While the voters made the final decision, Democrats’ efforts influenced it.
In the wake of Representative Peter Meijer’s loss to the Trump-endorsed John Gibbs in Tuesday’s Michigan Republican House primary, some have tried to give Democrats cover for meddling in the race. But that meddling did succeed in turning the race toward Gibbs, whom the Democrats believe their nominee, Hillary Scholten, can beat more easily.
The first of the disingenuous arguments trying to absolve Democrats of their role in the election’s outcome is that the TV ad on which they spent $435,000 was critical of Gibbs. True, the overall tone of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s ad is negative, but we have to keep in mind its intended audience.
It called Gibbs “too conservative for west Michigan,” saying he was “hand picked by Trump to run for Congress” after working in his administration and calling Trump “the greatest president.” It also warned that he would pursue policies similar to Trump’s, including being tough on illegal immigration and pushing patriotic education.
As a Republican voter who does not like Trump and his “stolen election” claims, I am nevertheless on board with his policy agenda. Securing the border and preventing indoctrination in critical race theory in K–12 schools sound good to me. For a Republican base that has a much rosier view of the former president, Gibbs’s prescriptions on those issues combined with his devotion to Trump make a pretty fine cocktail — so the DCCC ad was targeted at those voters.
Another argument has been that of culpability. People have emphasized the fact that Republican voters were the ones who made the final decision to elect Gibbs. As I pointed out in my piece yesterday, this critique is correct. Gibbs won because people voted for him. Voters have a responsibility to do their research and choose the best candidate, independent of insidious efforts by opposition parties to sway them.
That said, though I believe GOP voters in Michigan’s third congressional district made the wrong choice, I recognize that there is no measure of hypocrisy in their actions. They believe Gibbs and Trump are helping the American Republic and are clear and consistent about why they voted the way they did.
We cannot say the same for the Democrats. As Meijer told me back in June, “there’s something pretty rich about Nancy Pelosi one day saying January 6 is the greatest threat to our democracy and must be investigated, and, at the exact same time, she’s greenlighting her super PAC” and others to help the very same people she is denouncing.
Apparently, these “stop the steal” candidates are so dangerous to America that they deserve help in their campaigns. Additionally, as I wrote yesterday, the Democrats’ party leadership is doing greater harm than Republicans’. The Michigan GOP needs to take into account the wishes of GOP voters, a majority of whom preferred Gibbs. But the Democrats have no such obligation. They are going out of their way to boost MAGA challengers whom they have called threats to democracy.
The final argument is that Republicans in the district would have selected Gibbs even without the meddling from the DCCC. We cannot know for sure, but there is evidence to suggest that the committee’s boosting of Gibbs helped him win over voters.
A critical factor in the Michigan elections has been name recognition, and, much like his fellow Republicans in the state’s gubernatorial primary, Gibbs suffered from a lack of it. Voters disapproved of Meijer, but a poll in February, offering a simple list of the candidates running, showed that Meijer won the support of 26 percent, compared with 13 percent for Gibbs, and 55 percent undecided. When voters were additionally informed by the pollsters of Trump’s support for Gibbs, they chose Gibbs overwhelmingly, by 37 percent to Meijer’s 19 percent.
The key for Gibbs to win, then, was to make voters as aware of his Trump endorsement as possible. Was the $340,000 Gibbs spent on the race enough to do that? Maybe. But when the DCCC spent more money in one week than Gibbs did the entire campaign, it is not unreasonable to think that the effort had some influence.
Gibbs’s primary victory makes it easier for Democrats to win in the district, which is much bluer than it was in 2020 thanks to redistricting. Still, their meddling has given Gibbs a greater chance to be in Congress. They’re playing with fire, and they might just get burned.