Reportedly the successful sabotage work of Donald Segretti and Ken W. Clawson; in a childish scrawl with poor spelling, the author of the Canuck letter claimed to have met Muskie and his staff in Florida, and to have asked Muskie how he could understand the problems of African Americans when his home state of Maine has such a small black population, to which a member of Muskie's staff was said to have responded, "Not blacks, but we have Canucks" (which the letter spells "Cannocks"); the author further claims that Muskie laughed at the remark. While an affectionate term among Canadians today, "Canuck" is a term often considered derogatory when applied to Americans of French-Canadian ancestry in New England; a significant number of New Hampshire voters were of such ancestry.