Pence refutes story citing Trump voter suppression efforts

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence said Friday morning that he was “offended” by reporting that cites a senior Donald Trump campaign official telling Bloomberg Businessweek that “we have three major voter suppression operations under way.”

“That's offensive to me, that kind of language. It's not our operation,” Pence told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” in a Friday interview. “Donald Trump and I want every American who has the opportunity to vote to vote in this election. And that's our message, is to tell the American people that this country really belongs to them. That we can have government as good as our people again, but it's going to take all of us.”


The senior Trump campaign official detailed to Bloomberg how the real estate mogul’s camp is working to suppress the vote among three key groups for Clinton: African-Americans, young women and "idealistic white liberals.' They are doing so, the official said, by highlighting parts of Clinton’s past that might turn off those groups.

The official said Trump’s campaign will highlight Clinton’s 1996 remark that some black men are “super predators” in the hope of dissuading African-Americans from voting for her. Similarly, bringing up the women who have accused Bill Clinton of sexually assaulted them, as well as Hillary Clinton’s threats against them, is meant to discourage young women from voting for the former secretary of state. Discussion of Hillary Clinton’s past support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which she now opposes, and the revelations from hacked emails released by WikiLeaks, is intended to slow the tide of liberal voters to polling places.

At her rally with Hillary Clinton yesterday, first lady Michelle Obama seized on the Bloomberg report, telling the crowd that the Republican ticket’s strategy is “to make this election so dirty and ugly that we don’t want any part of it.”

But Pence said that he is unaware of any strategy designed to suppress the Democratic vote. He said he had not read the Bloomberg story, but added that nothing of what he’d heard from it sounded anything like the campaign he believes Trump is running.

“I’ve never heard anybody in this campaign talk that way,” Pence said. “Frankly, you know, it was offensive to me to hear that being reported in the news because that's just not the approach Donald Trump has taken to this campaign. It’s not the approach we're taking. We're reaching out to every American.”