Democrats, in working to defeat Meijer, have ceded any moral authority they had to condemn the ‘stop the steal’ movement.
Democrats, in working to defeat Meijer, have ceded any moral authority they had to condemn the 'stop the steal' movement.
O n Friday, Representative Seth Moulton (D., Mass.) said of Peter Meijer, “I think Peter is exactly the kind of Republican we want to have around, but at the end of the day we have to win the majority, and that is the bigger concern.” That saying encapsulates Democrats’ entire strategy in Republican primary campaigns, one that trades principle and devotion to American democracy for political expediency. In an interview with National Review back in June, Meijer predicted that Democrats would continue their campaign of meddling in GOP primaries to nominate Trump-endorsed candidates who embraced the “stop the steal” movement. They would “wait until the last minute, until it’s too late to counter,” he said.
How right he was. A mere week before his primary for the Republican nomination in Michigan’s third congressional district — which he lost to MAGA challenger John Gibbs on Tuesday — the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) ran a TV ad in the district, calling Gibbs “too conservative for west Michigan.” Though the ad was critical of Gibbs, the intent behind it was clear. Republican voters would likely gravitate toward the candidate whom Democrats hated the most. The DCCC knew this, and that is why it spent $435,000 to boost Gibbs in the race. That is more than the Gibbs campaign raised for the entirety of his campaign. The DCCC even spent more money to help Gibbs than did former president Donald Trump, whose Save America Super PAC gave only $5,000 to his campaign. Meijer best described Democrats’ support of Gibbs in an op-ed he published the day before the primary: “They are subsidizing his entire campaign.”
Meijer is not the first pro-impeachment incumbent to lose to a MAGA challenger in the 2022 election cycle. Tom Rice of South Carolina has that honor, but Democrats did not give support to his victorious opponent. Nor is Meijer’s race the first in which Democrats have meddled. In Pennsylvania, they spent twice as much money on TV ads in favor of the eventual winner, “stop the stealer” Doug Mastriano, than did Mastriano’s own campaign. This is not even the first time Democrats have undertaken the ignoble effort of trying to help a MAGA candidate oust a Republican who voted for impeachment. In David Valadao’s California primary, Nancy Pelosi’s Super PAC ran ads to support his opponent, Chris Mathys, who tried to get his ballot designation listed as “Trump Conservative.” Despite Pelosi’s efforts, Valadao held on to defeat Mathys.
Though the country has become eminently familiar with this hypocritical Democratic meddling, Meijer’s loss takes it to an entirely different level. His is the first race in which the Democratic Party has engaged in immediate material cooperation with someone they have deemed to be a “threat to democracy” and succeeded in defeating a person they have heralded as one of the American Republic’s great defenders. “If you let Republicans back in power, it is going to be those MAGA Republicans who want to take away your rights, your benefits, and your freedoms, and we need to stop it,” said congressman Sean Maloney (D., N.Y.) on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. The day Maloney appeared on TV to call upon Americans to “stop” Republican extremists was the very same day the DCCC started its advertising campaign in west Michigan to help Gibbs, which Maloney, as the committee’s chair, green-lit. Similarly, Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin, who worked as an impeachment manager after the January 6 rampage and now serves on the select committee devoted to investigating it, argued, “It might be worth it to take a small risk that another one of those people would be elected, in return for dramatically increasing the chances that Democrats will be able to hold the House against a pro-insurrectionist, election-denying GOP majority.”
We are told that the Republican Party, in the aftermath of Trump’s “stolen election” con job and the Capitol riot, is no longer a responsible custodian of American democracy. There is no shortage of lamentable actions from the GOP in relation to the events of January 6: the effort to object to the 2020 election’s certification, Senator Josh Hawley’s raising his fist to the crowd of protesters that would soon become marauders, and Trump’s wishy-washy condemnation of those who illegally entered the Capitol. Additionally, Republican voters are the ones who have the final say in the election, and the moral blame of nominating Gibbs ultimately falls on them. But in terms of party leadership in the present moment, it is hard to see how Democrats are not doing markedly worse damage to democracy than Republicans. The GOP is bound by its voters. If the people want to nominate a “stop the steal” candidate, Republican leaders have no choice but to go along, lest America return to a “King Caucus” system, in which the party establishment chooses a candidate without a popular vote. Democrats, on the other hand, could have chosen not to aid an effort, which, by their own admission, is antithetical to the Constitution. Unlike Republicans who have a duty to follow their constituents’ wishes, they have no obligation to give monetary assistance to Gibbs and others. With these efforts, they have gone out of their way to prop up the people they have told voters to ostracize.
Gibbs is probably not going to win the general election. He may have had a chance if he were the nominee in 2020, when Meijer beat Democrat Hillary Scholten by six points. In that election, the district was R+9, but Michigan lost a congressional seat in the 2020 census, so it is now D+3 as a result of redistricting. Voters in the district, which has become less red and less Trumpy, likely will not want to vote for Gibbs. It appears that Democrats have gotten their wish for Republican voters to reject a more electable candidate in favor of one who is easier for Scholten, who is running again, to beat. Still, there is a world in which Gibbs does not advance anywhere past the primary, and there is no risk of another person who rejects the results of the 2020 election entering Congress. In that world, Democrats do not meddle in the primary, and they allow Republican voters to give Meijer the chance to beat Scholten again, accepting the results of that election, whatever they may be. Instead, they chose to aid a man whom they believe to be an enemy of America. We should have tuned out Democrats’ screeching about January 6 when they first started undertaking these efforts. Now that they have achieved their most dangerous success, we should ring a death knell for their credibility on the issue. The United States Constitution is durable, and it has endured more menacing threats throughout American history. But if MAGA Republicans somehow do destroy our system, Democrats will have been complicit.