North Dakota Heads Into Last Week of Election With a Flurry of Misspelled Mailers

The North Dakota Republican Party dropped a mailer in the District 18 race accusing Democrat Corey Mock of being a carpetbagger.

You see, Mock has been representing District 42 in the Legislature but spent most of his last four-year term living in District 18.

Only the message of the Republican mailer is kind of overshadowed by the fact that they spelled Mock’s name wrong. They wrote “Cory” and it’s really “Corey.”

Nor was that the only gaffe in the mailer, as John Hageman reports: “The mailer misspells Mock’s first name as ‘Cory’ in four different places, and it refers to him as a ‘freshman member of the minority party, although Mock is in his second term after first being elected to the North Dakota Legislature in 2008. He is currently the Assistant Minority Leader in the North Dakota House, according to his legislative biography, and he ran for North Dakota Secretary of State in 2010.”

I’ve made my fair share of typos and blunders. Mistakes happen. But this is kind of a big mistake. You’d think the NDGOP would want to have someone who knows a thing or two about the District 18 House race to review a mailer like this. Because whatever effectiveness it might have had is overshadowed by the errors.

Kind of like this mailer Democrats dropped into Cass County’s District 22 race. It depics Republican House candidates Brandi Pyle and Michael Howe as being puppets controlled by an all-power House Majority Leader Al Carson.

Only it’s, you know, Carlson (click for a larger view).

As it happens, political scientist Mark Johnson has a piece here on SAB today disputing the idea that Carson-er-Carlson is some sort of a puppet master.

Not that it matters. Informed and conscientious voters aren’t the target audience for these sort of mailers, I’m afraid. These last-ditch efforts are about getting the dumb rubes who might wander into a voting booth this week to cast their ballot a certain way.