The Method to Democrat Madness

To most rational observers, the public antics of the Democrats appear counterproductive if they ever wish to emerge from the political wilderness. On all the most important issues, they champion wildly unpopular positions and employ asinine tactics that alienate most voters.

Nowhere is this trend more obvious than when it comes to illegal immigration. In recent weeks, we have been subjected to absurd PR stunts by people like Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA), who crashed a press conference being held by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and attempted to force his way past Secret Service while screaming at her.

Padilla subsequently ended up in handcuffs. But despite not wearing his special pin identifying himself as a U.S. Senator and posing a clear threat to Noem’s safety, Padilla and his Democrat colleagues made himout to be the victim – with an assist from an ever-compliant corporate media.

Then there’s the sorry case of New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who attempted to block ICE agents from arresting an illegal alien and was charged with assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer. Lander was, of course, also running to be the Big Apple’s next mayor at the time. (He lost in the Democrat primary on Tuesday.)

In another supreme display of political ineptitude, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has also announced that her hapless constituents will pay $50 million to help illegal immigrants avoid deportation.

Are these people so out of touch that they believe such nonsense will ingratiate them with the Hispanic voters they have been hemorrhaging? This question was thoroughly explored by pollsters during last year’s election, and the results suggest that such a strategy is unlikely to succeed. Moreover, the Daily Caller reports on a new TIPP poll showing that 53 percent of Hispanic voters “somewhat or strongly supported increasing the pace of deportations.”

Democrats must know that their ridiculous displays aren’t helping their tarnished image with voters. So, why keep it up?

One theory is that they are so desperate for attention and blinded by their commitment to left-wing dogma that they can’t see the self-inflicted wounds they are creating. Perhaps.

But it’s also possible that their motives for resorting to desperate measures to stop deportations are much more sinister; namely, ensuring Democrats can still count on illegal aliens at the ballot box.

If that sounds like we’re entering tinfoil hat territory, consider that Democrats need to flip only three Republican seats to retake the House of Representatives in 2026, and they are likely to gain two by judicial fiat in Wisconsin.

Last April, the election of Susan Crawford to the Badger State’s Supreme Court solidified its liberal majority. That will likely make possible a longstanding liberal dream of gerrymandering the state’s congressional districts in order to reduce the number of Republican seats while creating new Democrat seats. The ethically-challenged Crawford campaigned on getting that done. The GOP accused her of selling House seats:

Republicans are accusing liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Susan Crawford of “selling” two U.S. House seats after she participated in a Democratic donor call focused on how her race could affect the fight for control of Congress. Crawford’s campaign rejected the accusations, saying she joined the call briefly to share her story, but the dispute could be a sign that redistricting will again be a pivotal issue in this year’s race for the court. The call with Democratic donors was advertised as a “chance to put two more House seats in play for 2026.”

For this scheme to work, a lawsuit must be filed, claiming that the current congressional map somehow discriminates against some group of voters. That case must then quickly be taken up by the state Supreme Court.

Conveniently, a lawsuit was filed by the notorious pettifoggers at the Elias Law Group about a month after Crawford won. Elias quickly rounded up nine Wisconsin voters whose rights are allegedly curtailed by the current map, and insists that the case must be permitted to bypass the lower state courts and receive an expedited hearing by the state Supreme Court. Nostradamus need not be consulted to foresee how this case will end.

On the other hand, according to a recent Politico article, the fine folks at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) are worried that “messy” primaries might hurt their chances of retaking the House in 2026. “Interviews with more than a dozen Democratic lawmakers and strategists reflect a growing anxiety that next year’s primaries may be more combative and complicated than ever before.”

In the vernacular of the DNC, this means they fear their voters might choose the “wrong” candidates. However, a New York Times report suggests the DNC is so short on cash that it may not be able to fix the primaries:

Just months into the tenure of a new party leader, Ken Martin, the Democratic National Committee’s financial situation has grown so bleak that top officials have discussed whether they might need to borrow money this year to keep paying the bills… Martin said he had found that major donors were unhappy across the Democratic ecosystem after last year’s defeats. He has commissioned a significant postmortem review of the 2024 race, which is being overseen by Paul Rivera, a longtime Democratic strategist, and is set to entail as many as 200 interviews.

It is good news for Republicans that the Chair of the DNC needs a committee to tell him why the Democrats lost in 2024 and that their donors are sitting on their wallets.

Nonetheless, the party still has plenty of tricks up its sleeve. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) is targeting Republican House seats in states that are none too fastidious about accurate vote-counting. In California, a universal mail-in state where ballot counting routinely continues for weeks after Election Day, the DCCC is going after three Republican seats: David Valadao (CA-22), Young Kim (CA-40) and Ken Calvert (CA-41).

A classic example of how this works is the 2024 race for CA-45. Incumbent Republican Michelle Steele was more than 11,000 votes ahead of her Democrat challenger Derek Tran when the polls closed on Election Day. But the vote counting continued for three more weeks, at which point Tran had miraculously pulled ahead by 653 votes and was declared the winner.

It’s a good bet that similar fates await the three Republicans noted above. California’s “count until we win” elections, combined with the Wisconsin gerrymandering scheme, could deliver the House to the Democrats—despite their unpopular positions on the issues.

If that happens, their first order of business will be to impeach President Trump using some spurious pretext. He will never be convicted in the Senate, but Democrats hope the impeachment process will derail his presidency.

The only way this can be stopped is for the Republicans to pass a comprehensive election integrity bill that includes strong protections against noncitizen voting while they still control both houses of Congress and the White House. Otherwise, the Democrats will continue their absurd antics, violate their own election laws and disregard the will of the American people.

David Catron is a Senior Editor at the American Spectator. His writing has also appeared in PJ Media, the American Thinker, the Providence Journal, the Catholic Exchange and a variety of other publications.