Sen. Bernie Sanders answers a question during a Fox News town hall. | Matt Rourke/AP Photo 2020 elections How the ACLU is setting up Trump for a field day in 2020 The group is deploying hundreds of people to get Democratic candidates on video taking positions on hot-button topics like felon voting.

The debate over allowing the Boston Marathon bomber to vote started with a man named Rick in Muscatine, Iowa.

At a town hall in early April, he reminded Bernie Sanders that prisoners in his home state of Vermont are allowed to vote and asked whether that right should be extended nationally. Sanders agreed it should, and before he knew it, he was being asked variations of the question at Fox News and CNN town halls. Sanders critics pounced, and the conservative outrage machine kicked into gear, fueled by President Donald Trump.


The chain of events didn't start by accident: Its genesis was orchestrated by the American Civil Liberties Union, which is coaching activists like Rick as part of a multimillion-dollar, below-the-radar campaign to get the 2020 candidates on record about its civil liberties priorities. In Hanover, N.H., an ACLU-linked voter got Kamala Harris’ commitment to support adding a third-gender marker on federal ID cards. The group is also putting Democratic hopefuls on the spot with sensitive questions about immigration and abortion rights.

Each of the exchanges has been captured on video and posted to YouTube, and the answers largely reflect a Democratic primary field that’s veering further left. But the ACLU is making that shift happen far more quickly and visibly than it might have otherwise — to the apparent delight of Trump and his supporters.

In the opening months of the campaign, the organization has trained hundreds of volunteers in early voting states and sent them to more than 150 events at which they ask questions around planned topics. To the organizers, the field of more than 20 candidates has a long way to go to meet their demands. But already the effort is forcing some staunch civil liberties and voting rights advocates to grapple with how their priorities are playing out on a large stage.

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Sentencing Project Executive Director Marc Mauer, who wrote a Howard Law Journal article in 2011 arguing felony disenfranchisement policies are inherently undemocratic, acknowledged having mixed feelings about the sudden burst of public attention. “I wouldn’t have guessed that it would surface this quickly and this broadly,” Mauer, who is not a part of the ACLU effort, told POLITICO.

“It jump-started the issue, and I’ve seen a lot of support for that position that I wouldn’t have guessed was out there,” Mauer added. “But I would hate to see us have another Willie Horton election where we just get a very distorted discussion of an issue that’s important to democracy, but it’s one of 100 issues that should be debated, not the sole one debated.”

A few weeks after he appeared in Iowa, Sanders said at the CNN town hall he believes the right to vote is inherent in American democracy — “even for terrible people.” Moderator Chris Cuomo — presumably because the debate was held in New Hampshire — had provocatively framed the issue around whether the Boston Marathon bomber should be allowed to vote.

“Once you start chipping away and you say, ‘Well, that guy committed a terrible crime — not going to let him vote,’” Sanders said. “‘Well, that person did that. Not going to let that person vote’ — you’re running down a slippery slope.”

Trump seized on Sanders’ answer: “Let the Boston bomber vote — he should be voting, right?” Trump told members of the National Rifle Association last week. “I don’t think so. Let terrorists that are in prison vote — I don’t think so. Can you believe it? But this is where some of these people are coming from.”

Ronald Newman, the ACLU’s national political director, said it isn’t his job to worry about the political firestorm. He held up Sanders’ answer in Iowa as a model of what the group is trying to accomplish: to inject its priorities into the political bloodstream and, over time, sway public opinion.

Along with the incarcerated voting query, the ACLU is asking candidates for specific proposals to cut the federal prison population by 50 percent, end the use of detainers, reduce immigration detention by 75 percent and lift the Hyde Amendment and other government bans on insurance coverage of abortion.

In Las Vegas, Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro — who during an earlier stop in Concord, N.H., had agreed to back phasing out the detention of immigrant families seeking asylum or refugee status — said local law enforcement shouldn’t act as pseudoimmigration agents for the federal government.

ACLU staffers and volunteers have pushed several candidates on ending cash bail, expanding voting registration opportunities and making Election Day a federal holiday. Candidates Kirsten Gillibrand and Beto O’Rourke separately agreed to support a third-gender classification at the federal level, joining Harris.

The ACLU plans to spend $30 million in the 2020 cycle. After gathering more videos, officials plan to send questionnaires to the candidates and invite each of them to meet with people affected by the policies for which the group is advocating. The ACLU also plans to conduct a voter education drive. “Not only giving them that information but pushing turnout to make sure they take that information with them to the ballot box,” Newman said.

Despite the early attention, it’s unclear how much the program will register with early-state voters. But the ACLU looks intent to execute its plan.

During internal debates over what questions to get Democratic candidates to weigh in on, the ACLU focused on issues that would reveal meaningful distinctions between the candidates. On voting rights for incarcerated people, only Sanders has been unequivocal, while others, including Castro and O’Rourke, have said they would separate nonviolent offenders.

“That’s something we will continue to push them on,” Newman said of the specificity of the answers coming in.

“If you do give us one of those classic no-substance, boilerplate responses,” he added, “there’s a 50 percent chance that when you show up at the next coffee shop, you’re going to run into one of our volunteers.”