Republicans Getting Desperate Against David Crowley?

County Executive David Crowley. Photo by Sophie Bolich.

With one week left until the Nov. 4 election and polls suggesting Democrat David Crowley is leading Republican Tom Tiffany in the race for governor, we are beginning to see a pattern of increasingly preposterous claims against Crowley by GOP operatives.

A mailer produced in Oklahoma sent to Wisconsin households in recent days claimed to be from the Progressive Alliance of Wisconsin and carried a headline calling Crowley “A COP’S BEST FRIEND.” It declared that Crowley “Backs the blue, NOT US,” and blamed him for incidents of police violence, mistreatment of prisoners, and for increasing spending on public safety.

In short, it’s an attempt to sour liberals and probably Black voters by transforming Crowley into a cop-loving, tough-on-crime meanie. Up is down, a liberal is actually a conservative, and Crowley is anything but the soft-on-crime leftist the Tiffany campaign has accused him of being. It’s a head-spinning contradiction for Republican operatives, but part of a strategy to reduce the turnout of liberal Democrats in this election.

In a similar fashion, Wisconsin Republicans had a well-organized effort to discourage turnout by Black and Hispanic voters in Milwaukee for the 2022 mid-term election, something that Republican leader and Wisconsin Elections Commission member Bob Spindell bragged about in an email sent to area Republicans. “This great and important decrease in Democrat votes in the City” was due to a “well thought out multi-faceted plan,” Spindell delighted in telling party members.

The Arkansas mailer on Crowley was reported by Popular Information, “an independent newsletter dedicated to accountability journalism” by Jake Legum, a lawyer and journalist who founded Think Progress, a progressive news site. Legum ran the site for two years before joining Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign as a research director. Following the 2008 campaign, he practiced law in Maryland and ran unsuccessfully for the state legislature before returning to Think Progress, becoming its editor-in-chief. He grew the publication to a 40-person newsroom with 10 million unique visitors a month. He left to launch Popular Information in 2018, which has grown to 138,000 subscribers.

Legum traced the supposedly liberal Progressive Alliance of Wisconsin to individuals and groups in Oklahoma who are Republican operatives. And he found the mailers targeting Crowley in Wisconsin looked almost identical “in substance and style” to mailers attacking Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the Democratic nominee for governor in Minnesota. They also attack her from the left, saying she is on the wrong side on police accountability and single-payer health care. A Klobucher spokesperson has charged the mailer is an attempt to suppress the vote for her by Democrats and independents.

Another hit job on Crowley published yesterday by the northern Wisconsin publication The Lakeland Times, claimed that Crowley demanded $250,000 “for his next run for county exec or for future political activities,” and a government job for his wife as payment for endorsing Sara Rodriguez for governor. (The endorsement was short-lived, as Rodriguez’s financial difficulties forced her to end her campaign and Crowley quickly jumped back into the race.) Crowley denied the story, but the publication ran the story anyway, its only proof being a statement by an unnamed senior Democratic political adviser. The story is paywalled, but you can read all about it – with far more huffing and puffing – in a Wisconsin Right Now article.

Richard Moore, who wrote the story, has been called “a full-scale apologist for anti-vaxxers, Jan. 6 insurrectionists and a host of other right-wing zealots” by Dave Zweifel in a Cap Times column. The Lakeland Times owner and publisher is Gregg Walker, a conservative perhaps best known for his long-running disputes with Kirk Bangstad, the owner of the progressive Minocqua Brewing Company. Tiffany has also gotten drawn into the dispute.

As for the job-for-Crowley’s-wife claim, that trope had gotten a little threadbare even before this story ran. Last week Tiffany jumped on a story by the Daily Caller, a publication that has been categorized as an unreliable source of information by the Wikipedia community. The story reported that Crowley approved tens of millions in funding to a nonprofit where his wife works. As Urban Milwaukee reported, the nonprofit, Community Advocates, has been getting funded by the county since the 1980s, under the past five county executives, including Republican Scott Walker. Crowley disclosed that his wife worked for the nonprofit when the funding was awarded.

The implication is that Ericka Crowley is living high off the hog, but the organization’s federal tax form, which must list its top-paid staff members, shows they make between $190,000 for the CEO and $106,000 for the HR director. Ms. Crowley would be below that in pay.

Of course, if she was getting some kind of sweetheart deal, why would she need that government job the Lakeland Times claimed was being demanded by her husband? The two stories contradict each other.

It all has the feel of desperation by Republicans seeing their poll numbers plummeting.

An invitation to readers: On Sunday there will be a reading of Wings of a Dove, a new play by Bruce Murphy adapting the Henry James novel, at Pink Umbrella Theater. For more details check this press release.