Democrats Can’t Beat MAGA
Democratic Donors are Aligning Themselves with President Trump to Support MAGA Candidates in Republican Primary Races
Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead
In my home state of deep blue Maryland, Republican Larry Hogan has received a significant amount of praise during his time as Governor. In January, his approval rating was 74% and his support from Democrats (77.9%) actually exceeded that from Republicans (68.9%). He is what many would call a principled conservative leader, one of few national Republicans to confront the MAGA movement. Gov. Hogan is in many ways the type of Republican many Americans have expressed a desire to see in office. As the polling suggests, Gov. Hogan and presumably Republican candidates similar to him also are attractive candidates for many Democratic voters.
Gov. Hogan and others have been pushing hard to move the party away from the extreme right and back towards the center. To that end, he backed Kelly Schulz, who serves in his cabinet, in the Republican Primary race to succeed him. She went head to head with Dan Cox, an extremist Maryland state legislator who has made headlines for his efforts to grab the limelight, including: suing Gov. Hogan over his “stay-at-home” order with the charge it was unconstitutional, filing orders of impeachment against Gov. Hogan for those same orders, and helping organize busloads of protestors to participate in the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Amongst his many hot takes, notable highlights include his assertion that President Joe Biden’s election victory should not have been certified and that former Vice President Mike Pence was a traitor for certifying the election.
Nationally speaking, a victory for Schulz would have been seen as giving momentum to the principled wing of the Republican Party. One would think that Democratic voters and independents would likely favor Schulz as a clear preference to Cox if they had to be governed by a Republican. However, many national Democrats and donor groups realized that Cox’s election would all but roll out the red carpet for their nominee in the general election. In the Maryland Republican Primary race, the Democratic Governors Association (DGA) spent over $1 million on an ad boosting Cox’s candidacy. His victory over Schulz is seen as a tally in the win column for the MAGA movement of the GOP.
Maryland’s Republican Gubernatorial Primary is far from the first time Democrats have funded extremist Republicans in their party primaries. In 2012, Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, an incumbent Democrat, directed funding to the more extreme candidate in the Republican Primary deciding who would face her in the general election. In her case, it worked.
However, her tactics seem to have created the blueprint for a rather concerning trend for the political party which claims it is defending American democracy and the constitution from the threats posed to both by former President Donald Trump and his followers.
In the latest fundraising quarter, Democrats spent close to $44 million to support extremist candidates in Republican primary races.
In Illinois, Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker and the DGA spent $35 million on ads attacking the moderate candidate Richard Irvin and supporting the extremist candidate who made headlines for his efforts to partition Chicago off from the rest of Illinois (the DGA’s contribution to the extremist campaign actually exceeded the amount of funding the candidate could raise for himself). The extremist won the Republican Primary with 55.2% of the vote.
In Pennsylvania, the Democratic Gubernatorial candidate spent $840,000 boosting a MAGA candidate in the Republican Primary who, like Cox, bused rioters to the Jan. 6 insurrection and called the 2020 election “stolen.” If this candidate is elected in the general election, they will appoint Pennsylvania’s next Secretary of State, who oversees the management and certification of elections in the battleground state.
While Maryland and Illinois lean heavily blue and are unlikely wins for the MAGA movement, Arizona, Colorado, and Pennsylvania are all swing states where this tactic has been employed and Republican nominees often win statewide races.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger has called the Democrats’ gamble in these races a “dangerous game” and added that “[i]n a very strong Republican year, it’s feasible for a Republican to win the governor's race and they're promoting a democracy denier.”
For folks who believe the Democratic Party is the solution to defeating the MAGA movement, this is sure to be a wakeup call. Rep. Kinzinger is correct and it is quite likely that at least one of these anti-democracy candidates will win in November. This can have real-world consequences on future elections and transfers of power in the US.
In many cases, voting for Democrats is the best way to block such dangerous candidates from election victory. However, this fundraising pipeline also displays that the Democratic Party’s leadership is not as worried about the MAGA movement as their rhetoric might show. Money talks and the money shows that, for the foreseeable future, Democrats view a Republican Party de-railed by the MAGA movement as an easier opponent to defeat.
The incentives here are quite twisted. Many Democratic fundraisers and leaders are choosing to support what is best in the short term interest of their party versus what is in the long term interest of their country.
This points to the broken and destructive nature of our two-party system. Those concerned with political extremism and threats to our democracy must understand that political parties have no motivation to save our democracy, they are oriented solely towards winning elections.
While work within political parties may be a necessary means to serve our communities or prevent threats to our democracy from getting elected, we must realize that the two party system is broken. We have to look at political organizing and fundraising strategies as well as election reform changes that cater our politics to the service of all of us, the people.