A pro-Trump mob breaks into the U.S. Capitol on January 06, 2021. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
On the eve of tomorrow’s Atlanta debate between President Biden and former President Donald Trump, the Biden-Harris campaign is redoubling its efforts to remind North Carolina voters of the deadly January 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol insurrection in which Trump supporters attempted to violently overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Today, the campaign will release an ad (see below) via television buys in several up-for-grabs states, including North Carolina, that features footage of some of the violent events of that day alongside narration from Chris Swanson, a newly elected Michigan Sheriff, who decries Trump’s failure to stop the insurrection as a “neglect of duty.”
In a statement, the Biden-Harris campaign described the ad as part of a concerted effort to underscore “the stark contrast between Donald Trump’s campaign of revenge and retribution and President Biden’s respect for democracy and law and order.”
The new effort to remind voters of the January 6 events comes on the heels of two recent political events in North Carolina in which Democrats say Republican activists, in effect, doubled down on the kind of messaging that helped spur the insurrection:
An event held Monday in Cary by Western Wake Republicans that featured, among other GOP speakers, Stephen Horn — a self-described independent journalist, who was convicted of four misdemeanors for his participation in the January 6 insurrection. Horn claimed during his trial that he was merely recording the events of the day as a journalist, but the jury rejected that claim.
Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley’s speech in Charlotte last Thursday in which Whatley — who came to prominence as one of the most vocal champions of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” efforts after the 2020 election — appeared as part of the GOP’s “Protect the Vote” tour. As the Charlotte Observer reported, the public portion of Whatley’s appearance focused largely noncontroversial topics like the importance of getting out the vote. Democratic critics, however, said that the closed portion of the event, which focused on training volunteer activists, was kept private “to prevent scrutiny of their plans to engage in voter suppression.”
Notwithstanding the false narrative that Trump and many of his supporters spread about the 2020 election outcome and their repeated efforts in the years since to promote unfounded claims about widespread voter fraud, Republicans have repeatedly insisted that their current efforts — such as legislation under consideration in the North Carolina General Assembly to more tightly regulate voting by mail — are only designed to ensure that the 2024 election is conducted fairly and honestly, and not to suppress participation by voters likely to vote Democratic.
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