RUTHFULLY YOURS

So worried they have spent tens of millions of dollars and counting to promote controversial Republicans in hopes they will win their primaries. In an extremely cynical move, they are pushing candidates in key races who embrace bizarre or unproven theories about the 2020 election and who are the same candidates they claim are a clear and present threat to democracy.

Democratic groups have elevated the profile of marginal or extreme GOP candidates in Colorado, Illinois, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. The reason is that it may work. Helping such Republicans to win their primaries has worked in the past. Democratic senators Claire McCaskill in 2012 and Joe Manchin in 2018 won in part because Democrats worked to nominate the easiest GOP opponents for them (McCaskill was then defeated in her 2018 reelection effort).

In an essay in 2015, “How I Helped Todd Akin Win — So I Could Beat Him Later,” McCaskill recalled her thinking:

We came up with the idea for a ‘dog whistle’ ad, a message that was pitched in such a way that it would be heard only by a certain group of people. I told my team we needed to put Akin’s uber-conservative bona fides in an ad — and then, using reverse psychology, tell voters not to vote for him. And we needed to run the hell out of that ad.

The McCaskill tactic has had some success this year. Pennsylvania state senator Doug Mastriano recently won the GOP gubernatorial nomination in Pennsylvania aided by Democratic-sponsored ads highlighting his conservative agenda. Nonetheless, Mastriano trails Democratic candidate Josh Shapiro by only four points in the latest polls.

In Colorado, liberals are running ads attacking state representative Ron Hanks as “too conservative” in an attempt to raise his profile in the GOP Senate primary.

The Democratic Governors Association (DGA) is trying mightily to kneecap Republican front-runners in primaries — including businesswoman Heidi Ganahl in Colorado, who told me the ads promoting her primary challenger are a type of “dirty pool” that she can’t remember ever being used by Colorado Republicans.

The DGA’s biggest play is in Illinois. Wealthy Democratic governor J. B. Pritzker and the DGA have spent a combined $40 million to promote a GOP candidate in the June 28 primary that Pritzker is convinced he could crush in November. Politico reports:

It appears to be working as Pritzker’s team hoped. Republican Richard Irvin, the early frontrunner in the race with a tough-on-crime message, has lost ground to conservative Darren Bailey in the polls. The shift follows a barrage of ads that propped up Bailey — paid for by the DGA.

Another reason Pritzker wants Irvin defeated? He is African American, and, as the former mayor of Aurora, the second-largest city in Illinois, he could contest Spritzer’s hold on minority voters.

Former GOP governor Jim Edgar says the Democrats have never been “as obvious as they have been” this year, with this hypocritical ploy.

But some Democrats privately worry they are playing with fire. “There is always the chance that in a wave election against your party, the same crazies you wanted to win the other party’s primary wind up actually beating your guys and making laws,” Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf once told me.

It wasn’t so long ago, after all, that Trump was seen as a bump in the road to Hillary Clinton’s path to the presidency. And the economy isn’t doing Democrats any favors.

It’s telling that the media is largely ignoring the Democratic dirty-tricks ad buys, even though there is no comparable effort on the GOP side. An exception is the attention paid by National Journal columnist Josh Kraushaar, who asks: “How seriously does the party take its own argument that American democracy itself is threatened by Republicans when they’re boosting some of the most radical conspiracists and election-deniers for naked political gain?”

Once again, liberals swear they care most about reforming democracy. But what they are demonstrating by their actions is a desire for raw power.