Gerry Broome/AP Photo
North Carolina state Sen. Don Davis takes the oath of office, January 11, 2017.
North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, and Pennsylvania have become this year’s battleground states, not in general-election contests but in vicious, high-priced Democratic primary runoffs between moderates and progressives. Moderate-supporting super PACs, under the guise of supporting issues like crypto and Israel, have poured in historic amounts of money to push their preferred candidate on Democratic voters. In just a handful of House races and one Senate race, they’ve spent tens of millions of dollars.
That tidal wave of corporate money within Democratic elections is unprecedented, and has resulted in some dubious messaging and advertising. In Pennsylvania, the Penn Progress super PAC, supporting moderate Senate candidate Conor Lamb, became one of the rare entities to see one of its ads taken off the air on the grounds that it was demonstrably false and misleading, after it wrongly referred to his opponent John Fetterman as a “self-described democratic socialist.”
Now, in North Carolina’s First Congressional District, an ad cut by Democratic Majority for Israel PAC has also been pulled off the air after being deemed factually inaccurate, wrongfully asserting that progressive candidate Erica Smith endorsed a “Trump Republican” during the 2020 election cycle.
The race in North Carolina is fiercely contested, with moderate candidate Don Davis vying with progressive Smith for retiring congressman G.K. Butterfield’s vacated seat. Davis has a history of voting with the state’s Republicans on a number of anti-choice bills. He operated as the sole Democratic vote in favor of funding an anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy center,” as HuffPost detailed, and was often one of just a small handful of Democrats voting to defund Planned Parenthood in the state.
Democratic Majority for Israel alone has put nearly half a million dollars into anti-Smith and pro-Davis ads like the one in question, where DMFI PAC accuses Smith of having “endorsed a Trump Republican” in a race where Smith never endorsed. (The race was between Democrat Jeff Jackson and Republican Sonja Nichols for North Carolina state Senate, and Smith at one point said that Nichols, a fellow Black woman, “shares her values.” After that statement was wrongly interpreted as an endorsement, Smith even issued a press release that begins with the sentence “I’m not making an endorsement in this race.”)
The DMFI ad was deemed misleading enough that a handful of television stations decided to take it off the air on the grounds that it amounted to defamation, an extremely rare outcome that only occurs in the most dubious of cases. Given how few regulations there are in the world of campaign finance and messaging, it remains almost impossible to run afoul of those standards, which DMFI managed to accomplish in this instance. “It is common for campaigns to send stations a ‘takedown’ request, but it is relatively rare that they prevail,” said Brendan Fischer, deputy executive director of Documented, a money-in-politics watchdog. “Generally speaking, defamation is a pretty high bar.”
“Multiple stations across the district have already pulled this advertisement,” said Smith’s campaign in a statement. “The ad was taken down due to blatantly false accusations of Erica of having endorsed a Trump Republican and been bankrolled by Republicans in 2020 during her Senate run.” The ad remains on the air on certain stations, however, as DMFI has fought to keep it up.
Soon after the Smith campaign was informed that the ad had been flagged for takedown, it was back running widely, a sign of just how difficult enforcing those standards can be. DMFI PAC maintains that the ad never came down at all.
Redboxing has been strongly criticized for violating the prohibition on “collaboration” between candidates and super PACs.
The mishap looks to be another instance of the hazards of redboxing, the extremely dicey practice by which campaigns broadcast messaging strategy to “unaffiliated” super PACs on their own websites in obvious places, and those super PACs convert those messaging cues into expensive ad spots. In this case, Don Davis’s campaign site’s “Message for NC Voters” tab sports the exact language and talking points that feature in the DMFI ad, including the link to and the pull quote from an article claiming that Smith endorsed a Republican.
Redboxing has been strongly criticized for violating the prohibition on “collaboration” between candidates and super PACs. If any of the Democrats’ voting rights bills from this past session had made it through the Senate, the practice would be functionally outlawed.
Unfortunately for DMFI and Davis, neither group seems to have made it to the article’s conclusion, where multiple corrections have been issued. The article in question was written by Frank RL, a community member on the Daily Kos website, whose piece was “not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.” In a press release issued the same day as the article, Smith declared emphatically that she did not endorse the Republican candidate Nichols. Daily Kos later published its own blog post from Smith herself stating in no uncertain terms that she did not and had not endorsed a Republican candidate.
As has become commonplace across the country in this election cycle, pro-Israel super PACs have heaped money into Democratic primaries where Israel has barely factored in as a policy concern, but where there are clear ideological battle lines drawn between conservative and progressive candidates.
Multiple separate super PACs affiliated with AIPAC have plowed in huge sums. Recent filings from AIPAC’s super PAC United Democracy Project showed their spending for Don Davis had soared above $2.3 million, a massive amount of money in just a handful of weeks.
The choice to criticize Smith for a purported allegiance with Republicans, when Davis has gone out of his way to actually team up with Republicans to undermine a woman’s right to choose, is rather ironic. The fact that Don Davis has gotten multimillion-dollar support from AIPAC and its “pro-democracy” super PAC, which has endorsed more than 100 Republicans who refused to affirm Joe Biden’s election on January 6th, makes the strategy even more questionable.
The intrusion of big money from these sorts of outfits has alarmed Democrats broadly. In a recent statement, Sen. Bernie Sanders condemned super PAC spending in a number of races, noting that “corporate Democratic PACs are spending over $13 million to defeat progressive women of color,” referring to just three House races where huge money has flowed.
Those figures don’t even include NC-01, which has seen a rapid increase in spending in recent days, but remains a slightly lower priority for corporate money than high-profile races in nearby NC-04, or progressive showdowns in PA-12 and TX-28. The siege of the Democratic primary process by unlimited corporate money has been one of the most important and shocking developments of the 2022 election cycle so far.
This story has been updated.
