Democrats' primary meddling is part of a bigger problem

 Democrats' primary meddling is part of a bigger problem

It's a bad system for picking nominees

By Matthew Yglesias

Rep. Peter Meijer has not amassed a particularly moderate voting record in the United States House of Representatives. But he did tell the truth about the 2020 election and voted to impeach Donald Trump, opening himself to a primary challenge from a Trump-backed candidate.

Interestingly, the challenger — John Gibbs — was also de facto backed by the DCCC, which aired “critical” ads saying things like, “Gibbs is pro-life and loves the second amendment.” The D-Trip, in other words, tried to raise Gibbs’ name recognition while portraying him as an orthodox conservative. Then having helped put Gibbs over the top, Democrats are now going to turn around and argue (correctly) that Gibbs is a dangerous extremist. I am not especially familiar with the congressional district in question, but the consensus seems to be that Meijer was an unusually strong candidate (his anti-Trump stance gives him credibility with independents and his family name is ubiquitous in the area because they own an important Midwestern grocery chain) whereas Gibbs is potentially beatable, even in a bad year for Democrats.

Democrats have employed this controversial tactic in a range of races across the 2022 campaign.

My initial view was that trying to get Republicans to nominate extremists is dumb. But then I felt like the backlash was overwrought and overstated. Now, I’ve looped around to “worse than a crime, a mistake” because I’m not sure these gambits have the tactical upside that cynical Democratic operatives think they do. After all, the upshot of the DCCC trying to help out Gibbs is that Meijer is now reassuring moderate voters that they should back Gibbs and the whole GOP ticket.

While the race was pretty close, the margin wasn’t razor-thin — Gibbs won 52-48. The DCCC didn’t actually invest that much money in the race, and Meijer and allies badly outspent Gibbs and his friends. All of which is to say that I think it’s really unclear that the DCCC’s intervention was actually decisive here. But it does seem to have been decisive in shaping Meijer’s reaction to losing a primary over opposing the violent overthrow of the American government. Instead of talking to the press about how the GOP is being taken over by dangerous extremists, he’s decided that Democrats are full of shit and he should throw in with the hard right.

Fundamentally, I just think this is a lot less clever than the people doing it seem to believe.

Getting the cost-benefit calculus correct

At the end of the day, it’s not good enough to just say, “Gibbs is more beatable than Meijer, so we should spend money helping Gibbs beat Meijer.”

Aside from the question of doing the right thing, other factors matter:

How much does our money really boost Gibbs’ odds of beating Meijer?

How much easier is Gibbs for Hillary Scholten to beat?

How much does it strengthen Gibbs in the general election for Democrats to have angered Meijer in this way?

What was the next-best use of this DCCC money in terms of running ads directly supporting Sholten or other Democratic candidates?

Given that the GOP is going to be running pro-insurrection candidates in the vast majority of races, regardless of the outcome in MI-3, how much does it help all of their campaigns for the Democratic Party to compromise its brand in this way?

I’m quite skeptical that the investment of even a modest amount of money in the Gibbs-Meijer primary pencils out.

My main contribution to this debate is to say that factor (4), the most boring thing on this list, also tends to be underrated.

If I were Jared Golden in Maine, I’d be pretty mad. Money that could have been spent on Bangor television ads touting his independent thinking and work to boost domestic fossil fuel production was instead spent on a weird bankshot play in Michigan that, via mechanism (5), makes life a little bit harder for almost every Democrat in the country.

Note that this is an individualized assessment of the circumstances. In Colorado, the DSCC spent some money trying to help Ron Hanks win the nomination to run against Michael Bennet. In that case, I think the cost-benefit analysis probably militates in favor of meddling. Every Democratic Senate incumbent that I’m aware of is positioned to badly outspend his or her opponent, so the opportunity cost of getting creative is low. And Hanks was probably genuinely unelectable in Colorado, so the expected value of putting him over the top was pretty high. Finally, the value of an individual Senate seat is a lot higher than the value of an individual House seat, so the risk of incurring national brand damage is less serious.

Of course, despite the DSCC’s efforts, Hanks lost.

Which, I think, is the fundamental issue here. Democratic Party political operatives cannot actually control Republican Party primary voters’ behavior. The ultimate culpability for nominating bad candidates like Gibbs lies with Republicans — a huge swathe of the party wants pro-insurrection figures — and the main effect of “boosting” insurrectionists has been to muddy the waters. This became a subject of national controversy because Meijer specifically seems really hung up on it, but the fact is, he probably would have lost anyway.

Republicans are responsible for their actions

A lot of Republicans in the media find that while they can’t defend the more indefensible aspects of Trumpism, at the end of the day they prefer that Republicans beat Democrats because that helps keep taxes low and make abortion illegal.

And from these anti-anti-Trump Republicans, we’ve heard an an endless procession of explanations for why the bad things about Trump are really Democrats’ fault. For that set, this meddling is the latest excuse for their own apologetics: “Democrats say it’s bad to encourage a violent mob to storm the United States Capitol and threaten to murder Mike Pence, but they also prioritize winning as many elections as they can over helping sensible Republicans.”

And I think that just doesn’t wash.

The GOP decided long ago that it was in its interests to take a hostile attitude toward a neutral, truth-seeking media and toward neutral, truth-seeking expertise. Discrediting knowledge-producing institutions is useful for promoting policies like regressive tax cuts or for pretending that regulation of public health externalities is never warranted. Before Pence was a potential victim of a murderous mob ginned up by his boss, he was a guy who ran around denying that smoking cigarettes kills people. The first time I met Pence, he claimed it was possible to privatize Social Security in a way that guaranteed higher benefits for everyone without creating moral hazard or increasing the deficit.

He did the right thing on January 6, 2021, and he deserves praise for that.

But the climate of lies and nonsense that Trump exploited is something that the conservative establishment cultivated and participated in for years before Trump waltzed in. He’s been able to exploit it and that, much more than anything Democrats have or could do, is the main issue here.

Outside of their own political conduct, conservatives often emphasize the importance of cultivating an internal locus of control and an ethic of personal responsibility. We are all in part victims of circumstances in everything that we do. But dwelling on that is unhealthy psychologically and can be socially quite destructive, and Republicans should make a genuine effort to take stock of what’s going on.

Donald Trump is the GOP’s biggest candidate quality problem

Polling currently gives Republicans a roughly 50-50 chance of retaking the Senate.

That’s a dismal performance considering that it’s a midterm with an unpopular incumbent Democratic Party president. And that dismal polling reflects the fact that Republicans have fielded a ton of individual candidates who are underperforming expectations. Some of those underperforming candidates, like JD Vance in Ohio, are clearly favored to win anyway. But others, like Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, stand a real chance of blowing clearly winnable races. And there are two common threads among the currently underperforming GOP Senate candidates:

The party nominated an “unconventional” candidate rather than a sitting House member or down-ballot state officeholder.

Donald Trump personally intervened to help the candidate win.

In most of these cases, there is no Meijer-like martyr figure. Nobody is totally sure why Trump favored Oz in the Pennsylvania race, but it wasn’t because there were no anti-impeachment, pro-insurrection Pennsylvania Republican politicians available. Trump just decided he wanted to support a Turkish dual citizen who lives in New Jersey.

Normally you expect party leaders to prioritize electability over ideological considerations. And to the extent that they do prioritize ideological considerations, you expect there to be some kind of logic to their actions.

But Oz doesn’t have any unusual policy views at all, as far as I can tell. He’s running as a standard-issue conservative Republican who just happens to live in New Jersey and lacks political experience. He’s a veteran, which is a good resume item for a non-politician, but he’s a veteran of the Turkish military — normally American political parties try to nominate people who served in the American military. It’s just a weird blunder of a choice. I’d say Trump is looking for sycophants and personal loyalists, but Vance once argued that Trump is like heroin, poisoning the communities he claims to represent. I thought it was an insightful article, but again, an odd choice when there are plenty of banal Republican politicians kicking around Ohio.

I’m inclined to believe that a lot of people in D.C. underestimate Trump’s smarts and that there’s some kind of angle he’s working that I just don’t quite see. But whatever the angle is, it’s not the best interests of the Republican party as conventionally defined. And that, much more than anything Democrats are doing, is the proximate problem facing the GOP.

I know this is a pretty hot take, but the whole “meddling” dispute has been a reminder that deciding nominations with primary elections is a kind of weird idea.

I was thinking about this when I realized that the U.K. Conservative leadership contest is happening as an American-style primary, since the British parties have apparently moved away from the parliamentary tradition of having party leaders be selected by the caucus of MPs. This is too bad, because I don’t think our way has a lot to recommend itself.

What’s interesting about the Meijer situation is that because the stakes with insurrection and election denial are so large, there’s actually a decent case against DCCC meddling. But in the more standard case where it’s just a primary between two different guys and one of them is kind of a bozo or has a track-record of making extreme claims, then I don’t think there is much of a reason not to meddle. The fact that Blake Masters is on record as favoring privatization of Social Security is just gravy for liberals that makes Mark Kelly more likely to win while having no downside, compared to Republicans nominating someone who’s more circumspect. As I’ve argued before, progressives are very lucky to have Joe Manchin in the Senate rather than running a conventional liberal who would lose. And Democrats would do well to nominate more Manchin-like figures in places like Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and Iowa where mainstream Democrats all-but-inevitably fall short.

By the same token, it’s in Republicans’ interests to make sure that Democrats stick as closely as possible to the Jamie Harrison playbook of losing badly while making out-of-state donors feel good about themselves.

It would be better for America for both parties to try to move closer to the median voter. But it’s good for each party to encourage the opposition to move further from the median voter. Primaries already seem to me to excessively encourage extremism by giving too much influence to expressive voters; the fact that they’re potentially subject to deliberate manipulation only makes them worse. And I think a lot of DCCC critics are not taking seriously enough how big their ask is — they want an organization whose only purpose on earth is to help Democrats win House seats to voluntarily forego a tactic that could advance that purpose. In the specific Meijer case, I think there’s an argument that they outsmarted themselves and genuinely shouldn’t have done it. But in general, hoping extremists win nominations on the other side is an effective tactic, and we’ll see more of it if it’s seen as something that works. What we ought to be doing is trying to develop a nomination system that is not as subject to manipulation.