Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. Oppo is part of the story.
[Social media] uproars have become so frequent that the pattern of reaction to them now feels routine.
First: Long-ago social media posts or video clips by political candidates get exposed online, prompting a backlash from rivals.
Second: The candidates downplay the comments and distance themselves, often insisting their views have changed.
Third: In some cases, voters and the news media tire of the topic and move on. Or they don’t.
With a new generation of candidates who were active on X, Reddit and YouTube years before announcing political careers, it’s unsurprising that so many are seeing their past statements come back to haunt them. (It has become so common that Ms. McMorrow is not even the only Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan to deal with such a controversy: Abdul El-Sayed, 41, also faced backlash for deleted posts from 2020, in which he had described the police as “standing armies we deploy against our own people.”)
Opposition researchers have never had more content to draw from. Yet they say that voters also seem more willing than ever to forgive past unsavory viewpoints and social media misdeeds — spurred in part by President Trump, who has proved that voters can overlook outrageous statements.
“Before Trump, you could be really surprised by something you saw in the news about a politician,” said Pat Dennis, the head of American Bridge, a Democratic opposition research firm. “After Trump, everything is kind of boring in comparison, compared to the level of scandal.”
Emilio Perez Ibarguen at POLITICO:
[Abdul] El-Sayed, for one, has repeatedly emphasized that he isn’t interested in litigating the past — which opponents have sought to do over his since-deleted 2020 posts lamenting that police departments are overfunded relative to other social services and referring to them as “standing armies.”
He told POLITICO that “the idea that you stand by everything you ever said, out of context, is an insane thing to assume about anybody.”
But El-Sayed’s shifting recollection of the past has put him in bind. After telling the Detroit News that he “actually never, never called for defunding,” CNN reported that he said “we do need to defund the police” in a June 2020 interview with Detroit Public Radio. In that interview, the former health official said that he considered defunding to mean reducing funding for prisons and police while investing more in “the means of educating and empowering, engaging communities with the means of being able to take on systemic poverty.”
El-Sayed has characterized such reporting as superfluous to the actual issues present in the campaign.