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The Democratic Party, flush with cash this cycle, is spending money on an unusual tactic: helping Republicans.
In several key statewide races from Colorado to Pennsylvania, the Democrats have boosted extremist pro-Trump candidates in GOP primaries, hoping to get general election opponents who have more vulnerabilities, a high-risk, high-reward strategy: If any of those extremists follow former President Donald Trump’s path and actually win, Democrats will have helped accelerate the Republican Party’s drift into radical right-wing politics. There’s a lot of disagreement among strategists about the wisdom of this approach, but this week, a high-profile example highlighted the problems inherent in supporting fringe candidates.
In Michigan’s 3rd Congressional District, GOP Rep. Peter Meijer is facing a tough reelection campaign in a seat Cook Political Report has rated as a “toss-up.” Prior to redistricting, it had a more Republican tilt, but now, it’s a bona fide Democratic target, and Hillary Scholten, a former Department of Justice attorney, is running basically unopposed on the Democratic side of the primary.
But Meijer has a problem, which is that he has a viable primary opponent in John Gibbs, a conspiracy theorist who is endorsed by Trump. (Meijer was one of the few Republican House members to vote for Trump’s impeachment.) Seeing an opportunity, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has spent nearly a half-million dollars on an ad that purports to be an attack on Gibbs for being “too conservative for West Michigan” but is fairly obviously a ploy to make him look more attractive to Republican primary voters.
This has prompted an outcry from Democratic House members, who have said that helping Gibbs win “compromises your values” and makes the party look insincere when it talks about the importance of safeguarding the country from anti-democratic extremists.
To be fair to the DCCC, meddling in the other party’s primary is a tactic with a long history. In 2018, for instance, the DCCC spent $180,000 backing a Republican challenger to Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, hoping to bump the incumbent off of the general election ticket. This failed — the candidate the DCCC spent on got very few votes — but Democrats unseated Rohrabacher anyway. And in a cycle when Democrats are generally outraising Republicans, spending $425,000 on a moonshot to replace an incumbent with a weak candidate might be a viable tactic.
But the fact that this spending has become a mainstream news story is a problem. It undercuts one of Democrats’ key arguments in the midterms, which is that the GOP is full of dangerous extremists who attempted a violent coup in 2021 and will do so again at the first opportunity. The DCCC has managed to divide the caucus it purportedly represents, which is a problem for party unity at a time when there are already enough intra-party fractures around points of messaging and policy.
This also underscores why we at Blue Tent do not highly recommend giving to the DCCC. It has a history of meddling in Democratic primaries in order to get the most “electable” candidate on the general election ballot and often to defend centrist incumbents against more progressive candidates. In other words, it takes the side of one party faction over another, and while you can support that in the name of political hardball, the DCCC doesn’t exactly advertise these functions when fundraising. The DCCC homepage asks for money to “help protect our Democratic majority,” not “support the moderate wing of the party while occasionally backing Republican extremists when we find it strategically helpful.”
Meanwhile, as of the last FEC report, Scholten was trailing Meijer by $1.5 million in fundraising. That seems like a gap that the DCCC could help close after the primary is over and the committee is done spending money on Republicans.