Russian meddling in U.S. election backfiring on Putin, hurting Trump
By James Hohmann August 23 at 9:00 AM
washingtonpost.com
THE BIG IDEA: Eight years ago this month, Barack Obama’s high command became very worried after Russia invaded Georgia.
The first-term senator, then 47, had no meaningful national security experience, a liability Hillary Clinton had highlighted throughout the Democratic primaries. And he happened to be vacationing in Hawaii.
Campaigning in Pennsylvania, John McCain recounted a phone call he had just had with Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili. "Today, we are all Georgians,” the hawkish war hero said, drawing cheers from the crowd of several thousand.
The Obama team was worried about losing voters of Eastern European ethnic descent as a result of McCain's hardline rhetoric on Russia. There are lots of Polish Americans, Ukrainian Americans and Lithuanian Americans who live in swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. Many came here to escape the Iron Curtain.
As McCain’s regional campaign manager, responsible for Pennsylvania and Ohio, Jon Seaton vividly remembers pushing the pro-Georgia and anti-Vladimir Putin message. “We also were hopeful that the ethnic communities, particularly the Polish-Americans in the Cleveland suburbs would be a hidden block for us, and did a lot of coalition work there,” he recalls. “It wasn’t ultimately enough to overcome the massive Obama GOTV effort in Cuyahoga County, but it was definitely part of our strategy to drive up our numbers.”
Now the script is completely reversed. Those voters who McCain fought so hard for in 2008 are still out there. They normally would be very inclined to vote for someone like Trump – on paper, they look just like his core supporters – but Putin’s clear preference for him over Clinton (combined with Trump’s naiveté on all things Russia) gives them great pause.
John Weaver, who was John Kasich’s chief strategist this year and advised both of McCain’s presidential bids, thinks the blowback is starting to show up in polls, specifically Trump’s weakness among Catholics who regularly attend mass.
“In and around Cleveland, Akron, Toledo, Detroit and all throughout Wisconsin, you’re talking about voters with family in Poland, the Baltics, Ukraine and the Czech Republic,” said Weaver. “These voters are key to any narrow path that Trump has left.”
-- Trump alarms Americans of Eastern European ancestry for many reasons. Among them:- He has suggested that America will only conditionally live up to its obligations under the NATO charter and questioned the value of the alliance.
- He’s said he’ll look into whether Putin should be allowed to keep Crimea, which he annexed with complete disregard for international law. “Having a good relationship with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing,” he said this month.
- Just three weeks ago, Trump pleaded directly with the Russian government to find and release tens of thousands of Clinton’s private emails. Asked whether Russian espionage into the former secretary of state’s correspondence would concern him, he replied: “ No, it gives me no pause.”
- Trump’s campaign chairman until last Friday, Paul Manafort, orchestrated the political comeback of Putin ally Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine and is closely linked with other Putin cronies.
- At the Republican National Convention last month, the Trump campaign stripped the party platform of language calling for the U.S. to provide lethal weapons to Ukraine to resist Russian belligerence.
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