Busted: ABC News' 'Uncommitted Voters' at Trump Town Hall Revealed To Be Rabidly Anti-Trump
Let’s say you’re forced to categorize the voting preferences of the following individual based on her social media posts.
She’s a self-described “liberal Democrat” who said she would “be there, volunteering” for Kamala Harris when the California senator was running for president. She’s called President Donald Trump a “f—ing moron,” “pathetic,” “pig,” “swine,” “punk a–” and “LOOSER.” She’s said she’s a liberal because they “are not motivated by money or power, but by humanity and the needs of the people.”
How would you describe her?
According to ABC News, she’s “uncommitted.”
The individual in question is Ellesia Blaque, a professor at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania who The Washington Free Beacon identified as one of the “uncommitted voters” ABC dragged in for a town hall with Trump on Sept. 15.
The undecidedness of these voters was a critical selling point for the 90-minute event, which was broadcast from Philadelphia.
“Much has been made about the disappearing ‘undecided’ vote in 2020,” ABC News said in an article the day of the event.
“A recent Monmouth national poll found only 3% of registered voters hadn’t decided who to vote for, and an NBC/Marist Pennsylvania poll last week pegged the number of undecided voters as 2% of both registered and likely voters.
“But not all voters who have chosen between Trump and [Democratic nominee Joe] Biden have committed to voting for one or the other. This phase of the campaign — with unpredictable formats including town halls and then debates — represents fresh opportunities in a race that remains primed for disruptions.”
So apparently, the network had managed to trap the rare white Bengal tigers of the electoral world, assembled them in a socially distanced manner inside the National Constitution Center (I guess it was pretty easy if there were so few of them) and gave them 90 minutes to pepper the president with questions.
Here is ABC News explaining the event:
So a) either ABC News wasn’t able to find enough of those rare white Bengal tigers so it just bleached a few regular Bengal tigers and called it a day or b) it wasn’t terribly interested in ensuring that the voters brought in were undecided in the first place.
Blaque wasn’t the only “undecided” voter who definitely wasn’t undecided, according to The Free Beacon’s research into the town hall audience’s social media postings.
Philadelphia Pastor Carl Day was also billed as not having made up his mind. However, in August, just weeks before the town hall took place, he posted that he “never once supported trump and won’t now.”
“What I will do is call them out for all their foolery,” he tweeted Aug. 11.
On Aug. 26, meanwhile, Day tweeted, “I totally get what y’all mean when saying ‘Make America great again.’
“Back when the n—–s did what they were told in all industries, wouldn’t have the audacity to try to enter a white establishment and didn’t talk back to the cops. Oh that great America .. gotcha.”
In February 2019, quote-tweeting a Netflix advertisement that showed a video of Heath Ledger’s Joker from “The Dark Knight” and the caption “Name a better villain. I’ll wait,” Day tweeted, “Donald Trump.”
In July 2016, he tweeted that “Trump ain’t no Christian … Many of them aren’t.”
The reason they were all billed as undecided voters, ABC News revealed, was that the individuals “all identified to [the network] as uncommitted.”
As for Blaque, she told MSNBC that she “really did go [to the town hall] with an open mind” but that she “decided to bite the bullet and vote for Biden.”
However, here’s why she was undecided: “I didn’t know if I was going to vote or not — it was never a question of will I vote for Trump or Biden.”
This is a curious way to spend your Tuesday night. If you’re undecided whether you will vote, assumedly because Biden isn’t your cup of tea, what you do is show up to a town hall for Trump. You go through countless layers of security to sit in the same room with the president and others in order to ask him questions. You’re not going to vote for him, but assumedly if he’s not as terrible as you think he is, you’re not going to vote at all. If he’s terrible, you’re going to vote for Biden.
Lo and behold, he was indeed terrible in her eyes. Blaque penned a scathing piece for CNN in which she said she’d come there to ask the president about pre-existing conditions (she has a rare disease called sarcoidosis) and he’d interrupted her before she could get her entire question out.
“He addressed me in a way that made me feel like an inconvenience, rather than his forced constituent (I say forced because I didn’t vote for him in 2016). Encountering my question, one that millions of other Americans have, seemed to be a circumstance he had to suffer through to promote his reelection,” she wrote.
“Rather than seeing a human being asking for his support and help, perhaps all he saw was a fat Black woman — a metaphoric rock in his shoe that, if not for saving face, he would have begrudgingly removed and resentfully thrown into the Schuylkill River on his way back to Air Force One.”
I certainly feel for Blaque, and I can’t tell what’s in any individual’s heart of hearts, but these aren’t the words of someone who sounds like she recently reached a conclusion on whether she was going to vote or who she was going to vote for.
Furthermore, let’s say I’m a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party and I pass myself off as undecided because I don’t know if Biden will dismantle the capitalist system quickly enough and put the imperialist running dogs against the wall before 2024, but I’m definitely not voting for Trump. Do I really count as undecided?
And if I’ve made social media postings where I’ve aired my views, might not a major news organization have had the obligation to do its due diligence, given the relative paucity of undecided voters in its audience?
The Free Beacon reported Day also appeared on CNN to discuss that he (surprise) was also disappointed in Trump, saying the president had recited “statistics and numbers, stats that he probably had no substance behind.”
At the very least, the president probably knew he would get these kinds of “undecided” voters and still agreed to do the event. He was under no obligation to.
At Biden’s CNN undecided voter town hall, meanwhile, he faced the kinds of questions that led to quotes like this:
“I view this campaign as a campaign between Scranton and Park Avenue,” he said. “All Trump can see from Park Avenue is Wall Street. All he thinks about as the stock market.”
(It’s almost the difference between Wall Street and Main Street. Say, someone should write that one down; it might be a fresh zinger.)
Watching both events, one got the impression there were few undecided voters at either. In ABC’s case, at least, it’s almost as if it didn’t even try.
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