Campaign ad check: O’Donnell, Kansas Republicans use altered photo and racist tropes
Campaign ads for the re-election of Sedgwick County Commissioner Michael O’Donnell feature an altered photo of his opponent to support a claim she is anti-police — although she was actually praying with Wichita’s police chief when the picture was taken.
The picture of Sarah Lopez, with Police Chief Gordon Ramsay either blotted or cropped out, has popped up at least three times in the waning days of the campaign for Tuesday’s election: once in a TV and social media ad by the O’Donnell campaign and at least twice in mailers sent on O’Donnell’s behalf by the Kansas Republican Party.
O’Donnell did not return several calls seeking comment. Multiple efforts to reach state GOP officials by cell phone and e-mail were unsuccessful and the phone at the party headquarters in Topeka went unanswered.
O’Donnell’s campaign has been roiled since Friday’s reveal of a secretly made audio recording in which O’Donnell plots with two other office holders — state Rep. Michael Capps and Wichita City Council member James Clendenin — to deflect blame for a 2019 false attack ad that was made to smear Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple.
In that recording, O’Donnell is heard saying: “Like I’ve always learned in politics, it’s always avoid the truth at all expense, right? And just go on the attack.”
The picture O’Donnell and the Kansas GOP have been using in their attack ads on Lopez was taken by Eagle staff photographer Travis Heying during a prayer time at a peaceful Black Lives Matter rally on May 30.
It was used in the political ads without permission from The Eagle.
The rally where the picture was taken was held in front of the Patrol North police station near 21st and Hillside, in the heart of Wichita’s Black community.
It was part of the nationwide expression of grief and anger over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Ramsay, Whipple, City Council member Brandon Johnson and state Sens. Mary Ware and Oletha Faust-Goudeau addressed the crowd, among others. Afterwards, officers passed out bottled water and closed 21st Street for a peaceful march.
The original picture shows Lopez standing next to the police chief, both their heads bowed during a group prayer.
O’Donnell’s video blurred the photo, blotted out the police chief and replaced his image with the caption: “AND WON’T DEFEND OUR POLICE,” meaning Lopez.
The campaign commercial has been shown on local TV and posted to social media.
The photo was also featured in anti-Lopez mailers funded by the Kansas Republican Party, including one that misidentifies her as “Shelly Lopez.”
That state GOP mailer calls Black Lives Matter a “domestic terrorist organization” and uses the cropped image of Lopez from the May 30 gathering electronically superimposed over a burning Los Angeles police car.
Lopez denied every accusation in the mailer and said “I am quite against riots.”
She credited Ramsay and others’ efforts to reach out to minorities over the past several years with keeping a lid on violent protest here.
Lopez laughed at the implications in the mailer and said she’s never even been to Los Angeles.
She said her campaign staff has also had a few good laughs over the ad misidentifying her as “Shelly.”
“Shelly does seem to be a little bit on the wild side,” she said.
Russell Fox, a professor of political science at Friends University, said he couldn’t tell if the misidentification was some kind of effort to troll Lopez or “really, really bad fact checking.”
As for the ads’ use of the Eagle’s photo, he said “It’s obviously pretty indefensible that someone would take a photograph and use it in a way that is so plainly contradictory to the message of the original photograph.”
“Most people would recognize that taking a picture of a person praying next to Chief Ramsay at a BLM protest and superimposing it on a picture of a burning vehicle is really, seriously misrepresenting the image,” Fox said.
In its criticism of BLM, the mailer “makes use of racist tropes” portraying Black people as excessively violent and prone to rioting, Fox said.
Misappropriation of newspaper content is also part of an ongoing lawsuit over O’Donnell’s participation in last year’s anti-Whipple smear campaign, which falsely accused Whipple of sexual harassment of Capitol interns.
That ad used quotes lifted from a Kansas City Star/Wichita Eagle story about interns’ allegations against Republican senators in Topeka. Whipple was a Democratic member of the House of Representatives and the allegations were not about him.
The bogus ad was posted to Facebook and YouTube about a year ago in an effort to boost the re-election bid of then-Mayor Jeff Longwell.
Whipple’s lawsuit, recently updated based on new testimony and recordings obtained in the case, alleges that O’Donnell provided the talking points for the ad.
O’Donnell has admitted raising money that was used to bankroll the ad and its promotion on social media, but said he thought it was to be used for billboards.
The audio recording that damaged O’Donnell’s campaign was released Friday by a lawyer for Matthew Colborn, a young entrepreneur who produced the anti-Whipple video, after he was dropped as a defendant in the lawsuit.
Colborn’s recording captured O’Donnell, Capps and Clendenin plotting a cover story to frame Sedgwick County Republican Party Chairman Dalton Glasscock for the video, attempting to save themselves from the political backblast after Eagle reporting proved the ad was false.
Since the Colborn recording surfaced, multiple demands have arisen for O’Donnell’s resignation, including: the four other members of the Sedgwick County Commission, the officers of the Sedgwick County Republican Party, the Wichita Area Chamber of Commerce and U.S. Rep. Ron Estes, R-Wichita.
O’Donnell is the only one of the three on Tuesday’s ballot.
Capps was voted out in the August Republican primary and will relinquish his state House seat when new legislators take office in January.
O’Donnell and Clendenin, who has about a year left in his term, have said they have no plan to resign.
This story was originally published October 29, 2020 at 1:40 PM.
