Enough Promises Ohio, which was created last month, has spent a combined $1.58 million to promote Greg Levy and oppose Brown, according to recent filings from from the Federal Election Commission. Levy, a candidate with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, is also on the ballot in the tight race for Senate between Brown and Ohio GOP Sen. Jon Husted. He’s running a long-shot bid, currently polling at 5%, but could siphon away more progressive voters from Brown.
The super PAC spent a total of $828,359 on mailers supporting Levy or opposing Brown. Spectrum News, The Washington Post and Axios previously reported Enough Promises Ohio spent $400,000 on such mailers, but the expenditure has since grown.
The group also poured an additional $753,000 into ads supporting Levy and opposing Brown over the weekend, including one video ad on Google that knocks Brown as someone who “sold us out” and boosts “real progressive Greg Levy.”
Levy himself has distanced himself from the PAC, calling its boosting of him an “attempted deception of voters” that’s “a form of digital blackface.” Levy is Black. His spokesperson, Charlie Koenigsmark, also told POLITICO that he and the campaign “completely condemn this attempt to manipulate voters.”
Gonna be captain buzzkill here and predict that the strategy will probably work.
It'll: enrage establishment Dems against PSL while also pulling enough disaffected Dem voters to PSL to tilt the election to Republicans. The only real question is: will Republicans keep PSL around as a bogeymen to split liberals and keep Dems on the throat of PSL or will they harass and destroy PSL in the next stage of the red scare?
An absolutely necessary step of the process that was underway already, so this just accelerates it
Polling still looks like Brown wins, but also we don't care. If we appear to be a spoiler, that is a huge profile boost for us and draws the people we want at this stage (not MSNBC dems)
They are already attempting to do so in many ways and this raising of our profile will make that more difficult.
Speaking of which: Democrats absolutely refuse to do things on a state level that would actually help them, like Ranked Choice Voting. For every third party voter, democrats can run on “we’ll kick back, relax, and do nothing in office” as usual, but people who want the greens and want to keep the GOP out at all costs will simply not rank the GOP and rank dems last. There, now dems can be the semi-retired do-nothings they always wanted to be.
Ranked choice voting does not help democrats, it creates opportunity for third parties which removes power from both the democrats and the republicans. Even in short term there are also third parties who take votes from republicans. I haven’t seen any data that suggests that third party voters on average prefer democrats over republicans.
Doesn't matter either way for PSL - someone posted the strategy here the other day
https://hexbear.net/post/9828357
Yeah I read through that post; they're doing the Bernie plan of seeking out the biggest voting bloc in the country ("didn't vote"). I think it's great and I hope it works out for them. But Americans are boorish and quick to anger, so if liberals see election results of "Dem 46%, Republicans 48% and PSL 6%," they're going to believe they were owed that 6%, even if all those 6% of voters were previously nonvoters.