Showing Up
Oppo Research Helped Sink Harris, But Who Will Claim the Trophy?
This is my first Oppo File post since mid-September of last year. By way of explanation, I paused Oppo File for a couple of reasons: (1) My best sources were in the final stretches of various campaigns, and mostly unavailable to pass tidbits along; and (2) it seemed to me that flashing back to Great Moments in Oppo Research History wouldn’t be of much interest in the midst of the 2024 election.
(I was also absorbed with researching a new play, which will have its first staged reading this June in California, and writing a piece for the online magazine AirMail about the Rev. Billy James Hargis.)
My final post of 2024 bemoaned the lack of oppo research in the Trump-Harris debate:
The debate, given my particular interest, was a disappointment. Harris rolled out the “greatest hits” on Trump’s record and statements, but didn’t break any new ground.
As has been widely noted, Trump spent most of the debate relitigating various grievances. If his debate prep team briefed him with oppo research on Harris, you wouldn’t know it from watching his performance.
As it turns out, oppo research was about to play a big role in the presidential contest.
I’m referring to CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski’s September 9, 2024 story about then-Senator Kamala Harris’ 2019 ACLU questionnaire, in which she endorsed “providing gender transition surgery to detained migrants.”
It’s unclear how Kaczynski came across this questionnaire. An ACLU spokesperson told him the questionnaire had been on the organization’s website since 2019, but “page source” data indicated someone “reposted” the questionnaire in August 2024, after Joe Biden stepped aside and Harris became the Democratic Party’s nominee.
Then a video surfaced, in which Harris made a similar point. You can watch the entire video here.
In a post-election interview with David Axelrod, Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita said this:
“[W]e were religious in our discipline in terms of making sure that the only conversation we were talking about was [the] economy. Economics, that was the number one issue… And then that, you know, the video showed up and then, you know, the K-File I think had done some clip on it or something.”
Note the passive voice: the video “showed up.”
Excerpts from that video then appeared in several ads that the Trump campaign ran heavily in swing states. You can watch one of the ads here.
The video and the questionnaire proved to be very useful to the Trump campaign, as California Governor Gavin Newsom acknowledged on his new podcast:
Charlie Kirk: “But the most effective ad of this election cycle, the most effective ad - you know what it is.”
Gavin Newsom: “Devastating. ‘Trump is for you. She’s for they/them.’ Devastating… And she didn’t even react to it, which was even more devastating… It was a great ad… Brutal.”
When the various 2024 campaign books come out this year and next, perhaps we will learn more about how the 2019 ACLU questionnaire and the 2019 video “showed up” in the closing weeks of the presidential campaign.
The Trump ads, by the way, have their own Wikipedia page.
Oppo Research in the News…
Former oppo researcher Rahm Emanuel is considering a run for the White House.
President Trump signed an executive order targeting the law firm Perkins Coie for a pattern of “egregious activity,” included the hiring of Fusion GPS, “which then manufactured a false ‘dossier’ designed to steal an election.”