Republican attacks take aim at non-white congressional candidates

Expert says Donald Trump’s effective reliance on personal attacks have caused ‘racist and bigoted’ ads to become more prevalent

Negative campaign advertisements are as familiar in US elections as door-knocking and yard signs. But as the 2018 midterm election campaign pulls into its homestretch, Republican attacks in two congressional races happening 3,000 miles apart have triggered alarm bells for targeting non-white candidates in an apparent effort to highlight their “otherness”.

The first comes from California’s 50th district, where Ammar Campa-Najjar is running as a Democrat for a seat currently occupied by the Republican Duncan Hunter. NBC’s Chuck Todd, a veteran political reporter and commentator called the spot “maybe the most shocking and outrageous political ad I’ve ever seen”, in a Meet The Press Daily segment.

The ad zeroes in on Campa-Najjar’s heritage – his mother is Mexican American and his father is Palestinian – calling him a “Palestinian, Mexican, millennial Democrat” who is “working to infiltrate Congress” and a “security risk”.

“At best it’s desperate. That’s putting it mildly,” said Campa-Najjar, who also called the effort “blatantly ignorant” and “unhinged from reality”.

Last Wednesday a bipartisan group of dozens of national security veterans decried the spot as a “racist and bigoted” attack. “The baseless allegation that he is somehow a ‘security threat’ is an affront to our professionalism as national security experts, our American values, and our collective national dignity,” the group said in an open letter.

The ad accuses Campa-Najjar of being supported by the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood with no evidence, and despite the fact that Campa-Najjar is a Christian. “It’s just so interesting that we live in a world where Islamophobia even extends to non-Muslims,” Campa-Najjar told the Guardian.

The rest of the ad is focused on trying to tie Campa-Najjar to his grandfather, Mohammed Najjar, who was a member of the Black September Organization which plotted the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre that killed 11 Israeli athletes and a German police officer.

Campa-Najjar was born 16 years after his grandfather was killed by Israeli forces for his role in the attacks, but Hunter’s advert accused Campa-Najjar of changing his name to “hide his family’s ties to terrorism”.

The ad also claimed that Campa-Najjar’s father, Yasser Najjar once said the victims of the attack “deserved to die”, which was reported by right wing news network One America, but for which the original news segment did not provide any attribution.

Campa-Najjar said he and his father were now “mostly estranged”, but that the quote was “completely diametrically opposed” to what he knows of his father’s worldview, and public comments Yasser Najjar has made.

Campa-Najjar did recently change his name from Yassir-Najjar to Campa-Najjar, but has professionally gone by the latter for years, and said the change was to reflect the influence of his mother’s family, which primarily raised him.

In a email statement to the Guardian, Hunter’s spokesman, Michael Harrison, declined to provide a source for the claims about the Muslim Brotherhood or the quote from Campa-Najjar’s father, but insisted that “the facts … raise national security concerns”.

Harrison added: “any suggestion of racism or Islamophobia is completely contrary to the fact that Congressman Hunter has endorsed a Muslim candidate” in a different local race.

Campa-Najjar, who worked at the labor department’s office of public affairs under Barack Obama, attributes the ad to desperation in a race that a recent LA times poll suggests may be tightening. While California’s 50th typically leans Republican, Campa-Najjar is buoyed by general wave of Democratic support and by the fact that Hunter was recently indicted on corruption charges, which he denies.

“The fact is, there’s me, who was cleared by the FBI to work at White House, and there’s Hunter who was indicted by the FBI,” said Campa-Najjar. “So the law’s on my side and not his side as of late.”

David Schweidel, a professor of marketing at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University said ads like this may increasingly be more en vogue in the post-2016 election climate largely because Trump’s well-documented reliance on personal attacks proved effective enough to win the White House.

“We saw pundit after pundit kind of commenting on the fact that these personal attacks weren’t coming across as presidential and how ‘it’s the wrong temperament’. Well, guess what, people responded to it,” Schweidel said.

Schweidel was part of a research team that looked at the effects of negative political ads in a 2018 study. They found that negative advertising persists because, “as much as people say they don’t like it, it’s extremely effective”.

He added that spots like Hunter’s are generally not intended to sway undecided voters, but to inspire the base to show up at the polls. As US politics continues its long slog towards ever-increased partisanship, elections become more about turning out the base and less about converting undecideds: which could mean negative and personal attacks only become more prevalent.

On the other side of the country, attack ads on a black congressional candidate’s former career as a rapper have taken on racist undertones in a district that, like California’s 50th, is predominantly white. Antonio Delgado, a Harvard Law graduate and Rhodes Scholar is running as a Democrat for a seat in New York’s 19th district currently held by Republican John Faso.

As a young man, Delgado released a socially conscious and political hip-hop album under the name AD the Voice in 2006.

Since the album came to light, a number of Republican groups have seized on it to paint Delgado’s flirtation with hip-hop as out of step with the values of the district. The Congressional Leadership Fund released an advert spot referring to Delgado as a “New York City liberal” and “[Nancy] Pelosi’s candidate” before clipping a handful of Delgado’s song lyrics, overlaying dramatically loud “bleep” sounds over words like “fuck”, “sex” and “porno”.

The ad also accused Delgado of “lacing his raps with extremist attacks on American values”, playing a clip where Delgado states, factually, that more civilian lives were lost during the Iraq war than the 9/11 attacks.

Faso didn’t place the ads, but has not condemned them either, saying in a statement this summer that “Mr Delgado’s lyrics paint an ugly and false picture of America.”

The subtext of the ads was seemingly illuminated in a New York Times article from July when Gerald Benjamin, a friend of Faso’s and director of the Benjamin Center at State University of New York at New Paltz, posed the question: “Is a guy who makes a rap album the kind of guy who lives here in rural New York and reflects our lifestyle and values?”

He continued: “People like us, people in rural New York, we are not people who respond to this part of American culture,” eventually sparking protests from students at his home campus in New Paltz. Benjamin later apologized for his remarks.

Delgado has said the ads are an effort to “otherize” him in the eyes of the white voters he needs to win.

“It’s insulting to people in the district that Faso believes they will buy into this sort of deception and dishonesty,” said Delgado’s campaign manager, Allyson Marcus, noting that a similarly themed Super Pac radio ad was even pulled by the local radio station WDST, which called the ad “highly offensive” and “factually distorted” in a statement.

“The truth is Antonio grew up in a working-class family in Schenectady, right here in upstate New York, where he learned the values of hard work and accountability. The real question is, why won’t Faso condemn these divisive and deceptive ads,” Marcus asked.

Faso did not respond to a request for comment.