Why an endangered Republican Senate majority is targeting Minnesota in 2020

Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) speaks to the media following the weekly Democratic policy luncheon on April 30, 2019, in Washington, DC. | Pete Marovich/Getty Images

Democratic Sen. Tina Smith is up for reelection in a state Trump has pledged to win this November.

It’s been a hectic few years for Minnesota’s Democratic Sen. Tina Smith. First appointed in 2018 to replace former Sen. Al Franken after he resigned in late 2017 amid sexual harassment allegations, Smith had less than a full year in Congress before her first election as senator — a special to determine who served out the few years remaining in Franken’s term, which she won by more than 10 points.

Now, she’s on the ballot for a full six-year term of her own: Come November, Smith will face Republican Jason Lewis (known for once complaining that it was no longer socially acceptable to call women “sluts”).

Smith has a net +13 approval rating, according to Morning Consult; Minnesota is a habitually Democratic state, even as it has become more competitive in presidential elections. But Republicans are determined not to make things easy for her in 2020.

After narrowly losing Minnesota to Hillary Clinton in 2016, President Donald Trump took to Twitter last year to call his shot: “In 2020,” he tweeted, “because of America hating anti-Semite Rep. Omar, & the fact that Minnesota is having its best economic year ever, I will win the State!”

That makes Minnesota one of relatively few target states for a GOP Senate majority that’s looking imperiled. There are vulnerable Republican senators on defense in Arizona, Colorado, Maine, and North Carolina, to name just a few — but the party has also decided to invest heavily in the only upper-Midwestern state it failed to flip in 2016.

The Trump campaign is spending like they mean it: According to the ad tracking site AdAge, Trump has about $14.1 million in TV advertising booked in Minnesota through November 3 — more than his team is putting into Michigan, Wisconsin, or Arizona, at least for now — and his campaign is spending more in the Minneapolis-St. Paul market than it is anywhere outside of Florida.

An investment on that scale by the Trump team isn’t just a positive for the president’s chances in the state. It’s also good news for Lewis, who’s so in line with the president in agenda and style that his political future in the state is almost certain to rise and fall with Trump’s.

“We’ve been working hard in this state for well over a year,” Minnesota GOP chair Jennifer Carnahan told Vox. “And that’s a more impressive effort and focus than we’ve ever put in Minnesota if you go back probably even two decades.”

Jason Lewis was a Trump-style candidate before it was popular

Smith’s opponent this fall, Jason Lewis, is a former one-term representative who was ousted from the seat by Democratic Rep. Angie Craig in 2018. Before his brief stint in Congress, he was a controversial right-wing radio host in Minnesota with a long history of racist and sexist comments, and he’s been tagged as a “mini-Trump” since at least May 2016, well before he won his House primary.

Hannah Foslien/Getty Images

President Donald Trump greets Rep. Jason Lewis at a campaign rally at the Mayo Civic Center in Rochester, Minnesota, on October 4, 2018.

In 2020, that makes Lewis less of an outlier than he was four years ago, when, according to Roll Call’s Simone Pathé, the National Republican Congressional Committee took a pass on congratulating him the night of his primary win.

But even if it’s Trump’s GOP now, not every Republican Senate candidate is running toward the president with open arms. In Colorado, for example, incumbent Republican Sen. Cory Gardner has focused more on burnishing his bipartisan credentials than defending Trump, as Vox’s Ella Nilsen points out in her deep dive on the Colorado Senate race.

Republican politicos in Colorado say Gardner will still have to forge ahead with the independent “happy warrior” campaign ethos that got him to the Senate in the first place.

“Trump is not going to win Colorado,” Colorado Republican consultant Tyler Sandberg, who ran former Rep. Mike Coffman’s House campaigns, told Vox. “I think it’s a show, not tell thing. [Gardner’s] got to demonstrate that he’s different.”

Not so for Lewis: If Trump loses Minnesota this November, Lewis will go down with the ship. The two are so simpatico that one senior member of the Smith campaign refers to the Trump team in Minnesota as “Jason Lewis’s shadow campaign infrastructure.”

On the campaign trail, Lewis hasn’t shied away from those similarities. Late last month, he told voters in Rochester that the “fundamental duty of government is restoring public order and backing the blue” and decried the state’s coronavirus lockdown as “Orwellian.” And on Twitter, he’s embraced the near-apocalyptic rhetoric that Trump has deployed against Biden, arguing that Democrats are “coming after God” and want to “dismantle American society.”

Unlike Lewis, who didn’t make his first foray into formal politics until 2016, Smith has a long history in Minnesota politics. A former Planned Parenthood executive in the state, she served as chief of staff first to Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak — a job that reportedly earned her the name “the velvet hammer” — and then to Gov. Mark Dayton before becoming Minnesota’s lieutenant governor in 2015.

As a candidate, Smith has emphasized her fairly moderate record and her willingness to reach across the aisle; in a Zoom debate with Lewis last month, she stressed her focus on “practical, commonsense things that we can work on in a bipartisan way.”

But David Schultz, a professor of political science at Hamline University in St. Paul, says that Smith’s quiet, efficient legislative style comes with some challenges.

“She doesn’t come across, I think, as sort of the natural campaigner in the way that [former Sen Al. Franken] did,” Schultz said, and “she’s kind of been lost next to Amy Klobuchar,” Minnesota’s senior senator and a one-time Democratic presidential candidate.

Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party chair Ken Martin concedes that “people are still getting to know Tina,” but when they do, he’s confident they’ll like what they see.

“The last two years in particular,” he says, Smith has “kept her nose to the grindstone and just worked on being a good senator and doing her job and making sure that she represents Minnesota in Washington, and that work has not gone unnoticed.”

Historically, Minnesota isn’t much of a swing state. But Trump and the state GOP think they can make it one.

If Lewis — and Trump — want to flip Minnesota red in 2020, they have a lot of history to contend with. Minnesota hasn’t gone for the GOP in a presidential election since 1972, when incumbent Richard Nixon won every state but Massachusetts, giving it an 11-election streak of supporting Democratic presidential candidates.

Clinton’s 2016 margin in the state may also have made Minnesota look more vulnerable for Democrats than it actually is. Though Clinton in 2016 only won by about 44,000 votes — out of nearly 3 million cast statewide — University of Minnesota political science professor Larry Jacobs says Clinton “made monstrous errors in how she ran that race.”

Schultz, the Hamline University professor, agrees.

“Clinton basically ran a bad campaign,” Schultz says. “She gets destroyed by Bernie Sanders in the caucuses, doesn’t come back to campaign here after she loses, and what happens? You know, she basically took the state for granted.”

Still, Trump’s Republican Party sees a glimmer of hope. FiveThirtyEight has made the argument that Minnesota has become redder. As Nathaniel Rakich noted, “In 1984, the state was 18.2 points more Democratic than the nation as a whole. But in 2016, for the first time since 1952, Minnesota voted more Republican than the rest of the U.S.”

Schultz, who in 2018 co-authored a book on presidential swing states, thinks there’s something to that. Part of the close margin in Minnesota in 2016 was Clinton, he says, but part of it is just demographics: Schultz argues that Minnesota is genuinely trending purple.

And Carnahan, the state GOP chair, believes that the protests and unrest that have followed the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, as well as the police shooting of Jacob Blake, which left him paralyzed below the waist, could be what push the state past its tipping point.

Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Marques Armstrong holds up a picture of George Floyd at a demonstration on June 25, 2020, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Though nationwide protests calling for racial justice and police reform have been largely peaceful (about 93 percent peaceful, according to one study), some cities — notably Minneapolis; Kenosha, Wisconsin; and Portland, Oregon — have seen rioting, fires, and violent clashes between police, protesters, and pro-Trump militias, including two deadly shootings.

“I do see a momentum shift in Minnesota,” Carnahan told Vox in July, “and a lot of that has been driven by a governor in our state and mayors of the two largest cities that completely let every single person in the state down by letting our cities burn for a week and sitting on their hands and doing nothing.”

According to Schulz, there was a version of a law-and-order message that could have worked for Trump, but he believes Trump missed the mark by leaning so hard into the politics of white racial resentment.

“If [Trump] made the same messaging about law and order without the powerful racial overtones that he’s using,” Schultz said, “he might get to here. He might get some of those suburban voters to listen to him who are very concerned about what happened in Minneapolis and St. Paul.”

If Lewis wants to pull off a win, he’ll likely need to thread the same needle, though his history of racist comments and close ties to Trump could make that difficult. But Schultz isn’t ruling anything out.

“The Senate race is even tighter,” he told Vox over email this month. “George Floyd and the law-and-order reaction to it are part of the explanation.”

The coronavirus overshadows a lot of other issues

Even if Minnesota is on its way to perennial swing-state status, though, and even if there is — or was — a building suburban backlash to civil unrest and “defund the police” rhetoric from activists, 2020 isn’t shaping up to be the best year to test either theory.

With fewer than 60 days to go until November 3, the coronavirus pandemic has shaken up the electoral map. Former Vice President Joe Biden leads Trump by about 7.5 points nationally according to the FiveThirtyEight polling average, and even states like Texas, Ohio, and Iowa are starting to look tight for the president, though Trump retains a lead in all three. That could make it harder for Trump and the National Republican Senatorial Committee to expand their map and press the attack in states like Minnesota.

“The number one issue in the minds of Minnesotans is the same one that we’re seeing everywhere,” Jacobs told Vox in July. “Which is: We’ve got a pandemic, it’s clearly not under control, even where there are businesses that are open, consumers are scared to go out, and the Republican Party of Minnesota has sided with the president,” whose approval rating on his handling of the coronavirus outbreak is hovering around 39 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight.

That reality hasn’t changed in the intervening months, but the race has still narrowed, at least at the Senate level. While FiveThirtyEight has Biden up in Minnesota by an average of 7.4 points, a handful of Senate polls suggest that Smith’s lead could be as little as 2 or 3 points versus Lewis.

Other polls, however, have better news for Smith — Public Policy Polling has her up by 8 points, to name one — and race ratings give an unclear picture at best. The Cook Political Report relabeled the Minnesota Senate race in July, moving it from “Likely D” to “Solid D,” and it hasn’t moved since then.

Whatever the polls show, though, the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party — essentially an anachronistic name for the state Democratic Party — is feeling good about Smith’s chances in November.

“We wouldn’t trade our starting position right now with theirs,” Martin, the state DFL chair, said.

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Inside Joe’s bubble: How Biden’s campaign is trying to avoid the virus

WILMINGTON, Del. — Joe Biden’s chartered airplanes and SUVs are meticulously sprayed with disinfectant and scrubbed. The microphones, lecterns and folders he uses are wiped down in the moments before his arrival. News reporters covering the campaign have their temperature taken. People he meets are scanned in advance with thermometer wands and guests at his events are cordoned off in precise locations mapped out with a tape measure.

The former vice president is seldom without a mask when in public or around anyone other than his wife, Dr. Jill Biden. Access to their home is limited to only a few staffers — and when they’re inside, each wears a mask, including Biden. The level of discipline is such that at times when someone stops to take a drink of water, that person will turn their head away from the others to reduce the chances of scattering droplets, according to campaign aides.

With more than 6 million people infected and nearly 200,000 dead from the coronavirus, the former vice president is taking no chances with his safety. He operates in a sanitizer-saturated bubble within the traditional presidential campaign bubble, an environment designed and obsessively cultivated by staff in an attempt to protect him from a possible encounter with the virus.

The rationale behind the painstaking attention to safety is both personal and political. For months, aides have privately acknowledged being concerned about his health. At 77, Biden is more susceptible to the virus that causes Covid-19 and his advanced age alone puts him at higher risk of serious complications from the illness.

Yet the campaign is also committed to modeling responsible behavior — to avoid undermining their blunt Covid-19 messaging and sharpen the contrast with Donald Trump, who, at the big, non-socially distanced events the president has resumed holding around the country, delights in deriding Biden for frequently wearing a mask.

Biden deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield said the campaign’s reasoning for being so cautious is simple: “We don’t want any more Americans to contract the virus.”

“What we consistently hear from people is that they’re frustrated by how Trump has engaged over the summer — that he doesn’t follow public health guidelines while they’re not going to funerals and are sharing in the sacrifice for 6-7 months now,” Bedingfield said. “They're frustrated when they see Donald Trump behaving irresponsibly at a political event.”

As his public schedule has intensified, late last month the campaign announced Biden and vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris would be tested for the coronavirus regularly, and any positive tests for the virus would be publicized. The tests are now happening weekly, and extend to staffers and security who keep in close proximity to them. Trump said in July he takes a test every two to three days on average.

Biden’s campaign is also closely adhering to occupancy guidelines in each state. To get a picture of the lengths they are taking, in addition to drawing on first-hand observations from the road, POLITICO interviewed close to 20 campaign aides and advisers, Democratic officials and event participants.

Biden's crowds are generally kept in the low dozens. Members of the media are segregated in individual white circles sketched on the ground. Staffers arrive early to venues to measure distances and place sticky notes marking locations where masked guests are instructed to hold their position to ensure at least six feet of separation.

An event with union auto workers last week in Warren. Mich. — where outdoor gatherings are capped at 100 people — revealed the full measure of the efforts. Attendees were asked to stay home if they were feeling Covid-19 symptoms. United Auto Workers President Rory Gamble planned to greet Biden but went into precautionary quarantine late Tuesday after a family member had symptoms and was tested.

Before the event began, Biden’s trip director asked the audience to stay still so she could complete an accurate headcount — one that included Secret Service, staff, media and a production crew. An announcement implored the crowd to “please remain in your circles and keep your mask on for the duration of the event.”

Campaign eyes are always trained on the bubble. When Biden inadvertently wanders too close to others, staff pounces with warnings: “Six feet! Six feet!" aides called out in unison at a recent news conference in Wilmington.

“Keep back!” Biden was instructed by staff while in mid-sentence during a meeting in Wisconsin.

At AFL-CIO headquarters in Harrisburg, Pa., during a meeting where guests wore black masks emblazoned with the motto “Union yes,” fist bumps replaced the traditional grinning handshakes. On Friday at the 9/11 memorial in lower Manhattan, Biden walked over and extended an elbow to Vice President Mike Pence, and images of their "elbow bump" made the front-pages of several newspapers the next day.

“There was a ton of effort into how to do it in a Covid-safe way,” said the Rev. Jonathan Barker, pastor at Grace Lutheran Church in Kenosha, referring to the flurry of exchanges between the Biden campaign and attendees before a recent meeting. “They actually had a measuring tape and they were measuring where people could be and using dots to mark the places.”

Those allowed inside Grace Lutheran were asked to remove the mask they were wearing and handed more protective N-95 masks. They were escorted, one at a time, to assigned seats, which were spaced at least six feet apart from one another.

“It was very deliberative and careful,” said Lori Hawkins, the Democratic chair in Kenosha.“It was good to see that they’re really walking the talk and keeping [Biden] safe and keeping everyone else safe.”

Barker said his church venue could have easily fit another 75 people, but that it might have made for bizarre optics. “They wanted to get people six-feet apart, but also have people relatively toward the front,” he said.

The president, who has resisted wearing a mask in public and played a starring role in politicizing the debate surrounding the use of masks, has taken to mocking the rigor of his challenger’s approach. And he’s flouted outdoor state mandates on attendance limits in numerous states in recent weeks, including Michigan and North Carolina.

“Have you ever seen the gyms with the circles? That’s his crowd," Trump said gleefully in Winston-Salem, N.C., contrasting Biden’s low-key events with his own high-energy jamborees. In Latrobe, Pa., Trump asked his crowd: “Did you ever see a man that likes a mask as much as him?"

"It gives him a feeling of security," Trump said of Biden. "If I were a psychiatrist — right? I'd say, this guy's got some big issues." Aides have joined in the jeering, teasing Biden for Labor Day pictures of him solemnly masked with a handful of union workers perched in picnic chairs.

On Sunday night, Trump defied state regulations in Nevada — and his own federal health guidelines — by hosting his first indoor campaign event before a packed crowd since June.

At Trump's recent speeches — his campaign no longer refers to as rallies — many in the audience openly disregard local regulations by huddling close together without masks. But Trump believes he has an advantage to press with voters who are leery of government overreach and tired after months of keeping their distance.

Tim Murtaugh, Trump’s communications director, said Biden’s “above-ground excursions” are proof the president has momentum in the race.

“President Trump has always had a huge edge on enthusiasm, and draws big, boisterous crowds,” he said, “while Biden could hold a campaign event in a broom closet.”

On Thursday, Biden seemed to return the taunts, releasing an Instagram Reel of him standing silently and sliding a large black mask over his face.

Trump's disastrous rally in Tulsa in late June, which saw lower-than-anticipated turnout and “likely contributed” to spreading the virus, helped Biden justify his slow summer ramp up. But now that the former vice president has reemerged on the campaign trail — stumping three out of five days last week and four of five the previous week— the differences are coming into starker relief.

Nowhere was it more obvious than at the August party conventions. At the Democratic convention, any person who entered the Chase Center in Wilmington in the days where Biden was speaking had to submit to Covid tests and receive negative results for two consecutive days. The testing regimen extended even to people delivering food and custodial workers.

News reporters covering Biden and Harris also arrived days in advance to take consecutive tests and were asked to “self-isolate” in their hotel rooms. Their "crowds" were limited to a couple dozen reporters and some Secret Service, all of whom were masked.

Trump’s re-nomination speech, meanwhile, was delivered to a large, mostly mask-less crowd on the South Lawn of the White House.

Polls show a majority of Americans across party lines say that wearing a mask helps limit the spread of coronavirus. But those same polls also show a partisan divide over the issue. Republicans (32 percent) remain far more likely than Democrats (3 percent) and independents (17 percent) to say masks don’t help to limit the spread, according to the latest Kaiser Family Foundation Health tracking poll on Thursday.

While Biden’s increasing public appearances will test the campaign's ability to keep him at a safe distance, Democrats are not eager to see Biden try to match what they view as his opponent’s rashness.

“The worst thing he could possibly have happen is to try to do what Trump is doing and then a bunch of people get sick,” said Joel Rutherford, chairman of the Democratic Black Caucus of Macomb County in Michigan. “Trump is a showman. He’s all about the optics of things, not the safety. He doesn’t care about social distancing; he’s not concerned about masks. He just wants to look impressive on TV — and that means focusing on the more people he can get out [to his events].”

Still, Biden’s precautions have at times drawn criticism — and chafed some in his party. Media access to Biden’s events during his travel has been restricted to a small pool of reporters, which then shares quotes and observations with the campaign press corps. Critics say this has allowed the Biden campaign to control its message and candidate in ways that would be more difficult with a large group of media following him.

Terrance Warthen, former co-chair of Our Wisconsin Revolution, said Biden took it too far when he cited Covid concerns in moving his nominating speech to Wilmington, instead of Milwaukee, where the national convention was originally scheduled to take place. Warthen said Biden should have given the speech and could have even taken a safe bus trip and waved out the window, to at least pay respects to the city and state.

“He could have had a very safe, and isolated trip,” Warthen said. “That would have been a cherry on top of a decent remote convention. He has the resources to do it, it’s the middle of a presidential race … Is he taking Wisconsin for granted?”

In Kenosha, there was private grousing from attendees who said they expected to pose for individual pictures with Biden. And on Labor Day, a Milwaukee TV reporter told Harris that locals were disappointed Wilmington was treated to a post-convention fireworks show, rather than their city.

Harris responded that it was a decision “no one was excited to make” and emphasized that her own Labor Day gatherings were small and vigilant: “all of us wearing our masks, indoors, being at least six feet apart, not having as big of a group as we would have liked,” she said.

Added Harris: “This is what we have to do in a Covid world.”

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Russia is back, wilier than ever — and it’s not alone

Russian operatives are using a sneakier, more sophisticated version of their 2016 playbook to undermine the November election — and this time, groups inside and outside the U.S. are furthering their goal of sowing chaos.

Kremlin-backed operatives are flooding social media with fake accounts and stoking racial divisions around topics like Black Lives Matter. Articles in state-owned Russian media with millions of U.S. readers online seek to dampen Joe Biden’s appeal among progressives and echo President Donald Trump’s unsupported claims about voting fraud.

At the same time, Russian state-backed hackers are waging cyberattacks against political parties, campaigns, consultants and others tied to the U.S. elections — using more elaborate deceptions than in 2016, Microsoft said last week.

So far, the 2020 race hasn’t featured any obvious repeats of the mass hacking and dumping of confidential documents that undermined Hillary Clinton at key moments during the 2016 campaign. U.S. intelligence agencies later blamed that breach on a covert Kremlin effort to torpedo the Democratic nominee and help Trump win.

But security researchers, former intelligence officials and lawmakers now worry that the Russians may still have a hand they haven’t played.

“One thing we know that happened in 2016 was Russia, particularly with misinformation and disinformation, tried to exacerbate those divisions that we see play out in real time in America,” Senate Intelligence Vice Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) told an audience at a cybersecurity conference last week. “I’m very, very concerned in these last 50-plus days whether Russia could try to exacerbate those kinds of racial divisions again.”

In some ways, Russia’s job is easier than it was in 2016. American, Chinese and Iranian copycats are now pumping out falsehoods likely to seed the same divisions and doubts about the legitimacy of the election, often mimicking tactics first deployed by the Kremlin.

And the biggest threat this year may be Americans themselves. Many have embraced a deluge of fringe ideas and misinformation to a degree that may dwarf those foreign efforts. Extremists in the U.S. have adopted much of Moscow’s online strategy, including creating fake online personas to pump out falsehoods. Case in point: The QAnon conspiracy theory, which alleges a plot by elite pedophiles and the “deepstate” to overthrow Trump, has gone so mainstream it’s poised to send adherents to Congress.

“The scale, scope and, most importantly, the impact of domestic disinformation is far greater than any foreign government could do to the United States,” said Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which tracks online influence campaigns — and was itself the victim of recent Russian cyberattacks.

“Russia is continuing to evolve its tactics,” he added. “But the playing field has shifted since 2016.”

Worst-case scenarios

The question of what exactly Russia is up to has spawned a political brawl in Washington, where congressional Democrats have accused the Trump administration of failing to disclose all it knows about the Kremlin’s activities. They also say the president is pushing a false narrative that this year’s most potent election threat comes from China, which Trump contends favors Biden. Intelligence officials have told POLITICO that no evidence backs up those claims.

Still, Trump’s top counterintelligence official, William Evanina, has agreed that Moscow is seeking to attack the election. He told lawmakers last month that Russia aims to “denigrate” Biden “and what it sees as an anti-Russia ‘establishment.” Those efforts — plus influence campaigns by China and Iran — are "a direct threat to the fabric of our democracy," he said in an earlier statement.

Last week, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on four individuals, including Andrii Derkach, a Ukrainian lawyer with ties to Trump, accusing them of being active Russian agents. In particular, the U.S. accused Derkach of leaking doctored audiotapes aimed at discrediting Biden.

“The United States will continue to use all the tools at its disposal to counter these Russian disinformation campaigns,” said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Still, social media posts about those recordings have drawn millions of views among mostly Trump supporters after the president and his allies promoted them, The Associated Press reported Saturday.

Ten U.S. and international national security officials, misinformation experts and tech executives who spoke to POLITICO said their major concerns include a hack of either campaign coming to light only days before Nov. 3. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss national security matters.

That would mirror not only the months of anti-Clinton leaks from 2016, but also the run-up to France’s 2017 presidential election, when Russian hackers released reams of internal documents from Emmanuel Macron’s campaign.

No such leaks have yet been made public in this election. Senior U.S. national security and intelligence officials say they also have seen no new Russian efforts to hack the nation’s election infrastructure, such as voting machines, election device vendors and state voter databases.

But officials warned that Moscow is engaging in information warfare through a combination of attempted social media manipulation, old school propaganda and other dirty tricks.

Conspiracy theories like QAnon and racial divisions stoked by right-wing extremists online appear to be making it more difficult for Russia’s direct campaigns to gain massive followings, with recently exposed Kremlin efforts garnering limited traction with social media users.

But if Moscow still intends to try to weaken the U.S. by generating doubt around the election itself, such homegrown falsehoods would help achieve that goal, according to misinformation experts.

Moscow forced to evolve

Another change from 2016: Tougher oversight by social media companies and increased awareness from U.S. security agencies about Russia’s tactics have forced the Kremlin’s operatives to step up their game.

Before the 2016 election, the Internet Research Agency — a St. Petersburg-based propaganda outfit with ties to the Russian government — was able to buy political ads on Facebook, some of them in rubles, and create fake social media profiles that drew widespread followings around posts on both sides of issues like America’s racial divisions and the country’s treatment of immigrants.

But some of those doors have closed.

After receiving widespread criticism for their 2016 failings, Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube have spent the past two years removing millions of misleading posts and so-called bot networks of fake accounts controlled by Russian operatives. They have also limited the ways Kremlin-owned media outlets can spread their messages online.

On Sept. 1, Facebook and Twitter announced their latest attempts at curbing Russia’s influence by removing a handful of accounts and social media pages linked to an Internet Research Agency campaign to target progressive voters with a fake news website that pumped out left-leaning articles.

Seeking to evade the hunt for fake accounts, the IRA used artificial intelligence to create photos of non-existent people, then built social media personas with those images to push news articles to left-minded online groups, the two companies said. Most strikingly, the IRA also hired freelance journalists to write for a bogus online news outlet called PeaceData that promoted causes favored by Russia, such as attacks on Belarus’ opposition leader, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, and U.S. foreign policy toward Venezuela.

The elaborate tactics highlight how much harder it has become for Russia’s misinformation campaigns to reach Americans on social media, said Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at Graphika, an analytics firm that worked with Facebook on the recent takedown.

But even the new methods did not guarantee success. PeaceData’s English-language social media presence, for instance, failed to gain traction in the U.S. before it was outed as a Kremlin front, garnering just 200 followers after creating its Facebook page in mid-May.

“If you’re running a fake operation, trying to achieve success when you don’t have any real friends is tough,” said Nimmo, who has tracked the IRA’s activities for years. “The underlying reality is that it’s harder to conduct a successful campaign than you may think.”

Russia’s U.S. targets

Still, misinformation experts and national security officials say Moscow is again targeting the same voters as in both the 2016 presidential race and 2018 midterm elections.

The goal: to suppress turnout among disaffected Democratic voters and galvanize Trump supporters to head to the polls.

Last October, for instance, Facebook removed 50 IRA-linked Instagram accounts that had posed as Republican voters and progressive Democrats, according to a review by the social media company and Graphika.

Under usernames like “Confederate Virginia” and “Stop.Trump2020,” Russian operatives — often pretending to be voters in crucial swing states — copied viral memes like images of liberal Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) allegedly promoting anti-Israeli causes from other accounts. They also posted incendiary slogans and calls-for-action on both sides of issues like Black Lives Matter and garnered almost 250,000 followers collectively before the accounts were shut down.

In March, Facebook and Twitter also took down a similar Russian-backed campaign that tricked unsuspecting social media users in Ghana to target African Americans in the U.S. with viral posts depicting police brutality against minorities, including an image of officers allegedly arresting a 6-year-old boy, and calling Trump a racist.

Most of that content was not linked to the 2020 election, according to a review of the fake online content by Graphika. But tech executives and misinformation experts said the campaign had been aimed at building an online following that could then switch to more explicit political content closer to November.

“These types of operations are getting caught earlier and before they have an impact compared to what happened in the past,” said Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy. Then again, he added, “The threat actors will keep on innovating.”

'Russia doesn’t need to be successful in everything'

With weeks left before November’s vote, Russia is not limiting itself to covert tactics.

Over the past two months, the Kremlin has used its extensive state media operations like RT and Sputnik to pump out political messages to both progressive voters and Trump supporters, according to a POLITICO review of these outlets' social media activities.

Since the beginning of the Democratic National Convention in mid-August, for instance, the Kremlin-backed outlets published articles and op-eds attacking Biden for policies like his support for the Iraq War, and claimed that Barack Obama expressed doubt that his former running mate could win the presidency.

Those stories collectively reached thousands of online users, according to a review of activity on CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned tool that analyzes people’s engagement on social media. That represents a fraction of the reach of traditional news outlets’ coverage of the convention, but still allowed Russia to get its message to social media users across the U.S.

The Kremlin’s aim was to sow doubts in the minds of progressive voters, particularly those who had initially backed Bernie Sanders, about whether Biden was worth supporting, said Bret Schafer, a media and digital disinformation fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States' Alliance for Securing Democracy, a think tank in Washington.

The Marshall Fund was one of more than 200 organizations, businesses and people targeted by Russia’s recent hacking efforts, Microsoft said last week.

“It’s a quintessential voter suppression campaign,” Schafer added.

A week later, just as the Republican convention was getting underway, the same Russian media outlets began peddling articles to promote Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that mail-in voter fraud was a widespread problem. Kremlin operatives have been pushing similar pro-Trump messages about voter fraud since at least March, according to an intelligence bulletin from the Department of Homeland Security obtained by ABC News.

That message has continued into September, with articles from RT and Sputnik promoting mail-in fraud accusations garnering, collectively, thousands of comments and shares across social media, according to POLITICO’s analysis of CrowdTangle data.

“What we’re seeing in the U.S. is what Russia has done elsewhere,” said a veteran European national security official, who has tracked the Kremlin’s disinformation activities across multiple elections worldwide since 2016. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because the individual was not authorized to speak publicly on security matters linked to Russia.

“The key is that Russia doesn’t need to be successful in everything that it does,” the official added. “Just the fact that it’s pushing these falsehoods can be enough to muddy the waters before an election.”

Natasha Bertrand and Martin Matishak contributed to this report.

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‘This is f—ing crazy’: Florida Latinos swamped by wild conspiracy theories

MIAMI — George Soros directs a “Deep State” global conspiracy network. A Joe Biden win would put America in control of “Jews and Blacks.” The Democratic nominee has a pedophilia problem.

Wild disinformation like this is inundating Spanish-speaking residents of South Florida ahead of Election Day, clogging their WhatsApp chats, Facebook feeds and even radio airwaves at a saturation level that threatens to shape the outcome in the nation’s biggest and most closely contested swing state.

The sheer volume of conspiracy theories — including QAnon — and deceptive claims is already playing a role in stunting Biden’s growth with Latino voters, who comprise about 17 percent of the state’s electorate.

“The onslaught has had an effect,” said Eduardo Gamarra, a pollster and director of the Latino Public Opinion Forum at Florida International University.

“It’s difficult to measure the effect exactly, but the polling sort of shows it and in focus groups it shows up, with people deeply questioning the Democrats, and referring to the ‘Deep State’ in particular — that there’s a real conspiracy against the president from the inside,” he said. “There’s a strain in our political culture that’s accustomed to conspiracy theories, a culture that’s accustomed to coup d'etats.”

Gamarra, a political science and international relations professor with extensive experience polling in Latin America and Hispanic voters in Florida, pointed to recent large-sample surveys of Latinos in the state and in the Latino-heavy county of Miami-Dade. They showed Biden underperforming with this crucial Democratic leaning segment of the electorate, though he’s still running ahead of President Trump by double digits. The race overall in the state is essentially tied.

Florida’s Latino community is a diverse mix of people with roots across Latin America. There’s a large population of Republican-leaning Cubans in Miami-Dade and a growing number of Democratic-leaning voters with Puerto Rican, Colombian, Nicaraguan, Dominican and Venezuelan heritage in Miami and elsewhere in the state. Many register as independents but typically vote Democratic. Those independents — especially recently arrived Spanish-speakers — are seen as more up for grabs because they’re less tied to U.S. political parties and are more likely than longtime voters to be influenced by mainstream news outlets and social media.

Democrats fear that’s where the role of disinformation and conspiracy theories might prove effective against Biden, because it plants seeds of doubt in an otherwise-Democratic bloc of the electorate that the former vice president needs to win. The net effect would be to depress turnout, possibly enabling President Donald Trump to carry a state that is essential to his reelection.

Biden’s struggles can’t all be chalked up to election disinformation. The GOP under Trump mastered social media, especially Facebook use, in 2016 and even Democrats acknowledge that Republicans have made inroads in the aggressive use of WhatsApp encrypted messaging.

At the same time, there has been a rise of Spanish-language conservative media, especially revolving around politics connected to Colombia and Venezuela, that are increasingly showing up in the social media feeds of South Florida’s Latin America diaspora communities. They’re finding common cause with Cuban-Americans, who dominate Spanish-language radio airwaves and have been a bulwark of Republican support in Florida’s otherwise Democratic-leaning and diverse Hispanic communities.

But where radio is easy to hear for all, Facebook is harder to track. And the encrypted messaging system it bought, WhatsApp, is even more difficult.

WhatsApp group chats are widely popular among Latin Americans and other immigrant communities in the U.S. because the app doesn't require a U.S. phone number or specific mobile service provider, making it easy to stay in touch with family abroad via text or voice communication. Group chats within the closed network can easily be created with dozens of people anywhere in the world. Plus, iPhones aren’t as popular in Latin America — meaning iMessage chats are not an option for many.

Political campaigns, social-justice movements and support groups have followed along, making WhatsApp a top tool for reaching voters in Latin America and from Latin America.

In South Florida, veteran Latino Democratic strategist Evelyn Perez-Verdia noticed this summer that the WhatsApp groups dedicated to updates on the pandemic and news for the Colombian and Venezuelan communities became intermittently interspersed with conspiracy theories from videos of far-right commentators or news clips from new Spanish-language sites, like Noticias 24 and PanAm Post, and the YouTube-based Informativo G24 website.

“I’ve never seen this level of disinformation, conspiracy theories and lies,” Perez-Verdia, who is of Colombian descent, said. “It looks as if it has to be coordinated.”

Republicans say people on both sides of the political aisle are sharing disinformation organically, although they can’t point to similar conspiracy theories espoused by the left. And they accuse Democrats of labeling every opinion or news story they disagree with as disinformation.

For instance, in a Covid WhatsApp chat group, a Republican posted a statement that real Catholics can’t be Democrats, which Perez-Verdia found objectionable. But the group chat’s founder and administrator, businessman and former Republican Miami-Dade County Commission candidate Alfred Santamaria, said he didn’t ban the comment because he believed people should have freedom of expression.

Still, Santamaria conceded, political toxicity is rising on the platform.

“I see more tension, more fighting, more radicalism. I see a level of tension of people posting for and against the administration,” he said.

Some of the information shared in chat groups and pulled from YouTube and Facebook goes beyond hyperbolic and caustic rhetoric.

On Informativo G24, long-time Colombian news anchor Sandra Valencia brings on guests via webcam for discussions about Latin America and U.S. politics with analysis that often relies on conspiracy theories, such as how Black Lives Matter and other activist groups are planning a “siege” on the White House later this month. The site does not detail who funds it, but asks supporters to donate to a PayPal account registered to Valencia.

Valencia bills her Spanish-language YouTube page, which has more than 378,000 followers, as a channel for geopolitical analysis. But it often resembles English-language right-wing news sources, such as Infowars, sharing conspiracy theories and strong anti-globalization messages.

And unlike the conspiracy theories that circulate in English-language news media and social media, there’s relatively little to no Spanish-language media coverage of the phenomenon nor a political counterpunch from the left.

Some of the disinformation discussed on Informativo G24 has been led by Omar Bula-Escobar, a former United Nations representative and Colombian geopolitical analyst, who in recent years has become a frequent guest on various Latin American radio and television news shows to talk about globalization. Bula-Escobar, who’s also a frequent guest on Miami-based Radio Caracol — which is one of Colombia’s main radio networks and widely respected throughout Latin America — has gained an increasing amount of notoriety for pushing the claim, often seen as anti-Semitic, that billionaire George Soros is “the world’s biggest puppet master” and is the face of the American Democratic Party.

“Who’s going to celebrate the day, God forbid, Trump loses? Cuba; ISIS, which Trump ended; Hezbollah, which Obama gave the greenlight to enter Latin America; Iran; China… All the filth of the planet is against Donald Trump. So, if you want to be part of the filth, then go with the filth,” Bula-Escobar said in a recent episode of Informativo G24.

Other shared content has included a translated clip of Christian conservative pastor John MacArthur claiming that there is no pandemic and coronavirus death numbers have been wildly exaggerated.

In June, a Noticias 24, a Venezuela-focused news site that has a large following in Latin America, amplified disinformation with a story bearing the headline “social networks also accuse Joe Biden of being a pedophile.” A month later, when the lie resurfaced, “#BidenPedofilio” trended in Spain.

On Facebook, a Puerto Rican-born pastor Melvin Moya has circulated a video titled “Signs of pedophilia” with doctored videos of Biden inappropriately touching girls at various public ceremonies to a song in the background that says “I sniffed a girl and I liked it.” The fake video posted on Sept. 1 has received more than 33,000 likes and 2,400 comments.

Much of the shared content cannot be traced to a specific campaign or political organization. Still, fake videos and news stories are being widely shared in Facebook groups offering support for Trump.

And various fake stories across WhatsApp and Facebook claim that Nicolás Maduro’s socialist party in Venezuela and U.S. communist leaders are backing Biden.

“It’s really just a free-for-all now,” said Raúl Martínez, a Democrat who served as mayor of the largely conservative, heavily Cuban-American city of Hialeah for 24 years and is now host of a daily radio show on Radio Caracol. “It’s mind boggling. I started in politics when I was 20. I’ve never seen it like this.”

Martínez, 71, said it has been particularly frustrating to see the prevalence of disinformation in South Florida Spanish-language stations, which many older Latinos in the area still rely on for information.

“When I hear from other stations, they haven’t just sipped the Kool-Aid. They drank the whole thing,” Martínez said.

Radio Caracol, for its part, received unwelcome attention Aug. 22 when it aired 16 minutes of paid programming from a local businesssman who launched into an anti-Black and anti-Semitic rant that that claimed a Biden victory would mean that the U.S. would fall into a dictatorship led by “Jews and Blacks.” The commentator claimed that Biden is leading a political revolution “directed by racial minorities, atheists and anti-Christians” and supports killing newborn babies.

When Miami state Sen. Annette Taddeo, a Colombian-American who is also Jewish, heard the programming, she quickly called out the station on Twitter for “the disgusting message, spoken by Trump supporters,” adding that “We all — regardless of parties — have an obligation to repudiate and condemn this pro-Nazi and racist discourse.”

However, the 16-minute program did not receive coverage from local media outlets despite the outwardly racist and xenophobic messaging, a reminder that much of the Spanish-language disinformation and conspiracy theories circulating in South Florida remain unchecked.

Caracol management promptly apologized for the content and said it banned the commentator, local businessman Jorge Gonzalez, from the airwaves. A Caracol spokesman said Gonzalez had initially purchased the radio time to talk about business, not politics, let alone racist politics. Gonzalez couldn’t be reached for comment.

Then, on Friday, the editor of the Spanish-language sister paper of The Miami Herald, called El Nuevo Herald, publicly apologized for its own paid-media scandal after running a publication called “Libre” as a newspaper insert that attacked Black Lives Matter and trafficked in anti-Semitic views.

"What kind of people are these Jews? They're always talking about the Holocaust, but have they already forgotten Kristallnacht, when Nazi thugs rampaged through Jewish shops all over Germany? So do the BLM and Antifa, only the Nazis didn't steal; they only destroyed,” the ad insert said.

The publication said it’s suspending its relationship with Libre.

Conspiracy theories — especially revolving around QAnon, which posits that Trump is fighting a global cabal of Satanic pedophiles — are spreading across Spanish-language radio in Miami as well, said Roberto Tejera, a political independent who has a show on Actualidad Radio. Tejera said QAnon is a constant on another station, La Poderosa, whose station management also did not respond to messages seeking comment.

“It’s not right-wing. I don’t have a problem with right-wing stuff. It’s QAnon stuff. This is conspiracy theory. This goes beyond. This is new. This is a new phenomenon in Spanish speaking radio. We Cubans are not normal,” Tejera laughed, “but this is new. This is crazy. This is f---ing crazy.”

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Trump officials race against time to build massive vaccine tracking system

The Trump administration is betting it can get millions of coronavirus shots to the Americans who need them most using a new, unproven data system that threatens to bypass state trackers that have long been mainstays in public immunization programs.

The effort, funded by an almost $16 million sole-source contract, would help public health officials schedule Covid-19 immunizations, and manage vaccine supplies.

States already have information systems, called vaccine registries, that perform the same basic functions and can help doctors see what shots patients already have. But the Trump administration — which has left critical questions about the Covid-19 recovery unanswered while urging states to take the lead — believes that the scope of the pandemic requires new infrastructure to cover all the providers who might be involved in the response.

The so-called Vaccine Administration Management System is the latest big health data project the administration has launched and follows this summer’s bungled rollout of a new system to track hospital coronavirus cases that displaced a system long used by states and the CDC. The vaccine system is being developed by Deloitte using technology from Salesforce and has been tested in a series of pilot projects in four states over the summer.

The CDC says it expects an initial version of the software to be available next month. That worries states who aren't yet sure whether they'll need to use the new system or be able to enhance their existing ones in time. The administration also hasn't yet specified exactly what information will have to be entered as vaccinations begin.

“It’s this bizarre, murky, muddy situation,” said Rebecca Coyle, executive director of the American Immunization Registry Association, which helps states keep tabs on the childhood and adult vaccinations.

Salesforce and Deloitte declined comment.

The federal government is telling states to be ready to administer multiple prospective Covid-19 vaccines, most requiring two shots at different times, in the coming months.

Choreographing that many vaccinations poses a huge logistical challenge. At the heart of the job is software to track in real time if vaccines are working or producing adverse effects; to prevent patients from accidentally receiving two different vaccines; and to verify identities and ensure the shots go to health workers and others designated at the front of the line.

The states' existing vaccine-trackers, which have been fine-tuned over decades, could handle some of that work. Local health clinics are already familiar with the technology and could, in theory, be able to use the systems for any coronavirus shot that's developed, the way they do for tetanus, polio, chickenpox and other common vaccines.

But officials acknowledge that some new or under-resourced health clinics may not yet be linked to these systems. And states are concerned about whether the federal government will seek tough new data reporting requirements that will essentially force them to use the new software. The CDC confirmed it's seeking one contentious category of information: "identifiable" data tracking specific individuals, which experts say is legally tricky to comply with.

Federal officials may want to examine a vast breadth of data to track vaccination efforts, such as information on race and occupation, which current state systems don't have.

CDC said it’s requiring the data that's collected to be sent to a secure database, to weed out duplicate reports. After that, it will then be reported without identifying information to the government. Coyle says registries can perform the same functions already.

Health care providers who may use the new federal vaccine system haven't yet had the chance to preview it, according to several lobbyists and trade groups.

“They have not talked to the health systems at all about it,” said Janis Orlowski, the chief health care officer at the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Letting end-users test such systems is a basic checklist item in health software development, to reduce the odds of unwelcome surprises when an actual system is rolled out. The CDC says training sessions are in the works, and that state immunization programs could have joined calls earlier this month to walk through the program.

“What CDC is looking to do with the [new system] is to provide a tool that would allow that data capture, allow scheduling, things that wouldn’t ordinarily be the state’s responsibility,” said Claire Hannan, the executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers.

One state official familiar with the effort said CDC is expecting detailed daily reports once vaccinations begin.

“The reporting requirements are steep, and if our providers can’t meet those, then they can’t provide the vaccine,” said Kris Ehresmann, the Minnesota Department of Health’s infectious disease director.

Staff in Minnesota’s public health department have seen partial demonstrations of the new technology but "haven’t been able to pilot or play with so we don’t know if it will meet our ... needs,” Ehresmann said.

There may not be much time to figure that out. States must submit their vaccination plans to the CDC by next month, and the Trump administration has told governors they should get ready for coronavirus vaccine distribution by Nov. 1. Coyle said the new data system is expected to roll out Oct. 1— after officials originally set an Oct. 20 target date.

The uncertainty is leaving states stuck between deciding whether to enhance their own IT systems in the hopes they'll pass muster or to go with the federal one, with only vague assurances it will help meet vaccine scheduling and supply needs.

“The data piece is big,” Hannan said. “If you're going to make changes to make sure you're collecting the right information, those take some time, and you may have to be hiring a contractor or a vendor to make those changes.”

“The importance of the data cannot be understated,” said Adriane Casalotti, chief of government affairs for the National Association of County and City Health Officials. “If local health departments don’t have access to that data in as near real-time as possible, you’re not going to be able to really use it to make changes to ensure that we’re getting the vaccine to who needs it.”

CDC, in a statement, said that there are “inconsistent and disparate capabilities” among the states and that some systems require modernization to support increased reporting, especially to receive data in real-time. The agency added that data collected through the new system will flow back into existing state vaccine databases, and that it’s being built “given the accelerated timeline needed to implement a national, coordinated vaccine tracking approach.”

“We believe it’s very important for us to have end-to-end vaccine tracking and dose-level accountability,” Nancy Messonnier, director of CDC's Center for the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said in July. “That data is crucial to allow flexibility in targeting, in allocation, in ordering, in vaccine management.”

Federal officials outlined gaps in the existing system in a slide deck, including some state systems' inability to communicate with each other. In addition to the new reporting system, CDC is planning for states’ and providers’ information to be fed into a central hub, known as the Immunization Gateway, with the goal of having up-to-date information on coronavirus immunization.

But the schedule is daunting if states want to receive real-time data. Onboarding states’ current immunization systems to the central hub “may not be feasible for every jurisdiction” before the country begins vaccinating the first group of people, the CDC said in a statement. “In these cases, data will be provided to [the state systems] as quickly as possible.”

Health information officials are concerned about patient-matching, a phenomenon in which patients with the similar names are mistaken with one another. Poor quality information has bedeviled the health care system since the beginning of the pandemic. Shaun Grannis, vice president of data and analytics at the Regenstrief Institute, said while the CDC team is serious about addressing the issue, it's nevertheless a concern. The agency says its system "facilitates" pre-identification of eligible patients by an organization or employer.

For all that promise, though, states are facing a set of looming deadlines without a clear sense of their options.

“More and more states are unsure of how to proceed,” Coyle said. “This is one of the biggest contributors to my increased Tums consumption.”

Dan Goldberg contributed to this report.

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