You have probably heard some Dems boosted crazy MAGA Trumpists via ad buys in various Rep primaries, obviously angling for victory in November over more extremist, presumptively easier-to-beat opponents. Some of the crazies won!
Here’s a recent WaPo article about it. Quite a bit has been written elsewhere; you can google if curious. Details are colorful. (After the article appeared, Bolduc won!) These R’s who got the boost are all certifiable, whether they are electable or no. And it wasn’t just Dem candidates freelancing this on their own. The DCCC got involved among other leaders. So it wasn’t just some coordination problem where individual candidates acted in selfish, short-sighted ways against the party’s interest, never mind the country’s.
This has outraged people, D’s included. R’s (usually of an anti-anti-Trump bent) have cited it as evidence D’s don’t really believe that MAGA is a threat to democracy. Surely they would not be so cavalier as to play with fire if they thought it would burn the house down!
Maybe I’m getting flaming radical in my old age but, honestly, I just don’t see what the fuss is about. Actually, I thought I did at first. I said that I disapproved. Then I thought again and I just couldn’t see it. You tell me.
Let me sketch it abstractly. The season’s over but the issue remains and may recur. There is the Realpolitik of it. Then there’s the ‘ideal theory’ of it. Is it winning? Is it normatively justifiable, relative to a moderately aspirational benchmark of how democratic, adversarial party contests should be conducted?
I think it’s fine as Realpolitik, all things considered. Not self-evidently the smartest but a reasonable strategy. Not wildly risky. I think it’s likewise fine ethically. It isn’t really dishonest. A ton of stuff that people are regularly fine with, in campaigns, is much worse.
It’s just weird, I think. It isn’t normal a strategy like this seems likely. But – strange times.
Let’s do Realpolitik first without worrying about any nicey-nicey.
1st best: the Democrat wins. 2nd best: the moderate Republican wins. 3rd best: a crazy MAGA election-denier wins.
By boosting the crazies over the moderates, Dems are increasing the chances of 1 but also 3.
Is that obviously a stupid mistake? That is, is it obvious either that 1 isn’t much better than 2, or that 3 is much, much much worse than 2? (Or that otherwise the numbers just don’t work out.)
This is very far from clear to me. From a Dem perspective, a Dem is way better than a moderate Republican, who is likely to vote with R’s on almost everything except (by hypothesis) crazy overthrow-the-government-type insurrection and election denial stuff. Worse, I think there is a distinct risk that seeming-moderates would turn out to be squishes who break MAGA under pressure. That is, if you fail to boost an actual MAGA loon, against a moderate, you will only be accidentally boosting a MAGA-loon in moderate’s clothing. Better to fight against a clear crazy in the general than a crypto-crazy.
On the other hand, there is the counter-thought that you simply have to try to build a bulwark in the form of moderate R’s, against the day. But there is also this counter-counter-thought. A lot of establishment R’s clearly hate Trump and have contempt for MAGA but are just riding the crazy train, keeping quiet, hoping it will all burn out not too catastrophically, and the establishment can pick up the pieces again. Electing moderate R’s actually encourages these squishy anti-antis to fence-sit like that. Whereas, if MAGA crazies keep getting nominated and losing, so the R party itself loses, maybe only such real pain could make for civil war in the GOP, to get rid of Trump finally. So, by boosting crazy MAGA-types, to send down to flaming defeat, D’s are doing the healthy necessary heightening of contradictions to encourage the emergence of a moderate anti-Trump force in the GOP. Life is crazy. Who is to say? So you might as well just try to win, as a Dem.
It’s weird that campaigning for crazies on the other side would work. Normally this would probably be too-clever-by-half and just not work. But the R party has a problem. It has not a big enough base of moderate, center-right voters for candidates to win on that base. It has a fired-up radical, more or less far-right base. (But, fair is fair, far-right can get kind of confusing to calibrate. MAGA can cross-cut some traditional senses of left-right. But mostly it’s far-right.) But a healthy major party needs to have some moderates or it will be too small. So this just makes sense: if you know the other guy has broken ribs, hit him in the ribs. The fish will rot from the head down, eventually – if you hit the fish again and again in the broken ribs.
This goes against the idea that really what we want are two healthy major parties, so we should aim to get that. So, if the moderate ribs of the GOP are broken, the D’s should maybe bandage them, or at least not punish them! Maybe D’s should even campaign for some moderate R’s!
Yeah, but the whole point of two major parties is that they fight. When the ref says ‘fight!’ you can’t be trying to bandage the other guy, so he can fight you better, while he’s fighting you.
You can make deals, of course. You can have bi-partisan efforts. If moderate R’s get elected, of course D’s should be very happy to work with them. But, electorally, you would need a more wildly out-of-kilter set of upsides vs downsides s to be able to say that just plain boosting the D isn’t the straight best partisan play.
Now, let’s consider whether this is all just too sneaky and dishonest and lying, boosting a lunatic against a moderate, in hopes of going against a lunatic and winning because he’s crazy. (We’ve just ruled out that it’s more dangerous. But maybe it’s too dishonest.)
The thing is: it isn’t dishonest at all. The strategy is completely open. The D’s haven’t just come out and said it, but there would be no shame in it. I prefer 1st best to 2nd best and am willing to go for 1st best, although there is some risk. Honest, reasonable.
How about just saying this: we are cutting ads to boost crazies so we can beat them in the general. If knowing that D’s plan to beat them this way pisses off R’s, they can punish D’s by nominating tons of moderates, and not a MAGA clown in sight, to spite them. That’s fine. If the effect of this sinister D ad strategy is we get two competitive major parties, neither of which regularly nominates lunatics, D’s can live with that level of ‘backfire’.
When a strategy is perfectly open like that – or at least it can be open, without impairing it – that’s a sign that it isn’t dishonest.
But what about the content of the ads? Well, so far as I can see, the ads have all been perfectly honest and informational.
The ads are intended to inform R primary voters of who the most deplorable R is, so they can go out and vote for them. The theory is: the R voters will.
Often times the moderate R’s in the race want to create some uncertainty on this score, in the hopes that some Rs will vote for them, thinking they are more deplorable when secretly they are not so bad as all that. This is all sort of odd. But a perfectly good democratic principle is that ads that increase the ability of voters to find the candidate who best suits their preference in candidates are good ads. The Dem ads, boosting the crazies, effectively, are ads that accurately characterize where the R’s stand. The proof of this is that the Dems have been careful to cut ads that either are, or can double as, attack ads on the candidate in the general, whichever it turns out to be. That is to say, it will not be the case that these Dems are saying one thing in the primary period, and something else in the general – which is a quite common phenomenon, after all.
it’s far sketchier that it is so common to run to your base in the primary, then run to the center in the general. That’s dishonest. But normal. Understandable. These ads don’t do anything half so underhanded as that.
Some of these ads are kind of ironic. Again, some of them actually just say ‘this candidate is terrible, he stands with Trump 100%!’ That is, they are attack ads but they obviously anticipate that the attacks will ‘backfire’, causing the attacked MAGA candidate to win, due to standing with Trump 100%. But why is that dishonest? What the ad says is exactly what those paying for the ad think. It tells the voters a true fact that the person buying the ad wants the voters to know.
The ads that are attack ads on the moderate R’s are likewise, honest, as far as they go – so far as I have seen. A lot of moderate R’s are sleazy and corporate-establishment. Easy to make them look bad to the MAGA base by saying things about them that also make them look bad to the Dem base.
I’ll round off with the following: it seems bad to ratf*ck the other side’s primary, or bum-rush the other guy’s stage. Ideally, elections are battles of ideas and ideals that go in two stages. First, the R’s and D’s fight among themselves, in their primaries, to pick the best R and D, respectively. Then they fight in the general to determine whether the best R is better or the best D is, in the eyes of the voters generally. Deliberately degrading the other side’s candidate quality, rather than just minding your own knitting, working to see that your own candidate quality is high, seems counter-productive for good government.
But another thing you want is for elections to make the stakes clear. We want the voters to have choices and be informed. If you think that it’s basically a crazy MAGA party against a sane Dem party, making clear that it’s a crazy MAGA party, by ensuring that the R candidate is unmistakably crazy from 50 yards away, is offering voters a clear and honest choice.
Now, the objection to this would be: it’s not for Dems to say whether the GOP is crazy or moderate! It’s not for Dems to nudge the GOP towards the crazy, just because the Dems think that’s where it’s actually going. (Self-fulfilling prophecy.) But the Dems can say: we are only conducting an honest experiment in democracy to see whether we are right. We predict that, given a clear choice, GOP voters themselves will freely choose the worse and refuse the better. So we are running informative ads to help them make sure not to accidentally pick the better choice, thereby obscuring the expression of their preference for the bad. Then, we predict that in the general the general public, seeing that the GOP is the party of picking the worse over the better, the general electorate will not follow suit, also picking the worse. They will vote Dem instead.
There is no other way to play this game that is half so honest and open. It’s actually more dishonest to play it the other way, trying to engineer it so that somehow MAGA voices aren’t heard, proportionate to their number.
And, wrapping back to Realpolitik: not only is that sort of approach, trying to muffle MAGA, more dishonest, less open, it’s also what got us Trump in the first place. He benefited from the fact that there was an informal – not an alliance, but a harmony of elite positionings – between D’s and R’s that artificially constrained the issue space in some ways. That didn’t work out because it proved unstable. So maybe the smart play is to play it the opposite way. Give MAGA enough rope to hang itself. It’s not obviously impractical, it’s certainly not dishonest, therefore it certainly implies no failure to take the risks to democracy seriously. it takes them extremely seriously. So far as I can see.
{ 40 comments }
MPAVictoria 09.21.22 at 1:56 pm
For what it is worth I think you are spot on. None of the Democratic ads that I have seen lied or were dishonest about the R Candidates stances. Additionally, ANY Republican who wins will likely end up voting MAGA so it really doesn’t matter that much who wins their primary.
LizardBreath 09.21.22 at 2:38 pm
Are there any cases at all where Ds are straightforwardly advocating for the loonies, as opposed to, as you noted, running ads that identify them as horrifying Trumpist nutcases who are terrible? Obviously “Democrats hate me” is going to be a vote getter for Republicans in red areas, and the Ds running the ads know that, so the intended effects of the ads are as you said. But there does seem to me to be a huge ethical difference between literally boosting a scary candidate, and opposing them in a way that’s going to get them some votes.
The practical considerations seem to me to be exactly as you said — the practical effects of electing a ‘moderate’ republican aren’t significantly preferable to electing a foaming-at-the-mouth MAGA type, so increasing the chance of a D win is very likely to be worth it even if it increases the relative chance of a MAGA won over a moderate R.
1soru1 09.21.22 at 2:51 pm
Any time an obviously stupidly convoluted strategy is apparently rational then there is something being forgotten.
Surely the actual order of preferences is:
a Democrat gets elected by credibly promising to do things people want
a Democrat gets elected by pointing out how crazy the Republican candidate is
a ‘moderate’ Republican gets elected who does more or less the same as 2, but worse.
a crazy Republican gets elected, which is bad
If so, the thing being forgotten is #1. If you are not prepared for the possibility of actual good
things happening, then the best case becomes merely postponing disaster another electoral cycle.
TM 09.21.22 at 2:51 pm
“I just don’t see what the fuss is about.”
There has been some fuss about your false claim here at CT that “Some Dems, including the DCCC, gave to MAGA candidates in primaries”. Why don’t you just admit the claim as stated was false and correct the earlier piece? You were misled by the media, why not set the record straight?
Phil 09.21.22 at 3:26 pm
I say this is four-dimensional chess and I say to hell with it. Put it another way, it’s an argument in the form “OK, this seems very obviously crazy and unethical and counter-productive, but hear me out”, and in my experience those arguments’ hit rate is not good.
It seems to me that this is, first and foremost, an intervention in political discourse, and the effect of that intervention is not to promote left-wing values or even to boost the Democrats, but to promote a particularly crazy and dangerous set of right-wing values – and to promote them specifically by associating them with “conservative values”, and with values that the Republican Party stands for and (in its supporters’ eyes) should stand for. The downside risk of this strategy succeeding in what it’s actually setting out to do seems to me to far outweigh the speculative longer-term benefit.
Put it another way, would it have been good strategy for Trump’s campaign to promote Bernie Sanders and candidates allied to him, boosting them as true Democrats and suggesting that Hillary and co were DINO? I’m pretty sure they didn’t do anything like that, and I suspect the reason they didn’t is that they thought – as I do – that strengthening the Left in the Democratic Party had the potential to backfire massively (from their point of view), causing some short-term disruption but ultimately tending to build a party that was larger, stronger, more united and harder to beat.
Also, if they’ve got all this money to throw around, why don’t they spend it on Democratic candidates? Or, I don’t know, on union drives, or food banks or something.
Aardvark Cheeselog 09.21.22 at 4:06 pm
One thing that doesn’t get enough attention in this discussion: Trump is not the problem. Trump is a symptom, the Republican Party itself is the problem. There are no moderate Rs and there have not been for a long, long time. That is the problem. The “moderate Rs” who are fence-sitting would not be fence-sitting if they were really moderate.
In conclusion, the D approach described in OP is the only hope for reality and discourse to be brought into harmony, by either forcing a plurality to recognize the fundamentally radical subversive nature of the R program, or forcing the R program to be less radically subversive.
John Holbo 09.21.22 at 5:01 pm
“There has been some fuss about your false claim here at CT that “Some Dems, including the DCCC, gave to MAGA candidates in primaries”. Why don’t you just admit the claim as stated was false and correct the earlier piece? You were misled by the media, why not set the record straight?”
Sorry, are you talking to me? Which earlier piece are you referring to?
John Holbo 09.21.22 at 5:06 pm
Is it just the phraseology you object to: giving to MAGA candidates rather than making ads? I’m happy with that correction.
CP Norris 09.21.22 at 5:55 pm
I think in #1 you’re implying “and then the Republican concedes and goes home”.
But you also have to take into account that it might be “and then the Republican insists they won and continues trying to take power by all means they can imagine”. That’s a very unpleasant prospect, which Democrats are also boosting.
Sebastian H 09.21.22 at 7:54 pm
The missing insight is that in any district close enough for this type of thing to matter, it is also close enough to be decided by random things entirely outside your control (like inflation, or high gas prices, or rain). That type of decision is way more likely than that the 1-2% you’re hoping for breaks in the right direction at the right time because of your ads.
So in terms of expected return, the main effect is making it more likely that crazies get into office, which is absolutely not a good idea.
And like Phil, I want them to spend money on definitely or probably good things rather than hoped for bank shots.
Sorgenkind 09.21.22 at 8:43 pm
One of the unspoken assumptions of your argument is that it is easier for a Democrat to beat a MAGA Republican, than it would be for them to beat a moderate Republican. I think a lot of the argument turns on whether this is true. Clearly, Democratic strategists believe it is true. It’s a little less clear, but apparent enough that you find this claim plausible. But Democratic strategists were wrong about this in 2016, when no one thought Trump had any chance of beating Clinton. I’m not sure why this claim would be any more believable now, seeing as it doesn’t seem that the party has really processed the loss, let alone their fatal misapprehension of its likelihood (see: Clinton counting on the “Blue Wall” states, including PA and WI, when these states went to Trump). There’s a real risk here that we allow a kind of hubris among the consultant stratum to go unchecked and uncriticized. The biggest problem with the DCCC strategy of supporting MAGA candidates, in my opinion, only has to do indirectly with its electoral outcomes. On a more fundamental level the strategy seems to assume that the MAGA phenomenon can be objectified with sufficient clarity and distinctness that it can be controlled by the strategists of the Democratic party. But they have underestimated this phenomenon before – why would we believe they have a handle on it now?
Alex SL 09.21.22 at 9:23 pm
My first thought is that this is money spent on raising the profile of one’s opponents that could have been spent raising the profile of one’s own candidate and promoting one’s own views. That just feels wrong.
In terms of how likely it is to work out, it depends on one’s mental model of the electorate. Say there are three main groups of supporters of a given party:
Rusted-on supporters who will vote for it no matter what, either because they are extremely loyal, because they are ignorant or in denial of how radical the party has become, or because they vote on some issue where they will always see the party as the lesser evil no matter how unhinged it becomes on other issues (keeping the forriners out, lower taxes, guns, abortion, etc.).
Supporters who may be put off by the party becoming too radical and then stay home instead of voting (“moderates”).
Supporters who may be disappointed by the party being too milquetoast compromising and then stay home instead of voting (“radicals”).
The claim here, as with the perennial idea that the Ds need to move more to the centre to win, is that mobilising moderates is more important than mobilising radicals.
I am just not convinced that that is true. It seems to me as if in a two-party system, many people publicly claiming to be moderates easily put off by radicalism are actually in box number one and will, if push comes to shove, hold their nose and vote their side of the binary. The radicals, however, are more likely to withhold their vote.
Under a binary system like that, as opposed to multi-party, proportional representation where lesser evil logic isn’t as powerful, elections are won on how well one side mobilises its partisans by demonstrating that it fights for their interests and, of course, by having pure luck with low-information independents who may chuck their vote the party’s way this round based on the topic of the day (usually some crisis outside of the government’s control) or how well the economy happened to have been doing the last six months.
Sorgenkind 09.21.22 at 10:26 pm
I tried to post a comment that was apparently rejected, but I am not sure why since it wasn’t disrespectful or anything. I’ll try phrasing it as as questions rather than as an argument:
To what extent do you think your argument is dependent on the assumption that Democratic candidates can beat MAGA Republicans more easily than moderate Republicans (or that they have figured out how to defeat MAGA Republicans at all)? This assumption is clearly held by Democratic consultants and strategists – but does it seem warranted to you? If we had good reasons to doubt it, would it change your position?
marcel proust 09.22.22 at 12:47 am
in re:Bolduc
I’ve been living in NH for more than 20 years, more than 1/3rd of my life (not sure I can call myself a NHite yet). (The last poll of the Republican primary race that I saw before the election, about 2 weeks beforehand, had Bolduc at about 41% and his nearest rival at about half that. The race ended up being very close, so whatever the Dems did is unlikely to have helped Bolduc. Since the primary, the only poll I’ve seen shows Hassan at 51% and Bolduc at 40. Then, there’s this (which I stumbled across while looking for the other links). I don’t know anything about this website, but i like the message so I am linking to it here.
J-D 09.22.22 at 12:50 am
There is also a big difference between making ads which argue that you should vote for those candidates and making ads which argue that you should not vote for those candidates.
John Holbo 09.22.22 at 2:01 am
Sebastian: “So in terms of expected return, the main effect is making it more likely that crazies get into office, which is absolutely not a good idea.”
I don’t really think that’s true. Not more so than: the main effect is getting D’s into office. It’s clearly not a good idea to elect crazy election-deniers. But, on balance? For me the decisive thought is this: what you really don’t want is for crazy election-deniers to actually overthrow the government and institution some authoritarian something. You want to fight against THAT. But how best to do that. it is not clear to me that ‘try to elect Dems’ isn’t the answer. Maybe boosting the crazies (to elect Dems) will actually work better to stop then than the opposite. It’s hard to say.
John Holbo 09.22.22 at 2:04 am
J-D: “There is also a big difference between making ads which argue that you should vote for those candidates and making ads which argue that you should not vote for those candidates.”
Yes, all the ads have been attack ads. But when you have two R’s, an attack ad on one during a primary scans as a ‘you should vote for the other R’ ad. But I think that’s fine. The D can say: you CAN read it as ‘you should vote for no R.
J-D 09.22.22 at 5:10 am
On this theory, if Democrats run an ad during a Republican primary denouncing one of the Republican candidates for supporting a dangerous and irrational agenda, the implication is that they are encouraging people to vote for a Republican who does not support that dangerous and irrational agenda! What’s supposed to be wrong with that?
TM 09.22.22 at 8:10 am
John Holbo 7: “Sorry, are you talking to me? Which earlier piece are you referring to?”
I quoted your piece verbatim. You really don’t remember what you wrote earlier, and you don’t remember having several commenters pointing out to you that you were wrong?
https://crookedtimber.org/2022/09/04/who-thinks-who-is-a-threat-to-democracy-part-1
It would really have been easy to just admit having been wrong and make the correction. This is quite disgraceful.
Regarding this weird whole bullshit debate: nuff said.
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2022/08/are-democrats-responsible-for-the-actions-of-republican-elites-and-primary-electorates-spoiler-no
TM 09.22.22 at 8:14 am
Also, John Holbo 8, I don’t object to your “phraseology” (although to be fair there are grounds for objection), I object to you making false claims.
M Caswell 09.22.22 at 11:35 am
Maryland is an interesting current example. Larry Hogan is an extremely popular moderate Republican governor among voters of both parties. But Democrats and Trumpists effectively worked together to defeat his chosen ‘Hoganist’ successors up and down the ticket in the primary. As a seed-ground for a sane wing of the GOP, Maryland now looks like a bust. Not clear to me that this is a good thing.
SusanC 09.22.22 at 6:05 pm
Things I think are wrong with it:
a) It’s a high-risk strategy; the guy you think is a lunatic might actually get elected. Sure, you think he’s a lunatic, but members of the opposing party might think he’s great, or at least no worse than the proverbial yellow dog, and vote for him anyway.
b) It undermines the legitimacy of the democratic system if there is a possibility that someone was elected not because people actually wanted them in power, but because tactical voters miscalculated. It is very bad to be in a position where “sure, he got elected, but no-one actually wanted him in power.” Worst case, you get a mob with guns led by a guy in a comedy fur hat occupying the US capitol. [Ok, not quite worst case. Things could go even worse].
SusanC 09.22.22 at 7:42 pm
Joe Lycett (satrically) pretending to be a supporter of Liz Truss when he was on Laura Kuenssberg’s show is maybe related. (I’m inclined to think the main target of the joke was Laura Kuenssberg, as the joke exposes that she is avoiding asking any hard questions of Liz Truss when any competent journalist ought to asking some serious questions).
I look forward to some leftist US comedian dead-panning their enthusiasm for Trump.
SusanC 09.22.22 at 7:52 pm
But the Dem rhetoric is that Trump is much, much worse than a typical Republican: fears that he might start a civil war, or sell the country out to the Russians, or some such.
The revealed preference of the Dems is that they are prepared to risk option (3), which implies either that they don’t think (3) is likely to happen, or they don’t think it will be as bad [for them] as they are claiming. Given that (3) seems distinctly possible, the revealed preference is that the Dems don’t believe what they are saying. Or at least, that the Dem politician’s personal utility function considers (2) and (3) very similar, even if the average voter’s utility function is that they would really, really prefer that the US did not descend into a version of the breakup of Yugoslavia.
J-D 09.23.22 at 1:09 am
How? What, specifically, did they actually do?
Revealed how? What, specifically, did they actually do?
John Quiggin 09.23.22 at 3:39 am
The big question is whether the Republican is explicitly anti-Trump and committed to preserving democracy. In that case (and there was at least one such, IIRC whom the Dems advertised against) the Dems should not support a MAGA opponent.
But the great majority of “moderate” Republicans have shown that they will back Trump in the end. In that case, there’s nothing wrong with sharpening the issue by assisting an open Trumpist.
SusanC 09.23.22 at 9:48 am
Also: there is a danger in boosting groups who think US elections are fraudulent, and are advocating violent overthrow of the government.
Suppose you boost those groups by running ads for them, but they don’t actually win (because the median voter thinks they’re lunatics). After your win, they won’t believe the election result is legitimate, and are going to shoot you.
SusanC 09.23.22 at 10:25 pm
Another potential problem with doing this to the Republican primaries: you should take into account the possibility that the Republicans might do the same thing to the Democrat primary.
worst case, you succeed in making the Republican candidate be someone you think is crazy. But .. oops … the R’s have done the same thing to your priomary, and the Democrat candidate is now someone you think is even crazier … so now you have no choice but to vote for a candidate you think is crazy (or not vote).
Lest you think that there is an asymmetry that makes this implausible … in UK (as opposed to US ) politics, it is clear that centrist Labour hates the left just as much .. possibly even more .. than they hate the Tories, and probably prefer Boris over Jeremy Corbyn.
So the US failure mode would be someone like Marjorie Taylor Green get the R. nomination, but then some Jeremy Corbyn analog gets the D. nomination, due to a combination of (a) actual leftists who really want him to win; (b) anti-status-quo populists who are prepared to switch from R. to D. if a populist candidate is on the D. slate; (c) ratfucking from Republicans who want the Dems to lose. So now, centrists Dems are going to vote for MTG because, although she might be a deranged anti-semitic conspiracy theorist (cf. the whole Jewish space lasers thing), at least she isn’t an actual leftist.
J-D 09.24.22 at 12:36 am
It does seem that would be a bad thing if it had actually happened, but if it has actually happened, it seems odd that nobody has produced an actual example.
Raven Onthill 09.25.22 at 10:39 pm
In Illinois, at least, the strategy appears to be working; a far right Republican who the Democrats helped win the gubernatorial nomination is polling badly against the popular Democratic governor.
But I think there’s another reason for the response. There’s a sense that this is a moral failing; that the game ought to have rules and the parties ought to play by the rules. The USA is haunted by the shadow of the republic the founders imagined; a republic governed by knowledgeable disinterested men (sic.) Instead, they got the democratic hurly burly that US politics continues to be.
Many elected officials are incompetent, self-interested, and corrupt. The problem is especially acute in the Senate, which over the years has given rein to some of the USA’s worst impulses. And presidents—! Most of them were mediocrities, and the best of them are shadowed by the worst.
I don’t have an answer. The founders tried to prevent this outcome and failed. Still, we have tools the founders did not: the social sciences. It is possible we can use the knowledge gained in the past two centuries to do better.
J-D 09.25.22 at 11:35 pm
Did they help him? How, specifically, did they do that? The more times I ask this kind of question and don’t get any answers, the more reason there is to doubt that these kinds of description are accurate.
Raven Onthill 09.26.22 at 12:06 pm
J-D@31:
Etc., etc. there’s lots of reporting on this.
politicalfootball 09.26.22 at 10:46 pm
What did the Democrats do to support Darren Bailey? Raven explains via WaPo:
Are the attacks on Irvin inaccurate? (No.) Is important context missing from them? (No.) Have the Democrats concealed their motives in attacking Irvin? (No.)
If I were advising a politician, I would never say: “The truth is politically helpful here, so please let’s conceal it.”
And the Post’s assertion that Irvin is a “moderate” is just Post-speak for: This is a guy who is ashamed about advertising what a horrible human being he is prepared to be. It is now the “moderate” position to express concern about the survival of women who seek abortion. But that — and the rape and incest exception — are the only concessions to decency that he’s willing to offer. And I am suspicious of his sincerity.
As best as I can reckon, Irvin has been unwilling to support the result of the 2020 election, and is thus, at best, agnostic on the merits of democracy. This is what the WaPo calls a “moderate.”
If we had an honest media that was prepared to confront people like Irvin, there might be some reason for the Dems to back off. As it is, Irvin and his media collaborators seem a lot more dangerous than Bailey.
J-D 09.27.22 at 12:30 am
That article does not describe the Democrats paying for ads which advised voting for a Trumpist candidate or which made any positive comments about a Trumpist candidate.
Raven Onthill 09.27.22 at 2:23 am
J-D, there were six candidates in the Republican gubernatorial primary, three major front-runners; the Democrats ran ads attacking one of the front-runners. Are you claiming the intended outcome was not to advance the others?
J-D 09.27.22 at 7:27 am
How could I possibly know?
Raven Onthill 09.27.22 at 2:07 pm
J-D@36 oh, so the Democratic Party spent millions on a campaign with no intention of influencing the outcome? Well…it’s a take, but it’s a silly one. Go away.
J-D 09.28.22 at 12:28 am
No, the Democratic Party obviously wants to influence the outcome of the election, meaning by that that the Democratic Party wants to win the general election: therefore the Democratic Party does not want to help any Republican candidate, of whatever stripe, to win the general election. It is reasonable to suppose that the people who ran the ads described hoped that those ads would in some way contribute to the goal of Democratic victory in the general election. There’s no way I can be sure how they thought that would work. If you’re sure you know how they thought that would work, you haven’t explained what makes you so sure.
anon 09.30.22 at 2:39 am
Oftentimes, if the primary doesn’t seem close, I’ll ask for the other party’s ballot to do what is referred to as ‘strategic voting’. Helping to nominate the candidate you think will be easier to beat is a time-honored American tradition.
The R’s are just upset it’s being used AGAINST them this time around.
Precious Snowflakes VBG
J-D 10.02.22 at 8:20 am
There is, however, a difference between individual voters choosing to do this, and a party overtly urging its supporters to do so. Advertising attacking a candidate in another party’s primary does not automatically equate to urging your own party’s supporters to cross over and vote in that party’s primary, particularly as (if my recollections are accurate) some States don’t allow this kind of crossover voting.
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