Democrats are once again pouring money into a GOP primary to support a candidate who they claim is a threat to democracy.
Democrats are once again pouring money into a GOP primary to support a candidate who they claim is a threat to democracy.
D emocrats and their media supporters have been playing a two-faced game ever since last January 6. On the one hand, they say that the Capitol riot and Donald Trump’s broader “Stop the Steal” movement present a unique and continuing threat to our democracy, which requires an emergency footing and the suspension of many of the usual rules of politics. On the other hand, their actions reveal, over and over again, that they view January 6 and Stop the Steal simply as means to obtaining a partisan advantage.
They have not reconsidered any of their prior attacks on the legitimacy of elections; to the contrary, they nominated a serial stolen-election truther for governor of Virginia, renominated a candidate for governor of Georgia who insists that her last gubernatorial election was stolen from her, and stocked the January 6 committee with stolen-election truthers (including chairman Bennie Thompson, one of multiple current House committee chairs who objected to certifying the 2004 election). President Biden insists on branding the upcoming midterm elections as illegitimate unless Congress passes the Democrats’ voting and election bill, which it won’t pass, while Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer describes American elections as a “rigged game” — an excuse he offered for opposing Electoral Count Act reform.
Ah, you say: Of course Democrats think the real threat is coming from the other side of the aisle. Surely they are at least serious and consistent about that. Surely, they have learned their lesson from 2016, when progressive pundits argued openly that it was better if Republicans nominated Donald Trump than Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz. Surely, at the barest minimum, when viewing choices between two Republicans in which one is a Stop the Steal hardliner and the other is not, Democrats would put country above party to prefer the latter.
And yet, in the Pennsylvania governor’s race, where Stop the Steal candidate Doug Mastriano faced a crowded field that included more conventional Republican candidates, Democrat Josh Shapiro and his allies sent out mailers boosting Mastriano and spent twice as much money on pro-Mastriano TV ads as the Mastriano campaign itself did. They did this for cynical partisan advantage, thinking Mastriano the easier candidate to defeat. No Democrat or pro-Democrat pundit acted as if it would be dangerous, in a Republican wave year, to put Mastriano one step closer to becoming governor of the Keystone State.
The Democrats’ media defenders were furious that conservatives noticed this, and argued frantically that none of it mattered because Mastriano would have won anyway. And as likely as not, he would have — but if we are judging the Democrats’ actions to see if they actually believe that the nation is facing an existential threat, $840,000 spent on pro-Mastriano TV ads is not the act of a party that believes a word of that. Party above country, every time.
And I do mean every time. The Democrats are already using the same playbook in the Colorado Senate race. There, incumbent Michael Bennet holds the kind of Democratic seat that will only be endangered in the event of a big Republican wave, and even then only if Republicans field a plausible candidate for it. Colorado is a blue state now, but it is not deep-blue enough that Bennet (who failed to crack 50 percent of the vote in his 2010 and 2016 wins) can just coast to reelection. A wave of some sort is coming, and Democrats can do nothing at this point to control its size. The one thing they can do to avoid an expensive and difficult race is to influence whom the Republicans nominate.
There are two ways to get on the ballot for Colorado’s June 28 Republican primary. One is the party convention, referred to as the state assembly. The only candidate to crack the necessary 30 percent of the vote at the convention was state assemblyman Ron Hanks, a Stop the Steal rally attendee who literally launched his campaign with an ad blowing up a Dominion voting machine. Democrats thought that, as the only candidate to qualify at the convention, Hanks would be the nominee, and they were licking their lips. But then Joe O’Dea, who runs a Denver-area construction business, bypassed the convention and got on the ballot through an arduous signature-gathering process.
So now, Democrats are repeating their Pennsylvania gambit. “Democratic Colorado, a left-wing super PAC . . . is spending at least $800,000 this week alone” on ads openly promoting Hanks and trying to raise his name recognition in Colorado, per Politico. Overall, “Democratic Colorado has reserved at least $1.49 million worth of TV advertising slots in markets across Colorado over the next several weeks,” according to Colorado Newsline. A second group, ProgressNow Colorado, has also announced a campaign to support Hanks over O’Dea.
The strategy is transparent: “Beating Hanks in the general election is a layup,” as Greg Brophy, a GOP strategist and former Colorado state legislator who is supporting O’Dea, told Politico: “If Democrats spend $1 million to help Hanks win the GOP primary, that will save them $20 million in the general. It’s actually brilliant.” Chuck Schumer’s PAC is refusing to say whether it is behind the ads. (Democrats are also spending over half a million dollars to boost their preferred Republican candidate in the Colorado governor’s race.)
Whatever Mastriano’s chances were on his own, Hanks needs the help. O’Dea’s campaign polling has him up 33–12, and even if you don’t put much stock in internal polls, the first-quarter fundraising report showed O’Dea with $609,138 cash on hand compared to Hanks’s $16,165. According to Politico, Hanks “has raised just $38,000 throughout the course of his Senate campaign and has never placed a TV ad of his own,” while according to the Colorado Sun, “O’Dea plans to spend more than $300,000 in the coming weeks on TV ads in a race where polling shows voters don’t really know either candidate. . . . American Policy Fund, a super PAC funded in part by contractors with ties to O’Dea, has reported spending $600,000 on digital, radio and TV ads supporting O’Dea.” O’Dea has a reported $1.4 million banked. He has behind him a battery of high-profile endorsements within the state, while Hanks has none.
None of these tactics are brand-new; Claire McCaskill famously used them to ensure that she’d face Todd Akin in her 2012 bid for reelection. But if the Democrats truly believed that the likes of Mastriano and Hanks were a unique threat to our democratic system, they wouldn’t be spending millions of dollars to boost those candidates. Their actions speak far louder than their words.