“It just felt icky”
Some local Iowa news. Lol:
Never Back Down PAC, the political action committee supporting Florida governor Ron DeSantis, has caused a stir in early voting state Iowa — but maybe not in the way they had hoped.
The PAC is being accused of disrespecting the Black Hawk County Republicans by sending too many activists to the group’s participation in a local parade last weekend.
The Black Hawk County Republican chair, Craig Lohmann, sent an email invitation to the campaigns of the GOP primary candidates to walk with them in the annual My Waterloo Days parade. In the email, Lohmann says that campaigns may send “a few” representatives “with shirts with names and some handouts.” He cautioned the campaigns and associated PACs to avoid giving the impression that the Black Hawk County GOP was endorsing any candidate.
[…]
According to April Melton, a Black Hawk County GOP central committee member, the group was taken aback when the Never Back Down PAC showed up with twenty-two activists carrying triple-stacked signs and a large “DeSantis 2024” flag.
“As Iowans, we take our responsibility to vet candidates very seriously. And we invite everybody to come as a general rule,” Melton explained. “But there’s a trick called astroturfing, and that is where a candidate or a candidate’s PAC will kind of descend on the county and basically fall in on the back side. And that’s what happened.”
“We invited every candidate to send two or three people,” Melton continued. “[Never Back Down] sent about twenty-five people and they brought their own flags. At the time, we didn’t really want to say no because we had invited them. But at the same time, it was a little overwhelming because they marched so close to us that it just felt icky.”
Another source familiar with the incident told The Spectator that county party members expressed that they viewed the Never Back Down group as “unruly” and “rowdy.”
“They brought about thirty unruly kids who were clearly from out of state and who were disrespectful and rowdy,” the source said.
The Black Hawk County GOP only had about sixteen volunteers marching in the parade to Never Back Down PAC’s twenty-two staffers.
Melton said she believed only one of the Never Back Down PAC activists was from their county and added that their outsized presence at the parade was disruptive to their efforts to support other candidates and the Republican Party more generally.
“While we were marching and passing out candy, they kind of jumped up in front of our our group passing out stickers and stuff like that,” she said. “We were trying to support our governor, Kim Reynolds, and our local candidates as well. So to have a big group for just one candidate fall in like that, it was really kind of unnerving.”
A Never Back Down official contended to The Spectator that its staff members followed all instructions from the party officials at the event and took great care not to provide any disruption. The official also noted that no complaints were made to the team at any time.
The incident apparently bothered the Black Hawk County Republicans enough, though, that was brought it up at their monthly meeting Thursday night. Melton introduced a resolution to ban PACs from joining their future parade entries to prevent similar incidents.
Is it the worst campaign ever? I think it might be. He and his people make enemies wherever they go — because they are all assholes.