My latest New York Post column looks race by race at the more than $44 million and counting poured by Democrats across at least eight states into Republican primaries to boost Trump-endorsed candidates and/or candidates who refused to accept the outcome of the 2020 election and punish members of the House who voted to impeach Donald Trump. (I’ve previously written on that behavior here and here.) They’re still at it in the New Hampshire senate primary, spending at least $3.2 million to back Don Bolduc over Chuck Morse.
What does this tell us? One, Democrats are utterly insincere in their efforts to claim that they are truly worried that Trump and “MAGA Republicans” are an existential threat to the Republic. That’s exactly why Joe Biden can’t even keep straight the difference between MAGA Republicans and the rest of the party: because he doesn’t really think the post January 6 Trump faction of the party is a real threat, so he is more interested in partisan point-scoring against Republicans as a whole. Two, and relatedly, leading Democrats, in their bones, do not regard what Trump did after the 2020 election as out of bounds. Given their long track record of attacking the legitimacy of elections they lose, top Democrats simply see this as how the game is played and could picture themselves doing the same thing if the roles were reversed. To me, that’s what, say, Josh Shapiro is saying by spending more money on TV ads to help Doug Mastriano than Mastriano himself spent, or what J. B. Pritzker is saying by doing the same for Darren Bailey: This is all just an accepted part of the game. It’s normal. They’d do it themselves. And if some of these Republicans win their races on the strength of the national environment, well, it was worth it just to elect a few more Democrats than would otherwise have won.
Three, of course, while this stuff is dirty pool, there isn’t any law against it, and it would be hard if not impossible to devise one that isn’t bad and unconstitutional, so Republican voters really need to get better at resisting it by being a lot more skeptical of candidates the Democrats are supporting financially. If you’re thinking of voting for Don Bolduc, ask yourself: Why is it worth millions of dollars to Chuck Schumer and Maggie Hassan to nominate this man? Republican voters have learned to mistrust the mainstream media, and even to mistrust many of their own party’s leaders and institutions. It’s time for them to learn to mistrust Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and DGA chair Roy Cooper.
Fourth, there is no substitute for leadership. Democrats have a large and ever-growing insane faction within their party, but they still have a party establishment capable of guiding their voters to pick the people the party sees as the strongest candidates and avoid the people the party sees as unelectable. We saw that vividly in the 2020 presidential race with the simultaneously orchestrated withdrawals of Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar timed to consolidate the party behind Joe Biden against Bernie Sanders. As I noted in my latest magazine piece, while Trump is not the sort of strong party leader who can recruit solid candidates and impose discipline — voters have conspicuously rejected some of his choices — he now functions instead as a kind of anti-quality control, selecting his endorsees solely by reference to who is willing to do the most damage to their own credibility with the general electorate in service of Trump’s lies and delusions. Some of the more controversial Trump endorsees will likely win this fall anyway, given the national political tailwinds, but it is likely that Republicans will keep losing winnable races due to bad candidates unless and until the party has a leader who combines the desire to advance the party’s interests as a whole with the discipline and strength of will to get its various factions (of voters, candidates, donors, etc.) on the same page. No matter how badly the Republican Party establishment has failed — both the pre-Trump establishment and the Trump establishment — the idea of not having a party establishment at all is nuts. A successful party must have leaders and a class of professionals committed to the success of the institution, and those leaders and establishment figures must, for the good of the cause, remain in tune with their party’s grassroots and responsive to its needs and desires. The right leader will need to teach Republican voters to trust Republicans more than Democrats with the interests of the party.