Derrick Anderson's fake family scandal won't go away. New reporting from the Washington Post highlights how Anderson's deception is top of mind for Virginians, featured in campaign ads, and proactively brought up by voters in the community.

According to the Post, "parents and students interacting with Anderson at North Stafford High School's homecoming football game last weekend" asked Anderson about it directly and Anderson "falsely suggested that the image was circulating only because Democrats had captured a screenshot of that video." However as the Post noted, "In fact, Republicans were the ones who effectively turned the video into a photograph."

The "unforced error" that will "come back to haunt him" points to Anderson's authenticity problem and his desperation to hide his anti-abortion record.

As Eugene Vindman said during their recent debate, "Derrick is lying about his fake family. If you are going to lie about something [that] fundamental … how can you be trusted on more serious topics?"

DCCC Spokesperson Lauryn Fanguen:
"Derrick Anderson's fake family may be fictional, but the fallout from his costly deception is very real. Virginia voters don't trust Anderson's words, don't trust him with their rights, and certainly won't trust him with their vote."

Washington Post: A 'fake family' photo takes center stage in battleground House race
Teo Armus | October 28, 2024

• The attack ad in Virginia's most competitive congressional race starts off like something out of a sitcom.

• An actor resembling Derrick Anderson, a Republican looking to flip Virginia's battleground 7th District, comes home to greet life-size cardboard cutouts of a woman and three young girls. The stand-in Anderson eats dinner with the pictures, plays board games across the table from them and then joins them to watch a movie.

• It was a biting callout to an image that has dogged the former Army Green Beret for the past month: Anderson, who recently got engaged and does not have kids, shot campaign footage this year that showed him posing with the wife and three daughters of a friend - a scene that critics pounced on as giving the false impression he was the patriarch of the nuclear family.

• Since a photo of them posing together emerged in a news report late last month, liberal groups backing his opponent, Democrat Yevgeny "Eugene" Vindman, have blitzed the image over the airwaves - to the point that Anderson's campaign on Friday sent cease-and-desist letters to local television stations to get the spot featuring the paper family off the airwaves.

• "It's the story that Democrats have been trying to tell about Anderson for a while, and this is an effective, snappy hook to twist the knife a little bit when it comes to that message," said Jacob Rubashkin, deputy editor at the nonpartisan newsletter Inside Elections.

• As the House GOP looks to defend a slim majority in the chamber, Rubashkin called the incident an "unforced error" that could leave its mark. "If Anderson loses," he said, "this is going to come back to haunt him."

• At a rally in Dumfries over the weekend, he [Eugene Vindman] brought up his own "real wife" and "real kids" - to laughs from the audience.

• During a debate in Fredericksburg this month, he answered an unrelated question by saying: "Derrick is lying about his fake family," Vindman said. "If you are going to lie about something [that] fundamental … how can you be trusted on more serious topics?"

• Even before the primary, the 7th District race had become a battle over authenticity.

• Anderson, who has largely campaigned on fighting inflation and congestion on Interstate 95 and beefing up border security, has been dogged for months by allegations that he does not actually live in the 7th District.

• Most of those attacks did not break out beyond the relatively small circle of pundits and politicos closely tracking the contest. But then the New York Times published a Sept. 27 article about male GOP candidates trying to appeal to female voters by filming campaign material with female family members.

• Anderson, the article pointed out, had done the same - just not with his own family.

• The "fake family" photo - as it became known - took on a life of its own: It spread to other news outlets, comedic monologues on late-night TV and multiple attack ads from Vindman and Democratic groups - and then, eventually, to the parents and students interacting with Anderson at North Stafford High School's homecoming football game last weekend.

• "I was like, 'What was that about?'" said Debbie DeCola, 54, after Anderson chatted with her at the ticket booth. "There was a picture of him: Was it him and his fiancée? Or was it just different random pictures? But it talked about a fake family. Like he's not telling the truth."

• Sitting next to his fiancée, Maggie Romanin, at the football game, Anderson said no photo had ever been taken and that it was part of a longer collection of supplemental campaign footage, also known as "B-roll." He also falsely suggested that the image was circulating only because Democrats had captured a screenshot of that video.

• In fact, Republicans were the ones who effectively turned the video into a photograph. The Anderson campaign this year posted two separate videos of B-roll on YouTube showing him posing, holiday card-style, with Stafford County mother Ashley Cremisio, 41, and her three daughters. There are also clips of the five talking around a kitchen table and similar footage of Anderson chatting with other supporters.

• The National Republican Campaign Committee, the House GOP's campaign arm, captured a still image of Anderson and the Cremisios together from that video - and then posted it on a website meant to provide assets to super PACs and outside groups making their own ads.

• Lauren C. Bell, a political scientist at Randolph-Macon College, pointed out that plenty of other stills from the B-roll or other photos could have been used as assets on that website.

• "It's just so strange from a campaigning standpoint," she said. "You could have had a staged photo with a bunch of adults instead - Derrick Anderson talking with neighbors about their bread and butter concerns. The publicity around this just did not do him any favors."

• Neither an NRCC spokeswoman nor Anderson's campaign answered questions on how that image ended up on the website or why it was selected from nearly six minutes worth of footage of the candidate. Each referred a request for comment to the other.

• Lyndsey Clater, a 46-year-old stay-at-home mom, said she had already been turned off by the "combat to Congress" banners that Anderson's campaign had posted around her neighborhood. But the "fake family" bit, which prompted her to let out a chuckle, didn't help.

• "That's so funny," she said. It seemed to play on the maxim that "you can tell a lot about a person by the people they surround themselves with."

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