Short-Term Gain, Long-Term Pain

In politics, you’ll always get as good as you give. Whatever you mete out to the other guys will come back to you. A wise political party will not deploy tactics it wouldn’t want its political opponents to adopt for themselves because the terms of engagement are universal.

The Democratic Party has not been so wise. Since at least the early 2010s, Democratic politicians and their allies have greenlit clever campaigns aimed at manipulating Republican voters into behaving in ways that ultimately redounded to Democrats’ benefit. Sometimes, the practice has worked out great for Democrats. At other times, not so much. But Democrats now seem to have convinced themselves that the GOP’s effort to play that same game is dirty pool. At least, that’s the impression conveyed by a New York Times report on the Trump campaign’s efforts to undermine Democratic support for Joe Biden through a variety of loosely proximate affiliated groups.

The Times dispatch focuses primarily on the quiet efforts by Trump-linked donors to boost Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s candidacy. The logic of that effort is unassailable: “The more candidates in the race,” the Times reported, “the better for Mr. Trump.”

“Spoiler!” Democrats wail in the hope that publicizing the effort by Trump allies to corral disaffected Democrats into RFK Jr.’s camp will somehow cure them of their disaffection. In fact, there is nothing unusual about a campaign attempting to depress the other side’s vote, much less providing those voters with an outlet for their unhappiness. What’s distasteful about this effort is that Trump’s backers have appropriated for themselves the relatively new Democratic tactic of promoting the very values they claim to oppose.

“A third parallel effort in Michigan is meant to diminish Democratic turnout in November by amplifying Muslim voters’ concerns about Mr. Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza,” the Times report continued.

Trump allies are discussing running ads in Dearborn, Mich., and other parts of the state with large Muslim populations that would thank Mr. Biden for standing with Israel, according to three people familiar with the effort, which is expected to be led by an outside group unaffiliated with the Trump campaign.

The temptation to exploit the divisions within the Democratic Party over Israel’s defensive war against Hamas is obvious and, perhaps, hard to pass up. But Republicans would be wise to fear this stratagem’s unintended consequences. A successful effort to flip Michigan on this basis, which would persuade Democrats that Biden’s support for Israel cost him the presidency, would beget a Democratic Party that is far more beholden to its anti-Israel activists. That might make it easier for the GOP to win elections — at least, on the margins. But Republicans won’t win them all. And when their opponents retake power, it will be on the backs of voters who are that much friendlier to the allies of Hamas terrorists.

The tactic closely mirrors efforts by Democratic allies to boost Republican candidates who were most zealous in their promulgation of 2020 election conspiracy theories or even lent legitimacy to the circumstances that culminated in the January 6 riots. Not all of those initiatives were successful, but many were. And while this tactic helped the Democratic Party emerge from the 2022 midterm cycle relatively intact, it left in its wake precisely what the party’s leaders claimed they wanted to avoid: a GOP that was just a little more comfortable with the stolen-election narrative.

Cynics and partisans will probably disregard the trade-offs here, but political professionals who devote their lives to the pursuit of specific public policy outcomes are more sincere than that. Democrats genuinely fear the prospect of a GOP that is comfortable with extralegal violence and unconstitutional power grabs. Republicans are genuinely unnerved by the activist Left’s accommodation of elements in its ranks that appear willing not just to tolerate the massacre of Jews but welcome that bloodshed as a kind of karmic comeuppance. Neither will admit to themselves that the tactics they deploy in advancing their own interests contribute meaningfully to the other side’s devolution. Indeed, they might object to the claim that they have at all contributed to their adversary’s lapses in judgment. But nothing happens in a vacuum.

However marginally, Democratic efforts to convince Republicans to nominate the lowest common denominators in their party have made our politics worse. It seems likely that an equivalent Republican effort to boost the relevance of anti-Israel activists in the Democratic coalition will have a similar effect. These tactics are employed because they work, but the victories to which they contribute come at a steep price.