Joseph Cummins is the author of Anything for a Vote: Dirty Tricks, Cheap Shots and October Surprises in U.S. Presidential Campaigns.



In 1840, the canny political operative Thomas Elder, who served one term as Pennsylvania state attorney general, said this about U.S. campaigns: “Passion and prejudice, properly aroused and directed, would do about as well as principle and reason in a party contest.” Elder clearly didn’t know this year’s presidential field: Passion and Prejudice are kicking Principle and Reason’s butts right now. On the night of the Iowa caucuses, Ted Cruz’s campaign, hoping to garner the evangelical vote, spread the rumor that Ben Carson was dropping out of the race. (The campaign maintains that it was simply repeating what CNN was reporting.) They also sent a mailer to Iowans, unsubtly disguised as a missive from the state government, telling them that their “voting grades” would be revealed to their neighbors. After New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie bullied a sweating Marco Rubio during their New Hampshire debate, Ted Cruz aired a commercial mocking Rubio as “just another pretty face.” But he was forced to pull the ad when it turned out the actor who uttered that line was soft core porn veteran Amy Lindsay, who told CNN: “I’m a middle class working girl and I had a job to do.” That was all before Donald Trump shouted “Why do you lie? Why do you lie?” at Cruz in the most recent GOP debate. He is now threatening to sue Cruz for misleading voters about his record, (and for maybe being Canadian, as well).

On the Democratic side, things have gotten so contentious that Madeline Albright told young women that there was “a special place in hell for them” if they didn’t support Hillary Clinton. (She apologized in the New York Times, but shouldn’t feel too bad: In 1960, former president Harry Truman told voters they might go to hell if they voted for Richard Nixon.)


And now both parties are embroiled in an unseemly battle over the nomination of a successor to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, one that began even before Scalia’s passing was officially confirmed, one so rancorous and deeply partisan that some commentators fear a constitutional crisis is brewing. (The GOP response can pretty much be summed up by this statement issued by the Carson campaign: “It is imperative that the Senate not allow President Obama to diminish Justice Scalia’s legacy by trying to nominate an individual who would carry on the president’s wishes to subvert the will of the people.”)

It’s all pretty awful, a bare-knuckled, brawling, adolescent, old school primary campaign, the likes of which we haven’t seen in decades. But years of studying dirty tricks in presidential races made me realize that this was bound to happen. Climactic conditions point to a perfect storm. Not only are the two parties running for an empty chair, but each party is riven with internal divisions; the electorate is fed-up with politics as usual and is making some surprising choices; the world seems in an especially fragile state (encouraging xenophobia, always a potent political force); and Scalia’s death ramps up the furor even further. The 2016 election is going to keep on getting dirtier.

The last time a presidential campaign was anything like this was in 1972: Going into the New Hampshire primary in February of that year, many pundits predicted the big winner would be Hubert Humphrey’s 1968 running mate, Democratic Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine. In fact, most journalists had already anointed him the Democratic presidential nominee. Republican candidate Richard Nixon himself viewed Muskie as a formidable candidate.

But then strange things began happening. Suddenly, New Hampshire voters began receiving phone calls from rude black people—calls that came late at night or early in the morning—saying that they had been bused in from Harlem to work for Muskie.

And then the conservative editor of the Manchester Union Leader, William Loeb, published a letter, purportedly written by an ordinary citizen, that accused Muskie of using the word Canuck to refer to French Canadians. In defending himself against this and other slurs, Muskie, standing outdoors before microphones and cameras, began to cry. Or, since it was snowing, perhaps a snowflake had landed in his eye—it’s impossible to tell from tapes of the incident.

Muskie did lose his cool, however, and many voters wondered if he was unable to handle pressure. He won New Hampshire, but by a much smaller margin than predicted.

Things only got worse when Muskie headed for the Florida primary. Many voters in that state received a letter, written on Muskie campaign stationery, stating that fellow candidate Hubert Humphrey had been arrested for drunk driving in 1967. Other letters on Muskie stationery claimed that prominent Democratic senator and presidential hopeful Henry “Scoop” Jackson had fathered a child with a 17-year-old girl. (Since both stories were completely fabricated, the faked letters were intended to reflect badly on Muskie.)

No detail was too small. Posters appeared on Florida highways that read: “Help Muskie in Busing More Children Now.” (Muskie supported desegregation via racial school busing, a stance that was likely to antagonize white Southerners.) Ads were placed in free shoppers’ newsletters saying: “Muskie: Would you accept a black running mate?” At a Muskie press conference in Miami, someone released a handful of white mice wearing tags that read: “Muskie is a rat fink.”

Muskie placed fourth in Florida and was finished as a candidate. Senator George McGovern went on to face (and be demolished by) Richard Nixon in the general. Were it not for the Watergate burglary and the subsequent hearings, most ordinary citizens would have had no idea that Muskie’s destruction had been orchestrated by Nixon staffers Kenneth Clawson and Dwight Chapin.

Really dirty elections happen in different political climates, but are similar to the weather in that volatile or unstable conditions collide to produce storms. In 1972, the vitriol was the result of the controversial war in Vietnam, a racially charged political atmosphere and Richard Nixon’s unbridled disdain for his Democratic opponents. Going back much further, the election of 1800—only our fourth, and yet one of our dirtiest—saw a major clash between the very different political philosophies of the Federalists and the Republicans. It produced some classic name-calling: President John Adams was a “repulsive pedant” and a “hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” His opponent Thomas Jefferson was a “Godless atheist,” “the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father,” etc. Perfect for Twitter, actually.

In fact, nothing about Donald Trump’s physical insults and vulgar language can even match the invective hurled back in the day. James Buchanan’s head tilted slightly to the left; it was a congenital condition, but his opponents in 1856 claimed that he had tried to hang himself and failed. (He was also a bachelor with a long-time male roommate, so Andrew Jackson called him “Aunt Nancy” and Henry Clay affected a lisp in talking to him.) According to a klatch of alienists gathered together by the New York Times in 1896, William Jennings Bryan was not just a megalomaniac, but a “classic degenerate.” William Howard Taft? “A fathead with the brains of a guinea pig,” according to his former friend and boss Teddy Roosevelt.

John Quincy Adams wrote about his presidential campaign in 1824: “Every liar and calumniator was at work day and night to destroy my reputation.” After awhile, all that calumniating takes its toll. What I think of as the “trickle-down” effect of political smears has already begun this year. Back in 2008, I used to overhear stories in coffee shops about how Barack Obama would be sworn in on a Koran disguised as a Bible. My Uber driver in Washington D.C. last week claimed that Donald Trump could never become president because he has been married nine times.

“Three times,” I said.

“Three that you know about. The other ones were secret.”

After Thomas Jefferson won that disputed election of 1800, Noah Webster wrote him to complain: “What do men gain by elective governments, if fools and knaves have the same chance of obtaining the highest offices, as honest men?” The sour Webster was no fan of Jefferson and his party (Jefferson was one of the knaves he was referring to) but he had a point that resonates in 2016: Has our democratic process become so debased this season that it will sully the person who eventually becomes president? And sully us in the process? It’s true that American presidential campaigns are always dirty—well, except for 1789, when Washington ran unopposed—but the last time things got this nasty a president had to resign to help make us feel better about ourselves.