Romney’s Plan to Win Virginia: Lyme Disease

On Thursday evening, Anahita Nemat, a conservative PR specialist living in Northern Virginia, tweeted out this photo, with the description: “Received my first mailer from @MittRomney & @PaulRyanVP today. It talks about Lyme Disease. Huh? I’m confused! Why?”

@AnahitaNemat/Twitter@AnahitaNemat/Twitter

We were confused too. But it turns out that Romney has, over the last few months, actually made Lyme disease—the bacterial disease transmitted to humans from deer ticks—part of his pitch to suburban Virginia voters. It started back in August, when he sent a public letter (paid for by the campaign) to Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) commending him for his push to create a “Tick-Borne Diseases Advisory Committee.” “More needs to be done,” Romney wrote. “As president, I will work to ensure that more attention is focused on this important issue … We need to ensure that all scientific viewpoints concerning this illness can be heard.”

 

 

Incidentally, the letter, which was sent out on August 4th, wasn’t picked up by the press until this Thursday, when the Washington Examiner reported on it as part of a “bid for worried moms in the outer suburbs populated with whitetail deer and other wildlife.”

As it turns out, Romney is actually injecting himself into an intense dispute within the medical community, pitting the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS) against the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA). IDSA believes there is “no convincing biological evidence” that Lyme is a chronic infection, while ILADS thinks there are flaws with the current testing system. Wolf and Smith have aligned themselves with ILADS, which is reflected in their bill and other public statements.

Here’s the problem, though. That Lyme disease epidemic Romney is so concerned about? The spread of the disease is aided and abetted by climate change. Lyme Disease already costs the US $2.5 billion annually, is expected to double in geographic scope over the next 70 years. But Romney has said government should do nothing to stop man-made climate change—if it’s even happening at all. “My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet,” he said at a debate last October. “And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us.”

I won’t pretend that I know exactly what the Romney campaign is doing here, except to note that it’s tough to micro-target any deeper than a mailer talking about ticks. An obscure subsection of Virginia law requires that I ask University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato about all such Old Dominion issues, but in an email, the campaign guru professed ignorance: “VA is home to some Lyme disease, but I would never have guessed that it was a presidential level issue!”

Perhaps the campaign has some data that shows that this kind of targeted mailing will drive up his favorables among, say, middle class, politically moderate moms who like to hike. Or maybe they’re just trying to get under Obama’s skin.

Update: The Weekly Standard‘s John McCormack has the full mailer.

Find an unusual political pamphlet in your mailbox? Give us a shout: tmurphy [at] motherjones [dot] com.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate