There’s probably a rule written by some political strategist somewhere warning candidates not to use their ads to attack demographics whose voters form a core part of their base. Really, you don’t need a consultant to tell you that. Most people outside of politics would intuit the common sense.
But not, it appears, Republican Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas. Huckabee Sanders’ new ad takes aim at welfare dependency and so should be red meat for the kind of conservatives on whose votes she’ll rely in the coming midterm elections. Yet the ad’s only welfare recipient is a young white man, portrayed as a slovenly gamer who gorges on processed snacks for sustenance while living on taxpayer-funded handouts.
"Meet Brad," she chuckles, as the man appears on screen. "Brad has turned relaxing into a full-time profession. You pay taxes to cover welfare for guys like Brad who just choose not to work." Huckabee Sanders is using the ad to promote her welfare-to-work scheme, ARHOME, a state Medicaid expansion, to push more young people into work, study, or volunteering opportunities.
Fortunately for Brad, there’s a happy ending. But for many conservative viewers, the ad revealed Huckabee Sanders to be a coward for singling out a young white man as her focus. She fell right into a trap of her own making.
Will Chamberlain, a conservative lawyer and activist, called the ad “a massive own goal” and called for the consultants responsible to be fired. Matt Walsh, the conservative commentator, suggested that a Black woman would have been more representative of the underlying reality, but Republicans “don't have the balls” to produce an ad like that. The data has limits, but it does indeed show Black people are overrepresented in welfare assistance relative to their population.
You will have your own view on why that is—socioeconomic, cultural, structural racism, whatever—but it’s true enough. The Arkansas population is 67.6 percent white alone and 15.2 percent Black, according to Census Bureau data. Yet for Medicaid specifically, to which ARHOME relates directly, health policy think tank KFF says 57.8 percent of recipients in Arkansas are white and 20.6 percent are Black.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
