Dems Bankrolling MAGA: Big-Time Backfire

As autumn arrived, and the Democrats’ temporary summer surge ended, with the days beginning to dwindle in the countdown to Election Day on Tuesday, Joe Biden decided to employ his bully pulpit to shout at national and blue state audiences that so-called MAGA Republicans – alternately identified by the Biden administration as “Ultra-MAGA” or “Mega-MAGA” - are violent extremists who represent a “threat to democracy.” The president, who without irony spoke ad nauseam of unity in his inaugural address, could hardly dream up a more divisive and incendiary accusation. And by demonizing and “other-izing” at least 74 million people who voted for his opponent in 2020, he could hardly have taken more of a desperate riverboat gamble – one that will come back to haunt him on Election Day.

But as Biden is setting the dogs loose on his political enemies, a curiously contrarian agenda has surfaced. The Democratic Party, whose leader was employing what little political capital he possessed to throw Republican candidates and their supporters under the bus, simultaneously spent millions of dollars backing the same people essentially characterized as stormtroopers by their own president? Come on, you say. That can’t be.

But it’s true. As they say, you can look it up. And it’s not just the amount of money they threw at Trump-backed candidates, or the individual races in which they intervened in the other party’s business. It’s the fact that the Democratic Party officially and aggressively disrupted Republican primary elections. Years ago, the late Rush Limbaugh may have initiated the strategy of interfering with the opponent’s carefully laid plans with his “Operation Chaos,” encouraging conservatives to show up and vote in primaries for the least electable Democrat. But that was simply a plea from a talk show host. This was a calculated decision either made by the national Democratic Party or approved by it.

Whatever It Takes to Destroy the MAGA Movement

The logical next step in such skullduggery might be for Democrats, believing they can’t win certain races, to plant trojan horse candidates in GOP primaries, and instruct them on what message to convey in order to split the vote in a way favorable for their own side, or simply create chaos. Is that really any more preposterous than giving millions of dollars to the most hated of your political enemies?

So here are the ugly details of the scheme. Democrats directly interfered in at least 13 primaries: six gubernatorial races, two Senate contests, and five House campaigns. Their total investment was – wait for it – $19 million, according to a prominent newspaper in DC with deep ties to the left. And five of those Democrat-funded America First candidates – in gubernatorial races in Illinois, Maryland and Pennsylvania plus one in the Senate and one in the House – were victorious in their primaries.

Exhibit A in the misbegotten plan would be a PAC aligned with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), which spent over three million dollars on ads promoting the candidacy of Don Bolduc in the New Hampshire GOP Senate primary. The ads carried a message almost identical to those of Bolduc’s own campaign, portraying his better funded establishment rival Chuck Morse as a squishy moderate. The ads worked. Democrats got their way. Bolduc secured the GOP nomination, and was trailing his opponent, incumbent Maggie Hassan (D-NH) well into the fall. But now, Bolduc is coming up hard from the rear, pulling into a statistical dead heat with hours to go before the polls open in the Granite State, where early voting is all but prohibited, a fact that should favor the GOP contender riding a national wave of Republican momentum.

With the Senate hanging on a knife’s edge, at least until the GOP’s recent surge, how exactly will Democrats explain away their culpability in electing MAGA Trumpists to Congress when they could have had moderates, especially if the outcome in New Hampshire flips the Senate to Republican control, or at least contributes to it? The Dems did not heed the red-flag warnings issued by a number of veteran Democratic officials and strategists. As former Indiana Representative Tim Roemer told the left-wing DC newspaper, “This is a deeply, deeply precarious and dangerous strategy to deploy … It risks elevating these liars and giving them a platform for another three or four months – even if they end up getting beat – to drumbeat their message into the electorate and further erode trust.”

So now, as Roemer predicted, the fruit of the Democrats’ labor is turning rotten, making them look like nothing more than political hacks and opportunists who have no message of their own. They impugn the humanity of their enemies, and then turn around and fund the very same people, which even in the bare-knuckle brawl that is national politics where shame is in short supply, will prove highly embarrassing no matter the final outcomes on Tuesday.

What if, following the election, reliable analysts ultimately conclude that either GOP candidate would have beaten the Democrat in New Hampshire or elsewhere? It would prove that, if they had not intervened with such a heavy hand in the other party’s business, this roll-the-dice, way-too-clever-by-half initiative would not have exploded in their faces, as it appears to be doing in the final run-up to Election Day.