It is, by all measurements, one thing to knock your political opponent on a policy you disagree with. It’s another to criticize them even when you agree.
But it may be an entirely different universe of hypocrisy to misrepresent your opponent’s position and attack them using their own arguments and words—not as in throwing their words back at them and refuting their arguments, but as in actually taking their words and presenting them as your own.
Jen Kiggans, the top Republican candidate in a pivotal House race next year, recently sent out a fundraising email dinging her opponent as part of a Democratic coalition that doesn’t “put America first” and will “cower to China.”
That email, however, would likely receive a failing grade in a classroom; it lifts key phrases from her Democratic opponent.
Kiggans, in the attempt to pillory her political rival—two-term incumbent Rep. Elaine Luria (D-VA)—actually agrees with her, and appears to have stolen language directly from a Wall Street Journal op-ed Luria published four days prior to the email blast.
Mark Algee-Hewitt, director of the Stanford University Literary Lab and an expert in statistical linguistic analysis, called the email “really bizarre.” His software analysis pegged the probability that one of the phrases in question was accidental at one in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000.
“For comparison’s sake, that is less likely than you being elected president of the USA and winning the Powerball lottery in the same year,” Algee-Hewitt told The Daily Beast.
The op-ed, which ran this month, advocates for a beefed-up defense budget to meet the threat posed by China’s military build-up. Luria, whose district is home to the world’s largest naval base, took an uncommon position for a Democrat, chiding top military brass for an anemic budget request and for their contradictory statements about the seriousness of the threat posed by China.
Kiggans, a Virginia state senator, makes the same overall argument—many of them in strikingly similar language to Luria’s. She claims this stance sets her apart from elected Democrats who “don’t seem to share that perspective,” while ignoring that Luria does, in fact, share that perspective. Sometimes down to the very word.
Here are direct comparisons of the language in question:
Luria cites the growth in Chinese military power, specifically overtaking the U.S. naval fleet by 63 ships: “Meanwhile, China is building warships at an astonishing rate. In 2010 the U.S. Navy had 68 more ships than the Chinese navy. To