In late April I documented how the Democratic Party of Wisconsin was running misleading push-calls to people who had signed petitions to recall Democratic State Senator Robert Wirch.
The WisDems were trying to get people to say that they didn’t understand what they were signing or were misled; the results of those misleading push-calls then were used to challenge Recall Wirch petitions. The effort ultimately failed and now the recall election against Wirch is moving forward on August 16.
But first there is a Republican primary next week to pick the candidate who will oppose Wirch.
The organizer of the Recall Wirch group is backing Jonathan Seitz. As reported by Media Trackers (via Charlie Sykes), however, the AFL-CIO is running robopolls in the District asking people to indicate who they support, including on the list Wirch, another person running in the Republican primary, and “undecided,” but leaving Seitz off the list of possibilities.
The robopoll does not indicate who was running it, but the phone number was traced back to the AFL-CIO. Writes MediaTrackers:
That’s right, the AFL-CIO is calling residents in Senate District 22 with a fake poll that omits the name of the Republican front-runner in an effort to confuse voters.
MediaTrackers further notes that while allegations of misleading robocalls by a pro-life group received widespread mainstream media coverage, the same was not true for the misleading pro-Wirch calls.
This effort contrasts with the effort by Republicans to run “fake Democratic” candidate in Democratic primaries in order to gain more time for the general election. There was no secret why the candidates were being run, who they were, and the media regularly referred to them as “fake Democrats.”
The push-calls in late April and recently, however, are deliberately deceptive and try to push voters in a pro-Wirch direction without revealing either the misleading nature of the call or who is sponsoring the call.
Perhaps Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg could investigate.
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