What Happened
Reuters reports that ahead of Virginia's April 21 referendum on redistricting, both parties flooded voters with Barack Obama messaging. Democrats used his actual endorsement of the measure. Republicans used older clips of Obama condemning partisan gerrymandering in the abstract, hoping that enough people would hear his voice and stop asking inconvenient follow-up questions like "wait, what is his position right now?"
Obama appeared in ads for the yes side saying Republicans wanted to rig the next election and urging Virginians to vote yes. Meanwhile, Republican-backed groups used 2017 footage of Obama talking about the damage caused by gerrymandering and repackaged it as support for a no vote. Which is less political persuasion than archival ventriloquism.
Why This Belongs Here
This is media nonsense because the ad strategy depends on laundering context out of existence. The point is not to argue honestly about the referendum. The point is to borrow a familiar voice, strip away timing and specifics, and let recognition do the lying for you. Campaigns keep discovering that if you cannot win the whole truth, maybe you can rent a fragment of it.
It is also a perfect monument to the information ecosystem we built: expensive statewide persuasion campaigns now operate on the principle that most voters will only absorb the celebrity noun, not the actual sentence around it. So "Obama says gerrymandering is bad" gets repurposed into "Obama is with us," even when he is literally in other ads saying the opposite.
The Extra Idiocy
What makes this especially stupid is that it turns a serious structural issue into a branding trick. Redistricting determines who holds power in Congress. But instead of making the case straight, everyone has to funnel the debate through familiar voices, TV spots, and context-free snippets like politics is just an IP licensing war.
And because the referendum could help decide control of the House, the whole thing gets even dumber and more expensive. Naturally. Nothing says healthy democracy like fighting over representation by turning one former president into two contradictory ad campaigns at once.
Source
Reuters: In Virginia gerrymandering fight, Republicans claim Obama's with them. He isn't