AMAC Exclusive – By Andrew Abbott
The race for Pennsylvania Governor between Democrat Josh Shapiro and Republican Doug Mastriano is set to be one of the most high-profile battles this election season. As the summer has heated up so too has Shapiro’s rhetoric, with the current Pennsylvania Attorney General calling Mastriano a “real and present danger” to Pennsylvanians. To hear Shapiro tell it, a Mastriano victory would mean the effective end of democracy in Pennsylvania. So why did Shapiro’s campaign spend hundreds of thousands of dollars helping Mastriano win the Republican primary?
According to campaign finance disclosures, Shapiro spent more than $840,000 on television ads designed to boost Mastriano in the Republican primary – more than double what Mastriano’s own campaign spent. Shapiro also sent out mailers and other campaign literature in support of Mastriano, likely helping his successful campaign cruise to a comfortable victory in early June.
Shapiro is far from the only Democrat to employ this strategy. In Illinois, Democrats spent $30 million helping State Senator Darren Bailey win his primary for the governor’s race. In Colorado, Democrats desperately tried to elevate state Rep. Ron Hanks over businessman Jim O’Dea in the GOP Senate primary, even sending out mailers that illegally failed to disclose who funded them. (O’Dea defeated Hanks 54%-45% on June 28.) Democrat PACs also tried the same strategy to take down University of Colorado Regent Heidi Ganahl in her bid for the Republican nomination for governor – again unsuccessfully.
For Democrats, the goal of this tactic is clear: get Republican candidates nominated who – according to Democrat strategists – are “too conservative” to win a general election. In Pennsylvania, conventional wisdom during the primary was that former U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta, not Mastriano, was the best Republican bet to win the general election. In Colorado, O’Dea and Ganahl were viewed as the biggest threats to incumbent Democrat Senator Michael Bennet and incumbent Democrat Governor Jared Polis, respectively, while several candidates in the Illinois gubernatorial primary were viewed as having better odds than Bailey of defeating Democrat Governor J.B. Pritzker.
But history has shown that Washington strategists are often far from the geniuses they consider themselves to be, and both the Republican and Democrat party establishments have mixed records at best in spotting the strongest candidates. As a result, Democrats’ strategy of boosting the Republicans they consider less “electable” could ultimately backfire spectacularly, in more ways than one.
The clearest example of how out-of-touch the political class can be came in 2016, when the Democratic establishment and media class first dismissedDonald Trump as a viable candidate, and then salivated over the prospect of a Trump-Clinton matchup in the general election, believing that Trump was the weakest of all the GOP hopefuls. Today, Trump is the most popular national political figure in the country.
Back in 2016, the Clinton campaign also embraced the same strategy down-ballot, attempting to boost candidates seen as “too conservative” in Republican primaries as a means of discrediting Trump’s budding political movement. As a leaked internal Clinton campaign memo said, “We don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party… We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously.” In other words, pick the candidate with seemingly the longest odds and pour resources into boosting their primary campaigns.
Soon, however, Democrats and the media would learn that it was theywho had badly misread the public mood. Not only did Trump win the presidency, but Republicans won majorities in the House and Senate as well.
Many of the candidates who Democratic strategists believed were “too conservative” because they talked about standing up to the left and “making America great again” were actually speaking to voters in a way that resonated and led to a wave of general election victories.
A similar phenomenon occurred in the Virginia Governor’s race last year, when Democrat Terry McAuliffe spent millions of dollars trying to tie Republican Glenn Youngkin to Trump, and succeeded only in turning out the Trump base in rural Virginia, a major factor in putting Youngkin over the edge.
Even last year in a state Biden had won by nearly ten points, this proved a losing strategy for Dems. But at a time when polls show Trump would beat Biden handily in a head-to-head matchup, swing-state Democrats attacking Republican candidates as being the most “Trump-like” of their GOP primary rivals may, like McAuliffe, be pursuing an almost comically self-defeating campaign strategy.
Despite their poor track record in choosing Republicans to run against, it increasingly appears that Democrats risk repeating the same mistakes yet again in 2022. Often wrong but never in doubt, the Democrats and even many in the Republican establishment have dismissed many of these supposedly weaker candidates as “extremists” and “threats to democracy” because they dare to talk about issues like election integrity. It does not seem to occur to them that Republican candidates are talking about these issues because they are ones that many voters deeply care about, whether the media will cover them or not. The left has once again bought into its own propaganda about what people should care about and confused it with what people actually care about.
Moreover, this attempt to meddle in Republican primaries reveals the naked lust for power that animates the modern Democratic Party. After all, if Democrats truly believed that pro-Trump candidates were a “threat to democracy,” should they not be trying to defeat them in the primary as well? It’s hard to decide which would be worse: that Democrats would treat their opponents as domestic security threats without really believing it, or that they would seek to elevate those candidates despite actually believing their own rhetoric. Either way, the strategy is deeply cynical.
Given public polling, Democrats are understandably desperate for any edge at the ballot box this November. But if history and common sense are any indication, trying to pick and choose which Republican is the “best” to run against isn’t going to do them much good.
Andrew Abbott is the pen name of a writer and public affairs consultant with over a decade of experience in DC at the intersection of politics and culture.