ACLU Turns Political, Backing Biden Campaign

By IRA STOLL, Special to the Sun| September 15, 2020

Direct mail gets less attention than television commercials or campaign events. Yet it is a battleground in the presidential race, as the campaigns and their proxies communicate privately with voters.

Take a recent mailing from the American Civil Liberties Union. “I’m writing you today with an urgent plea for your participation,” says the letter, signed by the executive director of the ACLU, Anthony Romero. Then, in boldfaced type: “Fueled by racial animosity and political desperation, Trump won’t stop at anything to keep people from the polls this November.”

Mailing letters to voters just weeks before early or mail-in voting starts, describing one of the two presidential candidates, by name, as motivated by “racial animosity” and as attempting to prevent in-person voting — when in fact President Trump has encouraged people to go to the polls — is the sort of thing you’d ordinarily see from a political party or an actual candidate’s campaign, not a nonprofit organization such as the ACLU. The tax return the ACLU filed in November 2019 cites the organization’s articles of incorporation in stating, “The ACLU’s objects should be sought wholly without political partisanship.”...........To Read More.......