Turns Out 'Regretful Trump Voter' in Swing State Ad Never Even Voted in 2016
An ad running in a state vital for President Donald Trump’s re-election is pushing a lie on unsuspecting voters.
Although the ad from American Bridge 21st Century PAC shows Pennsylvanian Mark Graham, a man who claims to have voted for Trump in 2016 and regretted his decision, WJET-TV confirmed that the man never even cast a ballot in that year’s elections.
Despite being a total lie, the video is still up and running, accessible by millions of Pennsylvanians who will vote in the upcoming 2020 elections.
“I voted for Donald Trump in 2016 because I thought he would make a change,” Graham falsely claims in the video.
Graham then spends the rest of the minute-long ad appealing to Pennsylvanians to avoid supporting Donald Trump at all costs, even likening voting for him to pouring “gasoline on a fire.”
Watch the full video below.
It doesn’t appear the PAC responsible for the ad is keen to correct it, either.
Comments on the YouTube video are disabled by the group, preventing anyone watching it from being informed about the deceptive nature of the ad’s message. The video of Graham is also the only piece of content on the PAC’s Pennsylvania page.
“The ad is false, its premise is false and it’s messenger has been discredited,” Pennsylvania GOP Chairman Lawrence Tabas said in a news release, according to the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Patriot-News.
“The organization could easily have determined that Graham had not voted in 2016 by checking the publicly available records at the Erie County elections office.”
In a state in which more than 6 million people voted in the 2016 elections, Trump won by a thin margin — fewer than 50,000 votes. Despite how close this state’s race was, all 20 electoral votes went to Trump thanks to his narrow win.
American Bridge’s video, which has been on YouTube since Nov. 12, has been viewed over 53,000 times.
Ads pushing outright lies like this in such a closely contested state will no doubt have an effect at the polls.
The PAC behind the untruth is targeting not only Pennsylvania voters but those in other potential battleground states as well. Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and Florida are all subjects of videos from the anti-Republican organization.
If anti-Trump groups continue to run with blatant lies like this leading up to the 2020 election, there’s no telling the damage that will come from it.
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