets and optimum messaging. Circumstance might even suggest that, beyond the Trump campaign itself, Republican National Committee and GOP legislative leadership were in on a joint exercise. Some GOP candidates besides Trump did, after all, receive campaign financial support from Russian sources. And so did the National Rifle Association.
So it will be interesting to see if this "coincidence" of Russians and Republicans using very similar tactics to dampen the African American vote becomes more clear as more information becomes public. Fertile ground, perhaps, for investigators on up to Robert Mueller to explore, if they have time.