Disinformation, dark money, ‘looting and rioting’: 2020 election ads bombard Florida
With just over two weeks until polls close on Nov. 3, what was once a trickle of political advertisements has become a deluge.
Amid the mailers about political platforms and emails about how to vote is a near constant stream of false content and misleading information.
Reporters at the Miami Herald have been going through some of the ads to figure out what’s true, what’s not, and who pays for all of this stuff.
This week’s roundup included sometimes confusing text alerts about voting, mailers for local races — including a Hallandale Beach commissioner accused of befriending white supremacists — dark money seeping into a fight over Key West cruise referendums, and messaging intended to stoke fear about “law and order.”
Please visit the Election Ad Decoder to see our full reporting. And if you see an interesting ad or sponsored social media content that we haven’t reported on, please send it to us.
Here’s a quick look at the five biggest takeaways from our reporting this week.
Disinformation in Miami-Dade mayoral race
Voters in Miami-Dade county are receiving a mailer with disinformation claiming that Miami-Dade mayoral candidate Daniella Levine Cava, a Democrat, voted to “defund” the county’s police department by $7.59 million over the summer.
The claim is misleading. Levine Cava did not vote to defund the police. Rather, she voted to re-fund the county’s defunct Independent Review Panel in an attempt to monitor potential police misconduct. While original language in the ordinance called for the funding to be no less than one percent of the Miami-Dade Police Department’s operating budget, which would be equivalent to $7.59 million, the ordinance did not require that the money come from the police budget. Levine Cava and the bill’s sponsor, Barbara Jordan, both said police funding would not be cut to pay for the panel.
In the end, the panel got nowhere near that amount of money — and, as promised, the funds did not come from the police. The county’s 2021 budget, approved in September, supports the panel’s $750,000 budget out of the countywide general fund, a $1.7 billion pool of dollars mostly made up of property taxes that pay for parks, transit, police and other services.
Still, Levine Cava’s opponent, Miami-Dade Commissioner Esteban “Steve” Bovo, a Republican, has hammered her on allegations that she voted to defund police. The race is formally non-partisan.
David Custin, a political consultant for Bovo, disputed that the mailer’s central claim was misleading. “The facts are true, they have been pre-cleared by legal counsel and Levine Cava won’t be allowed to spin or mislead her way out of her actions and voting records,” Custin said.
To see the full ad analysis, search the Ad Decoder for “Levine Cava Defund the Police.”
Fauci ‘taken out of context’
A Facebook ad from the Trump campaign features a quotation from Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, that is used in a misleading way.
Released soon after President Donald Trump left the hospital following his coronavirus diagnosis, the October ad shows Fauci appearing to praise Trump’s response to the pandemic. “I can’t imagine that ... anybody could be doing more,” he says in the ad. But Fauci told CNN that his comments were “taken out of context” and that the campaign used them without permission. He said that he was actually discussing the overall efforts of federal public health officials — and his comments came well before cases and deaths surged nationwide over the summer.
The Trump team pulled the clip from an interview Fauci gave to Fox News in March. Fauci told the New York Times that he wanted the ad taken down. It is still running.
“In my nearly five decades of public service, I have never publicly endorsed any political candidate,” he told CNN.
Claire Wardle of First Draft, a nonprofit that helps identify and combat disinformation, said the ad took “a wider statement about how hard everyone was working at the time” and cut it “to look like Fauci is only talking about Trump.” And because the ad did not include a date with Fauci’s interview, “you wouldn’t know this was from the beginning of the pandemic,” Wardle said.
To see the full ad analysis, search the Ad Decoder for “Fauci disinformation.”
‘Largely a marketing ploy’
Many campaigns and committees on both sides are running ads soliciting campaign contributions that promise your donation will be matched if it’s submitted by a certain time. For example, an email from the Democratic Strategy Institute, a political action committee, sent days after the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, asks for contributions to help “defeat Republicans like Mitch McConnell” and promises a “500%” match of any donations.
While the contributions would go to the Democratic Strategy Institute, which supports Democratic campaigns across the country, campaign finance experts point out that any promises groups or candidates make to match funds are difficult to keep given legal caps on the amount donors are allowed to contribute to political campaigns. And there would be no obvious way for donors to check and see if the match had been made.
“I think these promised matches are largely a marketing ploy from direct-mail fundraising,” Michael Kang, a law professor at Northwestern University, told OpenSecrets. “They stir up contrived urgency.”
To see other ads and sponsored content that promise the same thing, search the Ad Decoder for “donation match.”
‘Looting. Rioting’
Race has become a driving campaign issue as Black Lives Matter protests are held in cities across the nation. One text message from the Trump campaign describes “looting” and “rioting” as the realities of “Biden’s America.”
The timing of the ad suggests it is talking about the Black Lives Matter movement — and it offers a misleading portrayal of how often violence breaks out at BLM protests.
While looting and rioting have taken place during and after some protests, 93% have been peaceful, according to the U.S. Crisis Monitor, a protest-tracking project by the nonprofit Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project and Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative.
“Research review suggests that the protests are largely peaceful. And yet the Trump campaign goes on suggesting ... that they are inducing violence,” said Dipayan Ghosh, a researcher at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. The Miami Herald flagged this ad as “misleading” because it misrepresents the nature of the protests.
Among Democrats, views on race appear to have shifted since the last presidential election In 2016, 57% of Hillary Clinton supporters said that they agreed with the statement that it is “a lot more difficult” to be Black than it is to be White in the United States, the Pew Research Center found. In 2020, 74% of Joe Biden supporters said they agreed with that statement.
In contrast, Trump supporters do not seem to have shifted their views. Eleven percent of Trump supporters in 2016 said it was more difficult to be Black than White. Four years later, the number was 9%, according to Pew.
To see other ads and sponsored content that address the Black Lives Matter movement, search the Ad Decoder for “Black Lives Matter.”
Key West Cruise Fight
In Key West, a bitter fight over ballot initiatives to limit the number of cruise ship passengers disembarking into the city has led to a wave of mailers promoting misleading information.
One argues that reducing cruises will cause “drastic budget cuts” that will lead to fewer police in the streets. The mailer states: “There’s a sound downstairs. Will anyone respond to your call?” Another says the proposals will result in “a massive tax increase. ... Times are tough. Keep your money in your pocket.”
The claims — which the mailers do not attribute to any studies — are misleading.
Yes, the revenue both from fewer fees charged to passengers when they disembark and in lower sales tax from meals not consumed and drinks not quaffed. But there is no reason to believe the ballot initiatives would cause a drastic cut to the city’s revenue, which is based largely on property taxes and not cruise passenger fees. And even in the case of a budget shortfall, there would be no plans to cut funding to police, according to the city manager. The revenue the city makes from cruise ships is not primarily tied to its general fund, which pays for police, fire and emergency services.
The mailers were paid for by so-called “dark money,” making it impossible to know who is responsible for spreading the misleading claims.
If passed, the initiatives would cap the number of daily cruise visitors allowed to come ashore in Key West at 1,500, prohibit ships with a capacity of more than 1,300 passengers from docking, and mandate that the city give priority to ships with “the best environmental and health records.” The restrictions would lower the fee revenue the city collects from passengers visiting Key West. They numbered nearly one million in 2019, generating $6.2 million in gross passenger fee revenues last fiscal year, according to the city. While most of that money went back into maintaining the port, about $1.7 million was used to pay small percentages of employee salaries across city departments, including police and emergency services. Whatever shortfall in that $1.7 million is created by limiting passenger fees would have to be filled through other means.
Greg Veliz, Key West’s city manager, told the Miami Herald that the ballot initiatives would produce a “revenue shortfall” if passed, although he does not expect it to be anything as severe as predicted in the mailers. He said the city would not slash emergency services and would try not to raise taxes. “We’ll cut costs. We’ll find ways to generate money outside of the tax base,” Veliz said. “No one wants to raise taxes. That’s our last resort.”
Although the mailers suggest limiting cruises will damage property and sales tax revenues, cruises are not the foundation of Key West’s tourism-driven economy.
A study commissioned by the cruise industry lobby found cruise passengers and crew contributed just $73 million out of $1.2 billion in overall visitor spending in Key West, or 7%. Cruise ship visitors don’t stay long, but they do account for about 12% of visitor spending on restaurants, retail and recreation — explaining why some local businesses are afraid of losing their patronage.
There would be some long-term economic impact from a decrease in cruise traffic.
The Key West Chamber of Commerce estimates that the cruise ship industry produces $90 million worth of economic impact in Key West per year. It opposes the ballot initiatives. But Scott Atwell, the chamber’s executive vice president, said he thought some of the claims in the mailers were overstated and said he disagreed with their tone. “That is not an approach that the Chamber endorses,” he told the Key West Citizen. “We present facts in a respectful way.”
To see all the ads and sponsored content about the Key West cruise fight, including who paid for them, search the Ad Decoder for “Key West cruise referendum.”
Miami Herald staff writers Douglas Hanks, Taylor Dolven, Samantha Gross and Gwen Filosa contributed to this report.
This story was originally published October 16, 2020 at 2:20 PM.
