Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Arrest could influence election
Midterms focused on Trump after supporter charged for mail bombs
The arrest of a fanatical supporter of President Trump on charges of sending mail bombs to prominent Democrats came during what may be the most divisive election season in decades, allowing a strip club DJ and occasional thief the chance to play an outsized role in American history.
Cesar Altieri Sayoc Jr., due in court Monday in Miami on charges that could put him behind bars for 58 years, embraced many of the themes of the most fervent Republicans. Posts on this Twitter feed and stickers on his now-famous white van placed rifle crosshairs on Hillary Clinton, showed Trump triumphantly riding a tank against a background blazing with fireworks and expressed viewpoints that would be familiar to any observer of contemporary Republican politics.
Although Trump’s name is not on the Nov. 6 ballot, the arrest of Sayoc on charges of sending 13 mail bombs to targets around the United States focuses the midterm elections for House, Senate and governorships even more than before on the president. The arrest comes at what may be the time of starkest political division in the United States since regular polling began in the 1940s, with “each side hating the other more than they used to,” said Stephen C. Craig, professor of political science and director of the Political Campaigning Program at the University of Florida.
“A large number of them say the other party makes them feel afraid,” Craig said. “Those are strong words. People view their partisanship as part of the core of who they are as a person, and that’s much more widespread. And what it does is makes people view politics in an us-versus-them kind of way. There’s a feeling now, much more than there used to be, that if your side wins, my side loses. This is more Republicans than Democrats, but Democrats are not innocent.”
Many Democrats saw the mail bomb attacks against Clinton, former President Obama and other Trump critics as a consequence of the heated rhetoric of
Trump rallies, with their “lock-her-up” chants, with the president’s praise of a congressman for assaulting a reporter, his offhand remarks about violence against protesters and his attacks on the news media.
“We have seen the continued and increasing degradation of our political discourse around the country. I can’t help but to evoke President Trump as one of the individuals who has set, I think, such an abysmal tone,” said Andrew Gillum, the Democratic candidate for Florida governor, in an interview Friday night on CNN. “And I think that the leadership begins at the top and he really has to take some responsibility for lifting the dialogue, of ending this demagoguery that leads to individuals like this particular suspect to resort to
violence.”
On the other side, U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Republican from Florida’s Panhandle, used Sayoc’s arrest to launch a political attack on Gillum.
Gaetz, who frequently appears on Fox News supporting the president, is also a prominent supporter of Republican gubernatorial nominee Ron DeSantis.
“The mail bomber is a convicted felon who had been arrested for making threats in the past. This is exactly the type of person who’s voting rights @AndrewGillum would automatically restore,” Gaetz wrote.
His facts were off. Sayoc has a lengthy criminal history, but all of the felonies appear to had adjudication withheld, so he’s not considered a convicted felon as
Gaetz claimed.
Some Republicans looked for evidence that the attempted bombings were a “false-flag” attack instigated by Democrats to damage the president. Others saw them as the politically meaningless manifestation of one man’s mental disturbance, rather than evidence that the president’s rhetoric has gotten out of hand.
“Why is it so hard to accept that a clearly deranged man carried out deranged acts?” asked Florida’s Republican Sen. Marco Rubio in a tweet Saturday. “The ‘false flag’ conspiracy theories on one side & the ‘it’s Trump’s fault’ on the other shows how unhinged politics has become. This isn’t incivility. It’s a society that has lost common sense.”
Trump on Saturday tweeted a news article headlined “Trump thunders at media for smearing his supporters after bomb scares.” At a speech in North Carolina after the suspect’s arrest, the president said, “We have seen an effort by the media in recent hours to use the sinister actions of one individual to score political points against me and the Republican party.”
“Political violence must never ever be allowed in America and I’ll do everything in my power to stop it,” he said. “The media has a major role to play, whether they want to or not.”
Gov. Rick Scott, who is running for Senate against Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson, issued a statement through a spokeswoman Saturday evening, responding to both the pipe bombs and Saturday’s massacre at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.
“The governor has said that these attempted bombings and today’s tragic shooting are disgusting, evil, and have no place in our country,” the statement said. “Earlier today, the governor directed the Florida Highway Patrol (FHP) to increase patrols of state troopers at religious intuitions across Florida and he will continue to take any action necessary to protect our communities.”
Although Trump had already been the major issue in many elections for Congress, the arrest of Sayoc intensifies the significance of the president in the upcoming election, said Kevin Wagner, chairman of the political science department of Florida Atlantic University.
“The largest impact is that it focuses voters on the president even more, and their opinion of the president may well color the choices that they make at the ballot box,” he said. “The research shows that people often make choices based on the issues that are foremost in their mind. And if concern about the president or happiness with the president is foremost in your mind, that’s increasingly going to become a referendum on the president.”
Yet for all that, he said, fewer minds may be open to changing either way. Democrats will take what they want from the story, Republicans will take what they want, with only those without strong opinions likely to vote differently based on new information.
“Voters tend to take new information and try to fit it into their pre-existing identity in the way that they view politics,” he said. “We call it selective reception. They hear the parts of it that they want to hear. Often it doesn’t change opinions. It even hardens opinions.”