Updated at 5:10 EST with audio of the call.
Updated at 6:12pm EST with confirmation that the call did indeed come from the Santorum campaign
LANSING, MI — Rick Santorum’s campaign is locked in a tight battle with Mitt Romney ahead of Tuesday’s Michigan primary. On Monday his camp started openly courting a demographic that’s not often reached out to in GOP primaries: Democrats.
Michigan’s primary rules allow Dems to vote in the state’s GOP primaries. The liberal site DailyKos and other progressive partners have been trying to drum up enthusiasm for “Operation Hilarity” – an effort to get Democrats to vote in the GOP primary and tilt the vote against Mitt Romney. The Santorum campaign evidently decided they’d take votes from any legitimate source.
Following some speculation that the robocall may have been a “false flag” effort designed to harm Santorum, a spokesman Hogan Gidley confirmed to TPM that they were indeed footing the bill, and reaching beyond party lines. “If we can get the Reagan Democrats in the primary, we can get them in the general,” he told TPM.
It’s a controversial tactic. Bill Ballenger, a longtime Michigan politico and the editor of Inside Michigan Politics, spoke with TPM about the call earlier in the day. He said the call piqued his interest because it sounded like it could have come from a union targeting Romney ahead of the Feb. 28 primary. The call focuses on Romney’s opposition to the auto bailout and calls on Democrats to vote for Santorum Tuesday because of it.
“It went on and on like this and I kept listening because I kind of smelled a rat,” Ballenger said. “And finally at the very end, in a tagline it says, ‘this call was paid for by the Santorum for president committee.'”
TPM readers in Michigan reported Monday receiving the same robocall as Ballenger. TPM Reader BG emailed in to say he’d received a robocall where the “voice sounded Union-ish” and “said the word ‘Democrats’ repeatedly, though not as a derogatory label.” He stayed on to hear who claimed the call in the tagline at the end and “yup, it was from the official Santorum campaign.”
TPM obtained audio of the call from a reader in Trenton, MI who said it showed up on his answering machine Monday morning. Ballenger confirmed the call was the one he heard.
I asked Ballenger, who’s followed many elections in Michigan, if the Santorum call classifies as playing dirty.
“This is a dirty trick,” he said. “I mean, first of all you know how these robocalls are. You get one, generally speaking, you kind of after the first couple of sentences you know what they’re after. If you don’t hang up right away you get the message, right? Well, most people don’t listen all the way through [and] you have to listen to the bitter end of this one to get the clincher. Otherwise, you’d hang up and you’d be convinced this came out of UAW Solidarity House or the Obama reelection campaign.”
What’s more, Ballenger said, the messenger delivering an attack on Romney for opposing the auto bailout is a little disingenuous.
“You talk about chutzpah: here’s Santorum who’s just as opposed to the bailout as Romney is, but he’s putting out robocalls to Democrats urging them to crossover and vote in the Republican for Santorum,” Ballenger said. “The only thing intellectually in the whole message that it seems to be the Santorum committee could use to justify this tactic is the one line that, you know, ‘Romney was all too happy to support bailing out Wall Street, but not Michigan.’ Santorum is in the position all along of ‘a plague on both their houses. No bailouts for anybody.'”
There’s already another controversy about a pro-Santorum robocall which is tagged as coming from the National Rifle Association, but which the gun rights organization denies it is running.
David Taintor contributed to the reporting for this article.
