'Our mantra is chaos': Republican researchers target 2020 Democrats

[DonViejo]

The America Rising committee monitors everything the candidates do, hoping the large field will work in Trump’s favor

Ben Jacobs in Washington
@Bencjacobs

Sat 6 Apr 2019 01.00 EDT Last modified on Sat 6 Apr 2019 01.26 EDT

Democrats are more than a year away from selecting their presidential nominee. Nonetheless, Republicans are already taking aim at the leading contenders.

Even as the field swells to nearly two dozen, the other party is monitoring public appearances, requesting court records and dissecting past utterances. This is not an effort that involves dirty tricks or elaborate snooping. Instead, it involves a lot of young people watching a lot of C-Span.

Mike Czin, a Democratic operative who worked on Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, said opposition research was “one of the most misunderstood things on campaigns”.

“It’s publicly available information that’s just well collated and tells a story about an opponent,” he said, citing as an example stories about Obama’s 2012 opponent, Mitt Romney, remodeling his office or installing a car elevator at one of his homes.

This, he said, was not “digging through garbage cans and dumpsters”.

more
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/05/election-2020-america-rising-republican-opposition-research

[Butterflylady]

1. And they're going to be loaded for bear.

The shame of it all, is the fact that they will go after family members also just like they did with Kitty Dukakis the wife of Michael Dukakis when he ran against pappy Bush. It wasn't pretty and this will be worse.