Senate majority leader Harry Reid’s super PAC tied Republican Senate candidate Thom Tillis to the death of Trayvon Martin in an attempt to motivate black voters to support Tillis’s opponent, North Carolina senator Kay Hagan.
“Tillis won’t fight for us,” the ad says, per The New Yorker. “Instead, he made it harder for communities of color to vote, by restricting early voting and voter registration. Tillis even led the effort to pass the type of ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws that caused the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.”
The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang notes that the ad “relies on a fallacy” that Martin died because of Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. “One would hope that such cynicism and willful manipulation would not be inevitable, but, given the stakes in the upcoming week, in which control of the Senate may hinge on whether or not Hagan can hold off Tillis’s late charge, and with millions more dollars from super PACs flooding the state, North Carolinians should expect more of the same from both sides,” he writes.
North Carolinians are getting a lot of that, lately. A Democratic congressional candidate called Tillis “Uncle Tom” during a rally with Hillary Clinton over the weekend, while a flyer passed out to black churchgoers depicts a lynching and suggests that President Obama will be impeached if Tillis wins.