As was Trump, theoretically.
Getting the other side to field the worst possible candidates is not. a. good. long. term. strategy.
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Does it really count if an election denier wins? Obviously, it was vote fraud.
I’m fine with this, because any money the DNC spends backing loony-bin candidates in the GOP primaries is money they can’t spend to defeat progressive candidates in the Democratic ones so that their hand-picked moderate ones can go one to lose by 23 points in the general.
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There is no LONG TERM STATEGY at play here. MI 3 is waaaay more likely to flip now, and if republicans are rewarded in this next cycle with control of the House, Senate, or both, then THERE IS NO LONG TERM to worry about. Fussing about decorum when the house is on fire Just to clarify, you still haven’t seen the ads in question, correct?
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That’s exactly the problem.
It’s a short-term strategy that involves shifting the Overton window to the right and bringing more election-denying insurrectionists into the forefront of American politics while ignoring the harm those decisions cause in the long term.
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As a one-time Republican, and one who remains center-right/libertarianish, it has a long way to go. Not so much in policy, but in this sort of know-nothingness that’s driving the MAGA/QAnon stuff. Congress is better with Liz Cheney in it than it will be with Harriet Hageman.
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Interesting when you consider the only evidence of voter fraud in 2020 was found among a tiny handful of GOP voters.
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In Philly it’s often Dem straw candidates against other Dems.
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If this was a matter of giving a boost to the weaker candidate, I’d be ok with it. But the guy who won is serious MAGAt death cult. Which means he now has a platform to shout his poisonous shit for another 4 months. It also emboldens the very worst of the GOP supporters. Even worse, he could win.
Supporting the weakest opposition candidate is a valid strategy but this particular case is a big risk and will have negative consequences even if he loses.
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Thank you. Democrat is a noun. Democratic is an adjective. The Republicans have been using Democrat as a pejorative adjective for so long, it’s starting to sound right to people. Don’t fall for it.
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So I’m confused.
It would appear that the Democrats did not actually vote for this guy.
The Republicans did.
So how are the Democrats responsible for the actions of the GOP? Because they were like, really persuasive?
I call shenanigans.
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Voting for or convincing the Leopards Eating Peoples’ Faces Party to vote for the Leopard who eats the most faces maybe backfire when their voters don’t care about their faces being eaten in the election. 
There is a scheme where you change or pick a party affiliation during the primary to vote for the opponent you want your candidate run against and win. So that may have been part of the numbers. Otherwise the issue is Democrats running ads to influence who Republicans vote for in the primary, which means partial responsibility, if not direct responsibility.
As per the linked articles they spent tens hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign advertising designed to convince voters to choose Gibbs over Meijer in the GOP primary race. So yes, for good or for ill they bear a non-trivial amount of responsibility for the outcome.
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Actually, hundreds of thousands of dollars. The article says more than $400k.
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It’s always a risk when anyone – starry-eyed with the thought of attaining power and influence – asks for your vote.
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Michigan runs open primaries, so not that.
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Note that they didn’t say he was made of rainbows and farted unicorns. The ads stated exactly the kind of asshole he is. It’s just that that kind of asshole is who those GQP voters wanted.
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I don’t care that the tactic is cynical, or that they’d take risks to try and win an election.
The worry is the Democratic Party’s apparent unshakeable faith that they know how to handle Turmpism, in the face of strong evidence to the contrary.
The district is currently (*) held by a Republican, and we know Turmpist voters come from all kinds of demographics – notably including historic non-voters, who by definition are poorly understood by party experts. Those experts are betting everyone’s safety that they know exactly how this district will behave, and I’m not sure where they’re getting that confidence from.
It’s true the district has been redrawn and is now more urban, and I assume there is county-level data to say it should be safely blue. But would you bet your life on that? Democrats can’t be all that certain, or they wouldn’t be spending money in Republican primaries.
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But you have to pick a party on the ballot, you can’t vote both sides.
I thought of voting on the republican side for the reasons talked about but my district had a whack job running as a democrat in order to benefit her whack job son. It’s a really bizarre situation and I didn’t want any chance they would win the primary.
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Murc’s Law: The widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics.
IOW: Republicans elected a lunatic endorsed by the leader of the Republican Party? Democrats must be to blame!
