Democrats have discovered a convenient new rule of political combat. A candidate's family, they now insist, is strictly off-limits, and anyone who drags a relative into a campaign has sunk to a shameful new low. You'll notice the rule seems to apply only when a Democrat is in the crosshairs.
The record tells a very different story, and the evidence goes back years.
The latest meltdown centers on Darla Arthur, the mother of Ohio Democrat gubernatorial nominee Amy Acton, which my PJ Media colleague Stephen Green reported on Tuesday. Arthur released what many are calling an “October surprise” video in which she calls her daughter a liar and urges Ohioans to keep her out of the governor's mansion.
Now, we know Acton is a liar already. Who can forget when she falsely claimed to have been the target of an assassination attempt last month?
But this ad definitely hits differently.
"My name is Darla Arthur and I'm Amy Acton's mother," she begins. "I worked at Children and Family Service Association, building one of the first two sexual abuse programs in America."
Arthur then turns to why she decided to go public. "I love my daughter, but when I saw her lying about her opponent, it's not easy for a mother to say this, but Amy has a serious problem," she says. "She is a liar… She lies about her past, she says she grew up living in a tent. None of that is true. She's lied her entire life."
Arthur closes by saying, "My daughter needs help. And she can't help you if she needs help herself. People can change, but first they have to tell the truth, and my daughter still isn't doing that. Don't vote for people who lie. Don't let her become your governor."
Of course, there are caveats to bring up. Acton and her mother have been estranged since Acton was 12, when she went to live with her father and his relatives. Acton claims her mother married an abusive man and that she spent time living in a tent. Arthur rejects that version of events.
I don't know anything about Acton's family history, and I won't pretend to. What I do see is a rather blatantly coordinated response to the ad on social media. Vivek Ramaswamy is taking the blame for it. I have no idea who is behind the ad. The viral clip making the rounds carries none of the usual disclaimers, so I can't say whether his campaign had any role in it at all.
What I can say is that the faux outrage from the left over using a candidate's mother in an attack is peak hypocrisy. A quick search on X will reveal a whole bunch of posts blasting the use of Acton’s mother in an ad. There’s definitely a legitimate debate over such a tactic. Still, the left is hardly in a position to be claiming some moral high ground on the issue, because using family to attack a political rival is a pastime of the Democrat Party, and the receipts are easy to find.
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Start with 2018, when six siblings of Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) appeared in campaign ads endorsing his Democrat challenger, David Brill, and tearing into their own brother. Two years later, MSNBC (now MS NOW) gave Mary Trump airtime to criticize her uncle during the Republican National Convention and promote her tell-all book.
In 2020, a Michigan Republican state legislative candidate named Robert Regan watched his own daughter publicly urge voters to reject himon Twitter, and the liberal media was more than willing to give the tweet coverage. That was a viral appeal rather than a confirmed Democrat-produced ad, but it shows how ordinary this tactic has become.
Using family as weapons is such a go-to tactic for the left; Democrats even use it on each other. During their 2020 Senate primary, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) invoked the Kennedy legacy against then-Rep. Joe Kennedy III, prompting Kennedy to accuse Markey of "weaponizing their history."
Then there's Sandy Smith. In 2022, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) aired a TV ad built on allegations made by the Republican candidate's daughter of domestic violence. The press release announcing the ad still appears on the DCCC website.
And then, of course, in 2024, then-President Joe “Autopen” Biden appeared with at least 15 Kennedy family members, including RFK Jr.'s sister Kerry, who endorsed Biden over her brother's independent presidential bid.
And it hasn't stopped.
This year, Democrat Brian Poindexter's campaign ran ads spotlighting allegations from Emily Moreno, the ex-wife of Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio).
Democrats never objected to this playbook when it served their purposes. Democrats have spent years turning candidates' own families against them and forfeited any claim to the moral high ground long ago.
