Democrats faced a backlash Wednesday — including from within their own ranks — after inserting themselves into a GOP primary in western Michigan, helping a far-right candidate who has embraced false claims about the 2020 election to topple a Republican who had voted to impeach Donald Trump.
Democrats this year have tried to interfere in multiple GOP primaries, using ads that appear to be attacks on more extreme candidates as a way to subtly promote those contenders. The idea is to line up opponents who the Democrats believe to be more easily beatable in the general election.
But Tuesday’s vote was the first in which the closeness of the outcome — Trump-endorsed challenger John Gibbs won with 52 percent of the vote, according to unofficial returns — suggested that the Democrats’ meddling may have tipped the results. – "Democrats face blowback after boosting far-right Michigan candidate," Washington Post, August 3, 2022
Democrats oppose the big lie and regard Trump as unfit to serve, yet earlier this month the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee boosted John Gibbs, the wacky election denier, to harm Congressman Peter Meijer (one of only ten House Republicans who cast a vote for impeachment) in his bid for reelection.
A number of critics (cited in the Washington Post article quoted above) have condemned this decision. The move was “cynical and dangerous” according to election savant Richard Hasen, who said, “We know that the Trumpian wing of the Republican Party is doing a lot to undermine people’s confidence in the fairness and integrity of elections. The idea that Democrats would be willing to gamble on electing more of these people because they think they’ll be easier to beat in the general election really is playing with fire.” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Members of Congress Mark Pocan and Dean Phillips – Democrats all – offered equally pointed criticism. The DCCC strategy was denounced as “a dangerous game,” “a very risky proposition,” and a disgusting boost of “the far-right opponent of one of the most honorable Republicans in Congress.”
Politico found additional Democratic members of Congress who offered scathing assessments of the DCCC approach, and none who voiced approval. In this post I will make an affirmative case for the DCCC decision.
Let's take a closer look.
Michigan's 3rd Congressional District
On May 18, 2019, Justin Amash became the first House Republican to call for Donald Trump’s impeachment (the first impeachment). On July 3, 2019, Peter Meijer announced that he would oppose the congressman in the August 2020 Republican primary for Michigan’s 3rd Congressional District:
In an interview with MLive, Meijer said his approach as a congressman would differ from Amash in that he would work with President Donald Trump to “make sure that we advance policies and an agenda that is in the best interest of West Michigan.”
Meijer, though this was his first bid for public office, insisted that he could be effective:
He pointed, for instance, to Trump, and said that, “Our president has demonstrated that to be a change agent, sometimes it helps to come from outside the system.”
On July 4, 2019, Amash announced that he was leaving the Republican Party. Subsequently, he decided not to seek reelection.
Meijer went on to win the Republican nomination and, in a close race against Democrat Hillary Scholten, the general election in 2020. Two days after the January 6 insurrection, he called on the Republican Party “to own up for the lies and deceptions we’ve been telling our supporters” about election fraud. Later that month, he was one of ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump (the second impeachment).
His opponent in the Republican primary earlier this month was the aforementioned conspiracy theorist, John Gibbs. When a radio host (who claimed Sandy Hook was a hoax and Parkland survivors were "crisis actors") tweeted that Hillary Clinton’s campaign messenger had participated in satanic rituals, Gibbs retweeted it, adding, “True, true, true.” Truth be told, Gibbs is hardly out of step with many Republican candidates across the country and a number in Congress.
On August 2, Republican voters rejected Meijer and gave Gibbs, whom the former president had endorsed, the nomination. Hillary Scholten, who narrowly lost in 2020, won the Democratic nomination setting up the scenario that the DCCC sought, a November face off with Scholten vs. Gibbs.
Democracy threatened as the DCCC plays the odds
This is a perilous time for American democracy. In the past half dozen years, this peril has often been described as ‘a five alarm fire.’ So Professor Hasen’s metaphor, that the Democrats are playing with fire, fits. Further, since electoral outcomes can never be predicted with certainty (just ask Eric Cantor, Joe Crowley, or Kansas legislators), in a sense the DCCC has placed a gamble on the November contest in Michigan.
But, based on all we know, this sure looks like a safe bet. It would be counterproductive, in seeking to preserve the House majority, not to take it. The prospects of a Democratic loss appear more slender with Gibbs, a newbie candidate who occupies the far right fringe, than with Meijer, a sitting first-term congressman who belatedly recognized the threat Trump poses, on the November ballot. Though Democrats could lose, that’s not likely.
Besides, what if Gibbs wins? There’s one more crackpot in Kevin McCarthy’s conference and that’s hardly a big deal. It’s easy enough to imagine scenarios where the presence of Meijer (rather than Gibbs) might make a difference. But those improbable scenarios are hardly near the top of any list of reasonable political concerns, such as retaining the House majority (or losing it narrowly). The DCCC has made a reasonable gamble in this instance.
The GOP became an anti-democratic movement decades ago
The road to the MAGA Republican Party didn’t begin with the infamous 2015 escalator ride. The dangerous transformation began much earlier. Newt Gingrich deserves special recognition. “During his two decades in Congress, he pioneered a style of partisan combat—replete with name-calling, conspiracy theories, and strategic obstructionism—that poisoned America’s political culture and plunged Washington into permanent dysfunction.” Moreover, Gingrich oversaw “the dismantling of the traditional legislating process based on the committees,” while he "slashed several thousand staff positions from the congressional committees and abolished the Office of Technology Assessment and the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations—agencies of Congress that brought scientific expertise to various issues and studied the impact of federal policies on state and local governments.”*
While the upheaval in the party during the Gingrich era can hardly be overstated, the dystopian changes have continued apace, with more milestones just since the mid-1990s than you can count (including an increasingly hostile House GOP caucus in the image of Gingrich, the rise of Fox News Channel and an alternative media universe, a series of anti-democratic rulings from the Supreme Court, Mitch McConnell's leadership in imposing gridlock in the Senate, and aggressive voter suppression laws across the country).
Donald Trump’s rise was not a one-off. Nor was he something new under the sun. The GOP was becoming increasingly anti-democratic before Trump's arrival and takeover. As noted in my previous post, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein observed in 2012:
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
By the time that was written, the trajectory of the GOP had become clear (though commentators and journalists mostly refused to recognize it at the time, just as most Republicans still do to this day). This devastating indictment of the Republican party sketches a virtual roadmap for a party transforming itself into an autocratic cult with a prodigious liar, contemptuous of the rule of law, at its head.
Rejecting both insurrection and democratic governance
And yet (as noted in my last post) Liz Cheney and other prominent Republicans who have at long last broken with Trump – by rejecting the big lie and the insurrection – do not accept the Mann/Ornstein indictment. They embrace the status quo ante just before the big lie and January 6 rioting. In doing so, they continue to enable an anti-democratic GOP.
This group of latecomers opposing Trump undeniably includes Peter Meijer, who wrote on the eve of his 2022 primary election: “Watching this unraveling inside my party has been utterly bewildering. The only thing that has been more nauseating has been the capacity of my Democratic colleagues to sell out any pretense of principle for political expediency — at once decrying the downfall of democracy while rationalizing the use of their hard-raised dollars to prop up the supposed object of their fears.”
Congressman Meijer is bewildered by a party, his own, comprised of a multitude of leaders and tens of millions of followers who embrace the big lie and defend (or whitewash) the January 6 attack on the Capitol. But it is Democrats who make him nauseous – stemming from a decision made by Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee – which many Democrats in and out of Congress oppose. (These critics are wrong, in my view, but the point is: Meijer's partisanship blinds him to what's been going on for a long while, what has become deeply embedded in his own party. This is why his anger is directed chiefly at Democrats.)
Peter Meijer is onboard with the decades-long anti-democratic project of the Republican Party that came before January 6. He saw an opportunity after Justin Amash had declared his support for impeachment (the first). He was raring to go to Washington to work with Trump. He looked at the president as a role model "from outside the system." That's a record that evidences a shallow commitment to democratic institutions.
Is Meijer better than an election denier (who will likely lose to a Democrat)? Well, yeah. But that's not good enough to spare him from a pragmatic campaign strategy to defeat House Republicans.
Defending American democracy
The surest way to change the Republican Party, to limit the damage it is doing our to democracy, is to defeat Republican candidates at the polls. That includes Republicans who embrace the party's pre-January 6 anti-democratic agenda. Rejecting the big lie and the insurrection shouldn't get you a free pass from Democrats.
But Democrats meddled in a Republican primary
Many Congressional Democrats are aghast at interference (or meddling) in Republican primaries. Is renouncing 'meddling' actually a matter of principle in political campaigning? Pause to consider an unexceptional, run of the mill televised political commercial: sound, images, and words designed to provoke or persuade. I understand a principled objection to content that is (for instance) inflammatory, libelous, or untruthful. I fail to see a compelling principle opposing a no-meddling policy.
Would the DCCC's running negative ads elicit such strong opposition from Democrats in Congress? Why object to meddling in this race? I believe it's because many Democrats have been gobsmacked by their GOP colleagues' embrace of the big lie. It is refreshing news, a reassuring affirmation regarding the integrity of a handful of their Republican counterparts, to see them renounce election deniers and insurrectionists. In an era when Republicans are "unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science," Democrats wish to throw out the welcome mat for the few who are bucking their party. Meijer stood up and told the truth (as Liz Cheney has done).
That's an understandable reaction. But shortsighted. Step back and consider the bigger picture: the only reason the meddling strategy worked (to eliminate Meijer) in Michigan's 3rd CD (or anywhere else) is because of the refusal of Republican leaders to denounce the lies and violence that have infused their party. They have either lied outright or refused to level with their voters (who have learned to cast ballots for extremists). These Republican leaders have done so because they seek a political advantage. They are willingly – in their pursuit of political power – doing damage to our democratic institutions.
'Meddling' wouldn't work if Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell, and other Republican leaders forthrightly denounced the big lie and the January 6 rioting and remained steadfast in the denunciation. But they won't. McConnell has made a judgment (replete with wishful thinking) that he'll gain more in the short-term by keeping quiet, than by speaking out (though he's lost this bet before). McCarthy has decided to go all-in with the big lie. The two men have this in common: their desire for political power trumps their commitment to democratic institutions.
In both cases, they need to be taught a lesson. The lesson is this: Democrats are going to punish Republicans in November for countenancing the big lie. To forgo meddling, Democrats would be doing McCarthy, McConnell, Trump, and so many other election deniers a huge favor.
The failure to meddle, insofar as it diminishes the prospects of a Democratic victory in 2022, would be a mistake of sentimentality. The best way to deter the Republican Party from its anti-democratic agenda, or (if that's not possible) to prevent it from implementing its agenda, is to defeat it at the polls. Fair and square.
That’s the strategy that Congressman Maloney and the DCCC have adopted. In my view, in this election year, it maximizes the prospects of success for the only party committed to defending our democratic institutions.+
*Note: Bonus quote on Gingrich from Nicole Hemmer (discussing her new book on American conservatism with Politico):
Newt Gingrich … really believed that Republicans needed a rhetorical style that made it clear that Republicans were the good guys and Democrats were the bad guys. And it’s not just “good” versus “bad.” It is “moral” versus “degenerate.” Gingrich would pick the worst possible words — “treason,” “degeneracy” — to attach to Democrats, and he felt like that was important.
+Note: Bonus headline: "Once unthinkable, Democrats now see narrow path to keeping the House."
