How Did Dem Attempts to Interfere In Republican Races Turn Out?

Several Democratic midterm wins weren’t particularly surprising — since the party’s candidates, operatives, and strategists helped ensure the weakest possible Republican nominees would be on November ballots.

A recurring storyline through the 2022 primary season was the Democratic Party’s practice of meddling in GOP primaries in the hopes of producing unelectable nominees. And the tactic, which Democratic candidates and organizations spent several million dollars on cumulatively, paid off politically. In five races where Democrats were successful in boosting hard-right candidates to the GOP nomination, the Republican candidate lost. That after struggling to raise money and being forced to explain past controversial statements.

But in a supreme irony, the biggest Democratic congressional champion of the practice, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY) lost his own reelection bid. As head of the House Democratic campaign arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Maloney oversaw spending in a bunch of races where his party tried to produce the weakest GOP general election nominee.

HERE’S WHEN DEMOCRATIC MEDDLING IN GOP PRIMARIES WORKED BEST AND WHEN IT BACKFIRED

However, Maloney was losing his own reelection race to represent New York’s new 17th Congressional District, based in the lower Hudson Valley. Maloney trailed Republican rival Mike Lawler, a state assemblyman, 51%-49%, with 95% of votes counted.

The political fate of Maloney, first elected to the House in 2012, reflects the political karma some prominent Democrats warned about in employing the GOP primary meddling tactic. Among were party elders such as David Axelrod, the campaign architect of former President Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 White House wins. The downside risk, Axelrod and others warned, was that some of those so-called extreme candidates could win on Election Day. And if that happened, Democrats would be open to charges of hypocrisy for attempting to advance the cause of the very candidates the party decried as threats to American democracy.

Other prominent Democrats, though, defended the meddling approach. The early interference amounted to what they saw as a viable path to keeping Democratic seats blue, amid a tumultuous campaign season where inflation and gas prices were on the rise and President Joe Biden’s favorability was stubbornly low.

Here are the highlights of Democratic 2022 meddling in Republican primaries — or lowlights, depending on your perspective.

Governor’s Races Targeted
The Illinois governor race early in the 2022 cycle wasn’t expected to be particularly close. Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker sought a second term, and Illinois is a strongly Democratic state, with Biden having beaten former President Donald Trump there, 57% to 41%.

But the state’s economy is in tough shape. The Land of Lincoln hasn’t fully recovered from the COVID-19-induced economic downturn of 2020. It’s still missing 117,000 jobs, and the unemployment rate is highest in the Midwest. Not that Illinois was in great economic shape before the pandemic. During the decade before the 2020 census, Illinois was among only three states to lose population, along with Mississippi and West Virginia.

So, Pritzker, a billionaire hotel heir, and Democratic allies did everything possible to boost the Republican candidate who would have the toughest time winning in the Nov. 8 general election — conservative state Sen. Darren Bailey from far downstate Illinois, not far from the Kentucky state line. Pritzker’s campaign and the Democratic Governors Association dropped $35 million on ads attacking a more centrist GOP gubernatorial primary rival to Bailey, the more centrist Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin. That was more than triple what Trump-endorsed Bailey had raised for his own campaign by that point.

Democrats knew Bailey would likely appeal more than Irvin to the conservative gubernatorial primary electorate. After all, Bailey had previously proposed allowing rural Illinois to separate from the Chicago area and form a “New Illinois” state. And in a debate of an abortion rights bill being considered in the legislature, Bailey criticized a Democratic opponent for having “the gall to bring up the separation of church and state.”

Bailey won the Illinois gubernatorial nomination with 55.2% of the vote. But that proved the high point of his campaign. Pritzker and Democrats attacked Bailey in the fall over his conservative stands. And the downstate Republican’s comments about Chicago — he’d referred to the state’s largest city as a “hellhole” — didn’t exactly help in the main population base of Illinois.

Pritzker cruised to reelection over Bailey, 54% to 43%.

The story was similar in Maryland, where a state legislator from a rural part of the deep-blue state, Dan Cox, captured the Republican gubernatorial nomination with more than a little help from Democrats.

Cox in the state House of Delegates represents parts of Frederick and Carroll counties, a conservative enclave nestled between southern Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Cox first garnered statewide notice in April 2020 as a critic of a COVID-19 stay-at-home directive by Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a fellow Republican. Cox later challenged the legality of Hogan’s statewide mask mandate and other COVID-19 mitigation measures, each of which lost in court. In February 2022, Cox introduced articles of impeachment against Hogan for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which went nowhere.

Cox also was a vocal supporter of Trump’s false claims that he won the 2020 presidential election against Biden. Cox helped arrange for buses to take constituents to the “Save America March” in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6. That rally preceded the violent attack on the Capitol, in which a mob of Trump supporters disrupted Congress’s counting of the electoral votes in a failed attempt to keep Trump in power. During the rally, Cox sent a tweet attacking Vice President Mike Pence, who refused to go along with the president’s scheme to stay in office illegally. “Pence is a traitor,” Cox wrote in the tweet, which he later deleted.

Seeing Cox as an easy mark in the general election against the winner of a crowded Democratic gubernatorial primary fight, Democrats sought to boost him over Hogan’s preferred Republican candidate, former state Commerce and Labor Secretary Kelly Schulz. The Democratic Governors Association’s DGA Action super PAC spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on airtime in July targeting the Baltimore TV market to air ads on Cox.

The ad called Cox “Trump’s hand-picked candidate” and stated that Cox would “protect the Second Amendment at all costs.” The idea was to energize Republican primary voters who agreed with Cox’s stances, even though they did not align with the views of Maryland’s general electorate. Maryland is one of the nation’s most Democratic states, having supported Biden over Trump in 2020, 65% to 32%.

Cox beat the more centrist Schulz to claim the Republican gubernatorial nomination, only to get crushed in the general election by 60%-37% by Democratic Gov.-elect Wes Moore, a former executive of a nonprofit organization who had been an Army officer, Rhodes scholar, and who had worked on Wall Street.

Across the Mason-Dixon Line to the north, Democrats played the meddling game on an even bigger stage. Illinois and Maryland were always likely to back Democratic gubernatorial candidates, due to their blue hues. Pennsylvania, though, is a premier swing state that famously helped make Trump president in the 2016 race, only to go for native son Biden four years later — the president was born in Scranton and moved to Delaware at age 10. The governorship itself has seesawed back and forth between the parties for decades.

Attorney General Josh Shapiro had the Democratic nomination to himself, while Republican gubernatorial hopefuls fought it out in a crowded field. But Shapiro and Democratic allies knew whom they wanted to run against in November — state Sen. Doug Mastriano, a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist who had helped bus Trump supporters to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6. Mastriano was later subpoenaed by the House Jan. 6 committee.

Shapiro’s campaign dropped $840,000 on TV ads highlighting Mastriano’s — more than double what the GOP candidate spent on his own ad buys. Shapiro’s ads called Mastriano one of “Trump’s strongest supporters” and highlighted his belief that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Mastriano won his primary with 43.8% of the vote, beating out an otherwise staunch conservative, former Rep. Lou Barletta (R-PA) by more than 23 percentage points.

Shapiro’s campaign, it turns out, knew what he was doing when it came to setting up the weakest general election opponent. Mastriano ran a mostly under-the-radar campaign, barely taking reporter questions from legacy media outlets and appearing almost exclusively before conservative audiences. On Election Day, Shapiro won easily, 56%-43%.

Congressional Race Democratic Meddling
Republican congressional candidates also were on the business end of successful Democratic meddling tactics and most prominently in Michigan’s 3rd Congressional District, where Democrats saw an opening for the Grand Rapids and Muskegon-area seat. Under its newly drawn lines, Biden in 2020 would have prevailed over Trump 53.3% to 44.8%.

Democrats wanted the worst general election opponent against their nominee, attorney Hillary Scholten. So they spent heavily against the incumbent Republican House member running for the seat, freshman Rep. Peter Meijer (R-MI). In doing so, Democrats backed the candidacy of John Gibbs, a former Trump administration official and onetime Silicon Valley software engineer.

Ahead of the Aug. 2 GOP primary, House Democrats’ campaign arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, paid for and released a TV ad putatively touting Gibbs. But only enough to get him through the GOP primary against Meijer, one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump over the events of Jan. 6. The ad also aimed to soften Gibbs up to a more centrist general election audience.

The DCCC ad said Gibbs, who had baselessly questioned the results of the 2020 presidential election, was “hand-picked by Trump to run for Congress.” Gibbs, the spot added, is “too conservative for West Michigan.”

As Democrats had hoped, Gibbs went on to win the Republican primary over Meijer. But almost immediately, opposition research about Gibbs surfaced painting him in an unflattering light.

For instance, Gibbs, while attending Stanford University in 2000 and 2001, argued women should not vote or work outside the home, as reported by CNN. Gibbs at the time challenged several of what he called “commonly held notions” about gender roles and inequalities in the United States.

“Having more women in the workplace does not benefit men, it only strains them. In the post-feminist workplace, men must bend over backward to make sure that they do not inadvertently offend any woman who might happen to hear a joke or comment uttered in humor and harmlessness,” Gibbs wrote.

As a congressional candidate more than two decades later, the revelation spurred a torrent of negative stories about Gibbs’s candidacy. His House bid never really recovered. On Election Day, Scholten beat him 52%-44%.

Rivaling Michigan for Democratic campaign meddling effectiveness was New Hampshire. There they boosted the chances of Senate hopeful Don Bolduc in the Republican primary to produce the weakest general election nominee against Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH).

Democrats found their man in Bolduc, a retired Army brigadier general. Democratic-aligned groups spent millions attacking Bolduc’s main Senate Republican primary opponent, state Senate President Chuck Morse. National Republicans, meanwhile, spent millions to boost Morse in the hopes of defeating Bolduc, whom New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, a fellow Republican, labeled a “conspiracy theory-type” candidate.

Nonetheless, Bolduc beat out Morse for the GOP nomination 37% to 36%. And until Nov. 8, he looked at least somewhat competitive against Hassan, who was New Hampshire governor from 2013-17 before becoming a senator.

That turned out not to be the case, though. Hassan on Election Day won a second term over Bolduc, 54%-44%.

That these congressional races worked out for Democrats after helping pick weak GOP nominees can be attributed to an act of strategic genius. Or perhaps getting lucky. Also, dodging a political bullet.

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If Democrats had helped nominate GOP candidates who then won in November, the tactic would come off as clumsy and shortsighted. Additionally, the approach would have undercut Democrats’ moral authority in arguing that politicians on the extreme right were a threat to the republic and otherwise unfit for public office.

Democrats, though, largely deemed the meddling tactic worth the risk. It’s one likely to be repeated by both parties in the years forward.