Today, the Washington Post has additional reporting on what transpired on Election Day in Maryland, where the GOP candidates for governor and U.S. Senate tried to mislead voters into thinking they were Democrats.
The Post story does not mention the comments made by defeated Senate candidate Michael Steele over the weekend on C-SPAN (h/t Thomas Nephew).
In an appearance with Democratic operative Donna Brazile (beginning at the 22:38 mark), Steele responded to criticism from a caller about campaign signs that read “Steele Democrat”:
Let me just me cut you off because you are way, way off base, as usual. People seem to forget the phrase Reagan Democrats. . . . That’s the same thing I did. You know, I had a number of Democrat friends . . . a host of Democrats from across the state support me and I call them Steele Democrats. I find it rather amusing that people get upset about that, acting as if that was some new invention or new term. It’s based off of Reagan Democrats, the same concept. And I thought it was even more clever because not only were they “Steele Democrats” but they’re “Still Democrats.” So it was fun.
At that point, Brazile raised the issue of the misleading sample ballots that were distributed by the Steele campaign, to which Steele responded:
Again, I have to laugh at that because I find that that’s somewhat amusing. That’s the same tactic that the Democrats have used in previous campaigns against each other, and I borrowed from that . . .
When Brazile pointed out that many blacks were offended by the Steele campaign literature, Steele conceded that it may not have translated well.
