Trackers, Plants, or Just Embarrassing?

Nikki Haley becomes the latest victim of a very popular tactic by opposition campaigns - operatives planted in opposing campaigns to catch or cause embarrassing moments. Or is she?

As “embarrassing” moments go in presidential campaigns, it wasn’t much, especially compared to President Joe Biden’s endless whoppers. In this case, former UN Ambassador and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and her weak responses to a question you might hear in a high school history class about the cause of the Civil War.

Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley.

Voters today, including GOP primary voters in New Hampshire (perhaps especially so), care little and know even less about the Civil War. The Civil War’s hostilities began at Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Bay in April 1861. The only casualty was a horse and wounded pride as the besieged Union garrison abandoned the fort. Today, it’s a popular tourist attraction.

You would think that of all people - a Governor who removed the Confederate flag in response to a horrific Emmanuel AME Church mass killing in Charleston - would understand how to explain the cause of the war that was launched in her state.

But being a slow week after Christmas, the media and her opponents pounced. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis chided her for her “word salad” and gave a perfect answer with the luxury of time and preparation.

Yet every election, especially one in which opponents want to make “race” an issue, it is brought up in often ignorant and ridiculous ways. Most recently, by a “campaign tracker” planted at a town hall campaign event: “What caused the United States civil war?”

Perhaps it wasn’t a real tracker - few of the media in attendance or afterward expressed any interest in the gentleman asking the question, very much unlike the portly, affable, and red-sweatered Ken Bone at the second presidential debate in 2016, whose earnestness and everyman demeanor provided him his 15 minutes of fame. And no reports I’ve seen have mentioned his name. The Washington Post said he sat behind his two sons, commented favorably about her, and cited her answer to a similar question while running for Governor of South Carolina in 2010.

That didn’t stop Haley from going on the media to complain that he was a “Democratic plant.” That’s also a poor response. The rest of her answer was only marginally better:

“What I was saying was, what does it mean to us today? What it means to us today is about freedom. That's what that was all about. It was about individual freedom. It was about economic freedom. It was about individual rights. Our goal is to make sure, no, we never go back to the stain of slavery.”

Sometimes, you get a random person with an off-the-wall question. I’ve seen it dozens of times at political town halls. That appears to be what happened to Haley. But it is the kind of question a tracker might ask since Democrats do love to trip up Republicans on race (never mind the Democratic party’s history or its grasp of race-based woke “intersectionality”).

But it’s an angle that doesn’t interest the media, which is too bad. It would help educate the public about this interesting campaign tactic.

There are two types of campaign “trackers,” including software used to track campaign ads. This is about the other kind - operatives hired to follow opposing campaigns and sometimes interjecting with unusual, “gotcha” questions designed to trip up candidates. It mainly involves following candidates with recording devices, sometimes nothing more than a smartphone. Sometimes, it is planting people at private fundraisers (at the cost of a major contribution or as a substitute for someone who made one). And not only do Democrats do it to Republicans, it’s quite bipartisan and intra-partisan.

Lesson: How you respond to a “tracker” is more important than what you say.

My Virginia friends still cringe at the most famous example of a tracker scoring his or her moment. In this case, S.D. Sidarth, then a 20-year-old college student (now a DC attorney), was tracking then-US Sen. George Allen (R-VA), son of the legendary Washington Redskins head coach of the same name, widely touted as a Reaganesque prospective presidential candidate in 2008.

During the usually slow, hot, and humid campaign days of August 2006, Allen chose to “introduce” his dark-skinned tracker to his audience by casually referring to Sidarth as “Macaca,” not once but twice, not realizing that it was a Portuguese word for monkey. In a strong Democratic year, former US Navy Secretary, Civil War historian, and author Jim Webb narrowly defeated Allen.

Allen tried to recapture the seat six years later and was still apologizing for the incident. He lost again, in another Democratic year, to now-Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA). Joe Biden, on two occasions, has referred to Black men - one a governor, the other a rapper - as “boy,” but seems to get a pass.

Few incidents are better remembered in an otherwise eventful 2016 GOP presidential primary than one-time front-runner and former Florida Governor Jeb! Bush. After giving what he thought was a solid answer to a question, a lackluster audience didn’t respond. After a brief pause, he asked, “Please clap.”

Sadly and very unfairly, the highly successful two-term Governor is better remembered by that gaffe, a symbolic moment for his failing campaign, than his extraordinary accomplishments. This is why staff in the room sometimes start clapping. Especially these days. No plants or trackers, just a candid moment. It ultimately didn’t matter - Bush dropped out of the race shortly after.

And it’s not just presidential campaigns. Trackers are prevalent in the US Senate, the US House, and many contentious local campaigns.

My friend and former Republican National Committee chair Ed Gillespie was running for US Senate in Virginia in 2014. A respected and smart pol, Gillespie handled the tracker dispatched by incumbent Democrat Mark Warner that year differently. Instead of singling him out or making him an issue, Gillespie knew he was there. He made sure he knew the tracker knew he knew he was there by kindly waving at him after the events were over. As reported by the Washington Post in 2014:

There are two trackers at Ed Gillespie’s first event of the day here in Eden Center in Falls Church, Va. One of them is from American Bridge, and he holds his camcorder above the crowd using a skinny tripod. There’s another from the Democratic Party of Virginia armed with a Flip cam. The Republican candidate for Senate has come to a Vietnamese deli to speak to Vietnamese business leaders. He talks about how his parents were immigrants from Ireland, how he once worked as a Senate garage parking attendant and how we need to “ease the squeeze” on American businesses. I ask one of the trackers how often he has heard this speech.

“Probably about 150 times,” he says, keeping his Flip cam focused on Gillespie and clutching a banh mi sandwich in his other hand. “I could recite it to you if you’d like.”

I ask if he likes his job.

“Not especially,” he says, his face quickly going red. “This is off the record.” (I didn’t agree to this, but I said I wouldn’t use his name.)

Gillespie finishes his speech and breezes out of the restaurant, giving a familial hello to the tracker.

“He’s a nice guy. It’s all professional,” the tracker says. “You can’t quote that.”

Gillespie narrowly lost to Warner in an almost upset. The race was gaffe-free.

Second lesson: There is no such thing as “off the record,” especially if the reporter doesn’t agree to it in advance.

Plants and trackers are a profession well grounded in both parties, cultivated through allied organizations such as America Bridge, a “super PAC” for Democrats, and Right to Rise, a super PAC ironically created to support the Jeb Bush campaign for Republicans. They’ve been a staple even in Minnesota, one of the more squeaky-clean states (until recent years).

More from the Washington Post, including links to other examples of where trackers successfully hit paydirt:

Gillespie’s staff understands the plight of the tracker. His communications director, Paul Logan, and his body man, Kyle McColgan, both once held the job.

"Yeah, it's kind of strange," McColgan says. "You know that your greatest moment will be that person's worst moment." Trackers, and their media-monitoring brethren, have been responsible for spreading the news about then-Senate candidate Todd Akin's comments about "legitimate rape," Rep. Steve King's comparison of illegal immigrants to hunting dogs and Rep. Bruce Braley's comment about Sen. Charles E. Grassley being just "a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school."

In other words, McColgan appreciates the jobs trackers do, but that doesn’t mean he won’t do his part to keep his boss from getting hurt by them.

I could go on about the secret recording of then-Senator Barack Obama in 2008 talking about working-class voters clinging to their guns and bibles or Mitt Romney, four years later, negatively characterizing 47 percent of voters who were never going to vote for him. “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president [Obama] no matter what. ... [M]y job is is [sic] not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives." Trackers or “opposition researchers” were involved in the recording or leaking both, including, in Romney’s case, a bartender working the event.

There are many more such instances, including in campaigns I’ve worked on. Cringeworthy but human moments that always seem to be remembered, if not lionized and reported to push narratives by opponents and the media.

Ambassador/Governor Haley will likely recover from her “moment.” I doubt it will move any polling in New Hampshire. The Civil War is a bigger issue in many southern states than it is in the north, where it wasn’t fought other than Pennsylvania (Gettysburg) and, arguably, Maryland (technically, a southern state as defined by the Mason-Dixon line, although its politics aligns more with their northern neighbors and cousins).

Joe Biden is the only candidate in modern times who seems inoculated from embarrassing, disqualifying comments and behavior, at least by his Praetorian Guard in the legacy media. Maybe when the media favors you, such gaffes become part of your charming persona.

We’ll see how long that lasts. Neil Kinnock, call your office.