While GOP candidate Nikki Haley was campaigning against former President Donald Trump, she declared: “Chaos follows him.” But now, in an ironic twist, fallout from Ms. Haley’s campaign threatens to cause chaos for other Republicans’ campaigns for years to come.
The problem: organizations that supported Ms. Haley recruited non-Republicans to change their voter registrations to the GOP, then encouraged them to vote for her in states that permit “crossover” voting in primaries or caucuses. Thus, in those states, many left-leaning voters now are masquerading as Republicans in voter data files—information that campaigners and pollsters mine to do their work.
This crossover-voting tactic is similar to the “Operation Chaos” initiative that conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh had advocated in years past.
He urged Republican voters to vote Democrat and “keep the primaries going” in 2008, after then Sen. John McCain had locked up the Republican nomination for president. McCain subsequently lost the presidential election to Democrat Barack Obama.
Now Republicans are seeing the tables turned, with costly consequences.
In separate interviews with The Epoch Times, pollsters Rich Baris and Tyler Bowyer, who work with the conservative Turning Point Action political organization, concurred that ripple effects from the Democrat-switching voters could cost Republican candidates tens of millions of dollars.
That financial toll will come from futile marketing efforts and data-cleanup operations; the tainted data could also cause losses in races that Republicans otherwise were positioned to win.
Enhanced Use of Old Tactic
“It’s really been happening for years,” Mr. Bowyer said. “But [what] we’ve realized, over time, is that it’s so detrimental to the Republican Party.”
Even so, this year’s election cycle featured the best-funded, most organized crossover-voting effort either of the interviewees had ever seen.
At election polls in various states, firsthand witnesses for Turning Point Action saw these voters “were organized; they were told to show up,” Mr. Bowyer said.
In several states that held presidential preference contests before Ms. Haley exited the race on March 6, at least 5 percent of the Republican-designated primary voters “are now really Democrats,” Mr. Bowyer said. “You have to basically go back and re-identify who these people are, and there’s really not a great way to do that.”
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