They’re baaaaaack!
Long-time readers may remember Common Sense Issues, a group that gained brief notoriety during the 2008 GOP presidential primary for launching a massive barrage of push poll calls in support of Mike Huckabee. One typical call claimed that John McCain supported “experiments on unborn babies.”
Now the group has returned to the fray, putting out calls on behalf of Mike Lee, an extremely conservative Republican who has launched a primary challenge against Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT). The Deseret News recently described the calls:
The call … asked if the voter favors federal funding for abortions. It then purported that a health care bill that Bennett introduced would provide federal funding for abortions, but Lee opposes such actions, and asked if that would make a difference to the respondent. The call also asked that if the respondent knew that Bennett supports federal ‘health care for homosexuals,’ if that would make it less likely for Bennett to receive the respondent’s support.
But Lee’s campaign says it isn’t happy about the support it’s getting from Common Sense Issues. Deputy campaign manager Dan Hauser told Politico in an email that the campaign “did not authorize the push poll,” that it did not know about it until afterwards, and does not condone it.
The group also said in a filing that it had contributed to Lee’s campaign, as well as to the campaigns of two other conservatives: Senate candidate Marco Rubio in Florida, and House candidate Kristi Noem in South Dakota. But Hauser, of the Lee campaign, said they would return any contributions received from Common Sense Issues.
