Weeks after the Republican National Committee deployed a Willie Horton-style attack on Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine, a Republican congressional candidate in Wisconsin is using the widely decried tactic as well.
In a new ad, Mike Gallagher, the Republican candidate in Wisconsin’s 8th congressional district, smears Democratic candidate Tom Nelson for voting in favor of a program that gives the Department of Corrections the authority to grant early release to inmates convicted of misdemeanors or nonviolent felonies.
Nelson, the County Executive of Outagamie County, served in the Wisconsin State Assembly from 2005–2011. He was elected Assembly Majority Leader in 2008 — the year before the legislature, then under Democratic control, approved the early release program.
The ad begins with two elderly women talking about crime in northeast Wisconsin. “I do lock my doors, which I never did,” says one. “The atmosphere has changed,” says the other.
In truth, serious crime in the region around Green Bay — the largest city in the eighth district — hit a half-decade low this summer.
But Gallagher, a former marine who served as foreign policy aide to Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) during his presidential run, tries to link Nelson to the nonexistent crime wave by fear-mongering about convicts who were released early.
“Tom Nelson voted for early prison release,” the narrator says. “Felons convicted of battery. Burglary. Even homicide. One was released despite warnings of the grave danger he posed. Tom Nelson. Too much risk.”
This style of fear-mongering about convicts was pioneered by an ad put together in 1988 by a political action committee aligned with Republican presidential candidate George H.W. Bush. The ad attacked Democratic presidential candidate Gov. Michael Dukakis (D-MA) for the weekend furlough of a black prisoner named Willie Horton who didn’t return to custody and later raped a white woman. It’s remembered as one of the most notorious racial attacks in the history of politics.
The ad forced Bush to fend off allegations he was running a racist campaign. It’s also widely credited for helping him overcome a significant polling deficit to win the election. Nonetheless, shortly before his death in 1991, Lee Atwater — who, as Bush’s campaign manager, helped develop the Horton attack — apologized to Dukakis.
“In 1988, fighting Dukakis, I said that I ‘would strip the bark off the little bastard’ and ‘make Willie Horton his running mate,’” Atwater said, according to a New York Times report. “I am sorry for both statements: the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not.”
Nelson, who faces an uphill battle against Gallagher in the red-leaning district, has won the endorsement of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association. The two are running for the congressional seat currently occupied by Republican Rep. Reid Ribble, who is retiring.
Wisconsin has the second largest racial disparity in incarceration rates for blacks and whites, according to The Sentencing Project.