Democrats are pouring millions of dollars to meddle in Republican primaries in a tough election year. Experts say they’re doing so to prop up Republican candidates who they think will be easiest to beat in the general election.
In some races, their wishes have come true.
In the July 19 Maryland Republican gubernatorial primary, Trump endorsee Dan Cox captured the nomination, defeating incumbent-backed Kelly Schulz by a 10-point margin. Schulz had outraised Cox by a 5–1 margin.
Democrats played the same game in Republican gubernatorial primaries in Illinois, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, where the candidates who received funding from Democratic sources won. The tactic was also used in Colorado but to no avail.
In California, two GOP candidates favored by the Democrats lost.
According to campaign finance disclosures filed with the above states, the DGA is the top financier of the Democratic money flowing into these Republican primaries.
DGA is a Washington-based nonprofit organization with a singular mission to elect and reelect Democratic governors across the nation.
Representatives for the DGA didn’t respond to a request for comments by press time.
According to University of Buffalo associate professor of political science Jacob Neiheisel, Democrats are doing all they can to stem a potential red wave, including boosting Republican candidates who they think will be easiest to beat in the fall.
“By pushing somebody ideologically far right across the line, Democrats can make the stakes so high for their side and increase their turnout while turning off independents in the general election. At least, that’s the theory,” he told The Epoch Times. “If the shoe was on the other foot, I have to think the Republicans would be doing very similar things.”
‘Tipped the Scales’
Neiheisel said it was hard to gauge how effective the tactic was in a particular race without good polling data throughout the campaign and good data on ad buys, such as gross rating points and targeted media markets.Republican primary voters are also typically more ideological than general election voters and favor the kind of candidates promoted by Democrats anyway, he said.
“It is certainly possible that the DGA money tipped the scales. It is also possible that a candidate like Cox is someone who has the support of Republican primary voters.”
Lombardo prevailed in the competitive 16-way Republican primary with an 11-point margin.
According to University of Virginia commonwealth professor of politics Jennifer Lawless, this tactic is a natural extension of strategic voting at the individual voter level.
“Strategic voting among voters has been around for a while, especially in states with open primaries, where a Democrat would vote in the Republican primary to elect the weakest candidate in the general election. But only a very small percentage of voters do it,” Lawless told The Epoch Times. “What we are seeing here is that political elites and Democratic associations are getting involved.
“It is better funded, and it has the potential to have a little bit more of an effect because you are not depending on individual voters to come up with that calculus on their own.”
But it can also be a risky strategy, according to Lawless.
“What we’ve learned in the past several election cycles is that strange things can happen,“ she said. ”Although Democrats are being careful about where they are doing this, there is still a little bit of risk. You never know exactly who is going to turn out or what can happen in the general election.”
A strong fundraiser, Shapiro had raised $12 million by early June, outraising Mastriano by nearly 17 times, according to campaign finance disclosures filed with the state.
The Playbook: Operation Dog Whistle
This tactic of boosting the other party’s perceived weakest candidate goes back at least to the 2012 Missouri primary.That year, U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) successfully used it in her reelection bid.
One month before the primary, McCaskill made an unprecedented move in her political career: She paid $40,000 to take a poll of Missouri Republican voters.
The poll first asked voters to rank the three Republican candidates in the Senate primary. The result showed U.S. Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) came in a distant second at 17 percent.
However, the result shifted drastically after voters were given details of candidates’ platforms and messages: Akin, a Tea Party Caucus founding member who branded himself as one of the most conservative members of Congress, became the front runner, with 38 percent of the votes.
The poll suggested to McCaskill that if she could help Akin, the weakest fundraiser in the Republican primary, spread his platform and messages among Republican voters, she could very well propel him to victory.
That would, in turn, help her reelection, she figured. McCaskill deemed Akin the weakest Republican candidate among general election voters and the easiest candidate to beat in the fall.
So her campaign produced what they called a “dog whistle” ad, using “reverse psychology” to tell primary Republican voters to not vote for Akin because he was too conservative for Missouri.
“This presentation made it look as though I was trying to disqualify him, though as we know, when you call someone ‘too conservative’ in a Republican primary, that’s giving him or her a badge of honor,” McCaskill wrote in the article.
During the weeks leading up to the primary, McCaskill spent a total of $1.7 million for Akin, more than Akin spent for himself.
As the ad was broadcasted to targeted Republican voters, Akin was inching up in McCaskill’s internal polls, tightening the gap between himself and the front runner. Akin eventually captured the Republican nomination.
McCaskill went on to beat Akin by a nearly 15-point margin in the general election.
She summed up her “dog whistle operation” by saying that she “had successfully manipulated the Republican primary.”
In 2022, Democrats overwhelmingly used this type of “reverse psychology” ad to meddle in the Republican primaries, too.
The ad often introduced the target Republican candidates as Trump endorsees, 100 percent pro-life, and pro-Second Amendment. It then ended with a tagline such as “Greg Lopez, too conservative for Colorado.”
Greg Lopez was a Republican gubernatorial candidate running against Heidi Ganahl in a two-way primary race. Ganahl outraised Lopez (Lopez raised $154,931 this year) by an 8–1 margin, according to campaign finance disclosures filed with the state.
In the month leading up to the primary, Colorado Information Network IE Committee spent $1.2 million on TV ads and $300,000 on digital ads to broadcast Lopez’s platform.
The committee got the lion’s share of funding, $1.525 million, from Strong Colorado for All. The latter got the bulk of its money, $1.575 million, from the DGA, according to campaign finance disclosures filed with the state.
Democracy and Voter Responsibility
“I don’t think parties should play in the other party’s primaries. I think it is a poor practice that I urge both parties to stop,“ private equity fund Stagwell Group President Mark Penn told The Epoch Times. ”It’s happening now with greater frequency, and it undermines democracy to spend money to promote candidates you don’t really want to win.”Penn served as a former White House pollster to then-President Bill Clinton and as an adviser in Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign. He also was the chief strategist to Hillary Clinton in her Senate campaigns and failed 2008 presidential campaign.
Daron Shaw, professor and chair of state politics at the University of Texas–Austin, thinks the tactic departs from traditional negative or strategic campaigning and is unconstructive.
Shaw has years of campaign experience under his belt, having worked as a survey research analyst in several political campaigns and as a strategist in the 2000 and 2004 presidential election campaigns.
“It is a naked effort to brand a candidate, but it is being promoted by a group that doesn’t really want the candidate to win. I don’t think we have a term for it. You might call it sort of second-level strategic campaigning,” he told The Epoch Times. “A lot of us might have some objections to it. But hey, this is an inevitability of history.”
Shaw said two historic developments set the conditions for candidates and groups to play the tactic.
One is the proliferation of money in political campaigns following the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 and the explosion of internet fundraising. The former opened the door for big interest group money, while the latter led to booming small-donor fundraising.
“Twenty or 25 years ago, money wasn’t this easy, and you wouldn’t have the resources to mess with the other side,” he said.
Another factor is that over the past decades, as U.S. voters pivoted to apply the notion of democracy to the party systems, the parties gradually lost control over the nomination processes, according to Shaw.
“We’ve all heard stories of smoke-filled rooms and state party conventions in which the Republican party tried to set up a ticket that’s going to be competitive across multiple races statewide; the Democrats would do the same. But in the 1960s and 1970s, the parties began to surrender that control,” he said.
“When you open your selection process to a more general system that facilitates input by all members, it opens the door to the kind of tactic we are seeing today.”
Shaw suggested that voters take more care to find out the source of a candidate’s positions and history.
In terms of campaign finance disclosures, every state has its own rules. Almost all the Democratic spending mentioned in this article was disclosed to various degrees to the respective state board of elections, except for Illinois.
However, the DGA isn’t obligated to report its spending with the state because the ads don’t specifically implore voters to vote for any candidate, according to Illinois State Board of Elections Public Information Officer Matt Dietrich.
“Any voter can file a complaint with our board alleging that the DGA ads are in fact independent expenditures and should be reported as such. No such complaint was filed in 2018, nor has one been filed thus far in this election cycle,” Dietrich wrote in a July 11 email to The Epoch Times.
Costas Panagopoulos, professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at Northeastern University in Pennsylvania, told The Epoch Times: “My sense is that this type of strategic activity has been going on for a long time. It just might be more transparent now, given the resources that we have to track spending.
“At the end of the day, it is the voters’ obligation to consider carefully the candidates they choose. And in that sense, promoting any specific candidacy should not dictate how individual voters vote.”
