FILE PHOTO: Tallahassee, Florida Mayor, Andrew D. Gillum addresses the audience at the Netroots Nation annual conference for political progressives in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. August 10, 2017. REUTERS/Chris Aluka Berry/File Photo
As Democrat Andrew Gillum is up in a CNN poll (an outlier, but still) of likely voters 54 percent to Republican Ron DeSantis’ 42 percent in Florida, the Democrat is being targeted by new racist robocall.
Ali Vitali and Adam Edelman of NBC obtained audio of the call, which includes a man who calls himself Gillum speaking in a minstrel dialect. In the call, Gillum is called a “negro” and a “monkey,” in case anyone missed the point.
“Well hello there. I is the negro Andrew Gillum and I’ll be askin’ you to make me governor of this here state of Florida,” the voice says.
“My state opponent, who done call me monkey, is doin’ a lot of hollerin’ about how ‘spensive my plans for health care be,” the voice says. A chimpanzee noise is played during the word “monkey.”
That must be how Republicans think black people speak, or rather how their base thinks black people speak, since their base is caught in a Trump time warp of epic proportions.
Republicans already have a leg up in Florida because Florida suppresses hundreds of thousands of potential voters, according to a Center for American Progress study.
Florida is one of only four states that does not allow ex-felons to vote, even after they’ve served their time. They have to wait five to seven years and then appeal to the Governor to have their rights restored.
Republican Governor Rick Scott “has restored voting rights to almost nobody. You have a situation in Florida where 1.6 million ex-felons can’t vote. That’s a staggering number. What that means is that one in 10 people in Florida — including one in five African-Americans in the state — can’t vote because they have a felony conviction.”
So even with all of these handicaps, Republicans still feel like they need a heavy dose of racism to rig the vote.
This Florida racist attack mirrors the larger Republican Get Out the Vote tactic of returning to their old reliable tactic of all racism all the time, as the president fear mongers about a caravan he promised wouldn’t come here if we locked up babies and Republicans suppress the vote all across the south, targeting minorities.
This is what happens when Republicans give tax cuts to the rich and then announce they’re going to make everyone else pay for them by cutting their social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and affordable health insurance and when Republicans lie to people to pretend they support protecting pre-existing conditions as they tweak laws so that insurance companies can deny pre-existing conditions and sell insurance under the ACA that does so.
Republicans have nothing else but their old fallback, racism. Ugly, ugly racism.
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