Left-Leaning Influencers, 'Mainstream' Media Play Big Role in Amplifying 'Army for Trump' Fears
Contributors: Rachel Moran, Joe Bak-Coleman, Tom Wilson, Ian Kennedy, Kolina Koltai, Andrew Beers, Ian Wisemore, Emma Spiro, Michael Caulfield, Kate Starbird, University of Washington Center for an Informed Public
Key Takeaways
The Trump campaign’s calls to action for volunteers (e.g., an “Army for Trump”) to become poll observers may serve multiple goals:
1) to motivate Trump’s base by giving them seemingly productive tasks (which can function to motivate and sustain participation of volunteers);
2) to gather “evidence” of voting issues from his supporters to use to feed false narratives about systematic voter fraud;
3) to foment fear and outrage on the left and consequently scare people away from the polls (voter suppression)
Considering #2, we have previously documented how images of discarded ballots were falsely framed and mobilized by right-wing media and influencers (and supported by foreign disinformation efforts) to support a false narrative of systematic voter fraud. The Army of Trump initiative could result in a vast amount of images, videos, and stories that could be selectively chosen, falsely framed, and fed into this false “voter fraud” narrative.
Considering #3, historical accounts suggest that “active measures” often cause the most damage to a target through the target’s own reaction. It is possible that the Trump campaign’s calls to action are also designed to have the secondary effect of voter suppression.
Analysis of social media and mass media reactions to Trump’s calls to action suggest left-leaning influencers and “mainstream” media have played a significant role in framing this call to action as having the potential to incite violence. Active measures have also long targeted journalists as “unwitting agents” in their influence campaigns.
It will be a continued challenge for media and other influencers to criticize these calls to action for violating existing norms and potentially functioning to intimidate voters — but to communicate that criticism without feeding unnecessary fear and suppressing votes.
The Trump Campaign Rallies an Army of Volunteers
On Sept. 21 Donald Trump, Jr. posted a video on Facebook calling on supporters to join an “election security operation” the campaign calls “Army for Trump.” Citing concerns that the “Radical Left” is laying the groundwork to steal the 2020 election, Trump, Jr. asked supporters to sign-up to join the Trump campaign’s Election Day team through www.defendyourballot.com. The website recruits volunteers for general Get Out the Vote (GOTV) activities but also asks if they have legal expertise and directs to a form where supporters can report alleged election incidents directly to the campaign.
This call to action was repeated by President Trump on Twitter and in the first presidential debate in which he urged supporters to “go into the polls and watch very carefully” for fraud. This appeal to untrained volunteers to act as unofficial poll watchers may function to motivate Trump’s base, providing additional pathways to participation in the election. It also sets the stage for a flood of claims of election fraud — providing additional “evidence” to support false narratives around systematic fraud.
Additionally, the militaristic language used by the Trump campaign has set off alarm bells around the potential for voter intimidation and violence at the polls. Trump’s tweet in particular garnered attention from liberal-leaning Twitter with some users expressing concern that the call to action — just days after controversy over Trump’s “stand back and stand by” comment towards far-right group the Proud Boys — could lead to violent clashes on Election Day.
One possibility — and the primary motivation for this post — is that these calls for action are, in part, designed to foment outrage on the left, including claims that highlight a threat for violence at the polls, as a voter suppression strategy.
In reality, there exists a whole host of protections managed by local, state and federal laws that secure against the risk of violence on Election Day. However, concerns over potential violence arising from the “Army for Trump” campaign have been heavily amplified by mainstream news media outlets including The New York Times and The Washington Post. While a focus on worst case scenarios is important for state and county entities, the amplification of the intimidation narrative carries its own risks and hides more likely — and potentially dangerous — outcomes.
Voter intimidation by armed citizens is a familiar issue in American politics with a dark history. Beginning with the Red Shirts during Reconstruction, such intimidation was a crucial mechanism of white supremacy. More recently, in 1981, a “Ballot Security Task Force,” put together by the Republican National Committee, was found to be such an egregious violation of voting rights that the RNC’s poll-monitoring rights were dramatically limited by consent decree through 2017.
While potential direct voter intimidation is an important concern for both government officials and citizens, more indirect methods of voter suppression should be considered as well. Complicating responses to this issue is the fact that political actors can use the concern about such intimidation as a tool of suppression and deligitimization in its own right.
The Trump campaign states that they have already established an army of 50,000-plus volunteers across the U.S. and expect this number to grow in the coming weeks. In addition to motivating the Trump base into undertaking a range of GOTV activities, our analysis highlights how the Trump Army campaign has heightened fears of violence at the polls, cemented narratives of fraudulent election behavior by both parties, and laid the groundwork for an army of volunteer poll watchers to act as feeders of “information” about voting locations across the country.
Understanding Campaign Techniques Through an Active Measures Framework
To better understand the impact of the Trump Army campaign, it is useful to look at it through an “active measures” framework. Active measures are methodical, planned information operations which aim to create friction, drive wedges within society, or erode the trust in democratic institutions. Traditionally used to describe efforts by a foreign nation (e.g., Russia) toward a perceived adversary (e.g., the United States), we are increasingly seeing domestically-sourced and -targeted active measures.
One common technique in the active measures toolbox is to use perceived adversaries to unwittingly push messages beneficial to the disinformation campaign. In the case of the Trump Army, liberal reaction to the militaristic framing of the call for volunteers amplified narratives of potential voter intimidation. By calling attention to the campaign and intensifying its potential for violence, liberal audiences engaging with Trump’s tweet and news media reporting this fear act as unintentional spreaders of messages that could dissuade voters from turning up at the polls.
Figure 1: Diagram illuminating Bittman’s theory of active measures. (1985, p. 50)
Accordingly, in addition to being a dog whistle to Trump’s supporters, the message also served to spark an outcry across liberal audiences over the potential for voter intimidation. By fomenting Election Day fears on the left — the targets of this active measure — the reaction may further advance intended voter suppression. Broad outrage can lead to broad awareness, but such awareness is a double-edged sword: it may lead to mitigating action, but may also serve to advance the very fear that fair election proponents are trying to address. This may be particularly true if the reaction drives news coverage consumed by a larger, less informed audience.
Arguably, the call serves a third function as well. Following the mold of more recent calls to action, such as that by the Oath Keepers (a right-wing extremist group) in 2016, Trump’s army of poll watchers is potentially part of a larger active measure, focused as much on delegitimization of the election results as influencing them through intimidation. Framing the argument about the poll watchers solely around intimidation may have the additional unintended effect of distracting attention away from the campaign’s attempts to gather misleading “evidence” of voter fraud designed to undermine the integrity of the election result. Such threats could include a flood of videos and reports on Election Day that could delegitimize the election and lay the framework for post-election violence.
Analyzing Public Reactions
We analyzed social media reaction to President Trump’s tweet calling for volunteers to sign up for his “army” alongside the news media coverage of the Trump Army campaign. An examination of the engagement with Trump’s Oct. 5 tweet highlights several narratives and sharing behaviours that took hold on each side of the partisan divide.
By Oct. 10, Trump’s tweet had received 23,922 retweets. Most occurred in the first few hours after Trump posted his tweet. Our analysis suggests that most of those retweets came from accounts that were politically conservative and/or supportive of President Trump.
Figure 2: Volume (tweets per hour) of retweets, quotes, and quote retweets of Trump’s Oct. 5 tweet calling for Election Poll Watchers
Trump’s tweet was also quoted 5943 times, and these quote tweets received 12,480 retweets. The quote tweets lagged a bit behind Trump’s initial tweet (see Figure 2) and eventually (collectively) surpassed the original tweet in terms of engagement rate. An examination of these quote tweets surfaces several narratives that took shape on each side of the partisan divide.
Right-leaning accounts who quoted Trump’s tweet tended to reiterate the need for volunteers to protect voting against fraudulent practices or simply reinforce to their own audiences that they should use the originally shared link to sign up. For example:
Quote tweet: Sign up! I just did!
But engagement with Trump’s tweet via quote tweeting was much more prominent among left-leaning influencers (see Figure 3, tweets in blue) and their followers/retweeters.
Figure 3: Cumulative tweet graph showing retweets (circles) and quote tweets (diamonds) of President Trump’s Oct. 5 tweet calling for “election poll watchers.”
The x-axis is time. The y-axis is the total number of tweets and retweets at that time. Tweets are sized according to the number of followers of the tweeting account. Tweets and retweets of conservative influencers are in red. Tweets and retweets of liberal influencers are in blue. Tweets from unclassified accounts are grey. Only tweets from accounts with more than 10,000 followers are visible (high visibility tweets). The majority of high-visibility retweets were posted by conservative influencers. The majority of high-visibility quote tweets were posted by liberal influencers. Interactive version of the graph.
The framing (of the call to action, apparent in the quote tweets) on the political left was quite different from that on the right — often interpreting the call for volunteer poll watchers as a call to violence and equating it to a form of voter intimidation:
Quote tweet: This is illegal, insane, intimidating, imbecile etc
In the example below a user tweets directly at Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey asking for Trump’s tweet to be removed because of its potential for political violence.
Quote tweet: @jack @Twitter This tweet is encouraging election violence. “Fight” and “Army” — those are bugle calls, not dog whistles. Twitter, take down this tweet. To be clear, the president who has repeatedly encouraged political violence, said ""stand by"" to heavily-armed extremist groups, and repeatedly spread lies about voting procedures, is now calling on his supporters to raise an ""Army for Trump"" at the polls. Just so dangerous
To gain an understanding of the narratives taking shape within the initial response to Trump’s call, our researchers took a random sample of 100 tweets that quoted Trump’s tweet and qualitatively coded them along the following dimensions:
Whether the tweet supported or challenged Trump’s call for poll watchers;
Whether the tweet believed Trump’s tweet had the potential to incite violence;
Whether the tweet discussed Trump’s call as breaking institutional rules or norms; and
Whether the tweet was concerned about voter suppression.
The tweets in the sample overwhelmingly challenged Trump’s call for poll watchers, with just four out of 100 quote tweets expressing support for the call. Forty-nine out of 100 tweets believed that Trump’s call had the potential to incite violence at the polls on Election Day (like the example above directed at @Jack).
Many users who expressed concern that the Trump Army was a call to violence made comparisons to authoritarianism and facism, and explicitly linked the Trump Army campaign to the president’s controversial comments on white supremacist groups. A secondary narrative also emerged related to the legality of volunteer poll watchers. Thirty-five out of 100 of the randomly sampled tweets felt that such activities would break institutional rules or current laws. This narrative was, however, expressed with far less confidence, with many users unsure of whether or not the call for volunteers was legal or illegal, or expressing uncertainty of what exactly the Trump Army was supposed to be doing.
Quote tweet: This seems illegal. But it is definitely extremely dangerous
Quote tweet: How can this even be legal? He’s asking for vigilantes to intimidate voters......
In addition to noting the potential for violence and expressing uncertainty over the nature of the campaign, 31 out of 100 of the sampled tweets expressed concern that the call could lead to voter suppression.
Quote tweet: After the Republican Party sent "poll watchers" with guns to intimidate Black voters in the 1980s courts banned them from doing it for decades... But the ban recently expired so they're back at it with this voter intimidation stuff.
Mainstream Media Cements Concerns Over Potential Violence
Feeding off of concerns on social media, mainstream media coverage of the Trump Army campaign centered its potential to incite violence. Headlines from The New York Times and The Washington Post led with fears of intimidation, chaos and violence. Digital news media coverage followed suit, forefronting claims that the move is an attempt to militarize the election and create a MAGA militia.
Beyond the headlines coverage was more nuanced, explaining the role of official poll workers and how Trump’s Army could upset institutional norms. However, fears of voter intimidation were pronounced. The New York Times led with uncertainty over how the Trump campaign wished to use their army of volunteers, suggesting that training to keep volunteers in line may be both ineffectual and a convenient cover for the official campaign’s true intent to cause chaos. Washington Post coverage maintained a similar narrative, highlighting the support the call for volunteers has gathered from “neo-Nazis and right-wing activists” causing law enforcement and state officials to “prepare for voter intimidation, arrests and even violence.” The Post also quoted Trump campaign officials dismissing accusations of inciting violence and intimidation as “partisan nonsense” and instead reinforcing both the normalcy of recruiting election volunteers and the training their volunteers received. The cementing of concerns of potential violence, and the concurrent amplification of these concerns on social media, visibly tracks along an active measures framework.
While responding to increasingly militarized language as heightening the potential for voter intimidation is by no means an over-reaction, the centering of violent narratives in mainstream media and left-leaning conversation runs the risk of itself contributing to fear around voting and potential voter suppression. In addition, this also distracts from attempts to delegitimize the election through a barrage of unqualified challenges of fraudulent behavior. In contrast, coverage by Politico can be seen as a more measured attempt to address the aggressive language of the Trump Army campaign while balancing a need to not propagate intimidation. The article quotes the Biden campaign directly challenging the active measures attempt — “overheated reports about chaos at the polls on Election Day could threaten to further Trump’s clear goal of discouraging Americans from voting.” The Politico article further focuses attention on the disruptive impact mass challenges to Election Day voting could have on the perceived legitimacy of the electoral outcome.
Conclusions
In addition to motivating Trump’s base, the calls by the Trump campaign for volunteer poll watchers may further their goals in other significant ways. As we’ve previously documented, right-wing media and other social media influencers have been leveraging otherwise innocuous or misleading video and images to feed into narratives about systemic voter fraud. Cellphone-armed poll watchers will be able to crowdsource the collection of videos and photos that could be taken out of context, assembled, reframed, and amplified to create/support a false impression of an unfair or rigged election.
Providing fodder to feed false narratives about widespread voter fraud, these videos and photos can also be propped up as grounds to launch ballot-count-delaying investigations. Indeed there have already been calls from public figures, including the president, for the U.S. Department of Justice to launch investigations based on this type of shaky evidence. Although the department has historically only investigated these types of incidents in the most extreme cases, recent relaxing of rules has laid the groundwork to make investigations of purported electoral fraud more commonplace.
On the left, the prospect of a large number of (potentially armed) poll-watchers is likely to have a chilling effect. This is understandable, given our nation’s history of voter intimidation and election-related violence, particularly with regards to BIPOC communities. Fear-induced voter-suppression has the potential to be exacerbated by responses on the left that foment this fear. Historical accounts suggest that “active measures” often cause the most damage to a target through the target’s own reaction. It is possible that the Trump campaign’s calls to action are also designed to have this a secondary effect of voter suppression.
To the extent this is the case, our analysis demonstrates that left-leaning, “mainstream” media have played a significant role in framing this call to action as having the potential to incite violence. “Active measures” have also long targeted journalists as “unwitting agents” in their influence campaign. Moving forward, it will be a continued challenge for media and other influencers to criticize these calls to action for violating existing norms and potentially functioning to intimidate voters — but to communicate this criticism without feeding unnecessary fear and suppressing votes.
