On Sunday, January 21, my wife and I, both registered Democrats, received a phone message urging us not to vote on Tuesday, saying, “Republicans have been trying to push non-partisan and Democratic voters to participate in their primary, but that’s a bunch of malarkey.” The caller ID listed a phone number belonging to a Democratic Party organizer for the “Write-In Biden” campaign. I called that number, and the woman who answered had no knowledge of the robocall. So clearly, the robo-caller used a disguised caller ID, framing the Biden Write-In campaign.
I reported this to the New Hampshire Attorney General, as it is a crime in New Hampshire to attempt to suppress the vote.
The candidate that the call was designed to benefit is Donald Trump because Nikki Haley’s success depended on the turnout of independent voters taking a Republican ballot. The dead giveaway that the call was designed by the Trump camp is that it stated that Democrats can participate in the Republican primary, an assertion that Trump, and only Trump, had made in both ads and on the stump, because only Trump, among the presidential candidates, does not understand that in New Hampshire, Democrats cannot vote in the Republican Primary! No other candidate is that clueless about our election law. This misstatement gives him away. Moreover, only Trump, among active candidates, has a track record of trying to cheat in an election. He was even impeached for it.
I am currently filing a formal complaint with New Hampshire Secretary of State Scanlon, asking him to disqualify Trump from the ballot for violating the anti-voter suppression law if evidence points to Trump’s culpability. Scanlon refused to do that in response to complaints that Trump was disqualified under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, barring insurrectionists from office who had previously taken an oath to defend the Constitution, arguing that New Hampshire law did not specifically bar such a person in a primary. Well, this one is a clear crime in New Hampshire. Its perpetrator is a criminal, and worse – a traitor to democracy. No penalty short of disqualification from the ballot would be an effective deterrent to prevent this from happening again, not even jail time. If the law is to have any teeth, Scanlon must do his duty to keep our election process fair, clean, and legal. The criminal responsible for this must be barred from any further appearance on the ballot in our state, ever!
The Attorney General’s Office has confirmed that it received many similar complaints about the call, so indeed it was widespread. They are investigating. It doesn’t take Columbo, however, to see whose fingerprints are all over this, so I suspect they are going to bark up the right tree. Once they find the evidence, they should attempt to assess just how many independents received this call. Trump only won by about 10 points. The call could have accounted for that difference. If so, Haley really won the primary!
I have heard the argument that the call may have been a Democratic dirty trick done to implicate Trump. However, the idea that Democrats would tamper with their own “Write-in Biden” effort by suppressing the turnout of Dems and independents just to attempt an aspersion on Trump is, frankly, ludicrous. Moreover, there is nothing Dems would have loved more than enough Independents coming out for Haley to bury him. They know she can’t win in other states, so she is not a nomination threat, but Biden would wear Trump’s loss here on his sleeve until the last dog died, if for no other reason than to crank up Trump’s self-immolating meltdown.
Trump has the status of an incumbent president in this election. Hell, the MAGAs already think he is still president, anyway! In the past, when an incumbent has been embarrassed by a strong showing by a challenger, they have either dropped out or lost in the general election later. Eugene McCarthy ousted LBJ from the race after a losing New Hampshire Primary challenge that netted him only 40 percent of the vote, while Pat Buchanan, with a mere 37 percent showing, proved Geroge H.W. Bush would lose the general election. He did.
This time, notably, Haley’s challenge bested both of those historic benchmarks. Even if it’s never proven that Trump was behind the cheating call, a simple survey of New Hampshire voters would easily determine if it had the effect of suppressing her independent vote enough to give Trump the win. If so, no one will ever believe that Trump wasn’t behind it.
Whatever happens to Haley’s primary path from here on out, she has already demonstrated that Trump is unelectable in a general election, and if it turns out she actually was snookered out of a win here, she can take that to the bank for 2028. And she’s more than smart enough to do it!
