Analysis | The complicated, often cynical politics of fighting for democracy – The Washington Post

Newly elected Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.) voted his conscience on Jan. 13, 2021. A week after rioters overran the U.S. Capitol, he joined with the Democratic majority in the House to impeach President Donald Trump for having stoked the violence that had filled the surrounding hallways. It was a principled stand, if to many an obvious one, and one that Meijer soon understood to be imperiling his own political future.

On Tuesday, that peril was manifested. Meijer’s bid for a second term was blocked when Republican primary voters in his district cast more ballots for John Gibbs, a former Trump administration official who had embraced Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election. One of the first votes Meijer took in Congress would be central to his ouster.

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But, as you may know, that’s not the whole story. Unlike other Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, Meijer represented a district that wasn’t solidly red. To critics of Trump, he deserved praise for being willing to buck his party on the impeachment vote. But to Democrats tasked with holding the House, he was still a Republican, one who was otherwise reliable in casting votes with his party’s caucus against the narrow Democratic majority. So a complicated chain of reasoning ensued: Meijer’s district could elect a Republican but not one who could point to his voting record to appeal to voters from both parties. Get someone like Gibbs in there, someone whose track record would be viewed with unmitigated distaste by Democrats and many independents, and maybe gain more breathing space in the party’s uphill fight for a 2023 majority.

So the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) spent about as much on an ad promoting Gibbs than Gibbs himself had raised as of the middle of last month. And then Gibbs won.

This situation, a distillation of various tensions on the right, on the left and nationally, has been subject to significant scrutiny over the past few weeks. It is, in fact, revealing about all sides involved — but some useful nuance has been lost.

Let’s consider the results in Michigan’s 3rd Congressional District, then, by asking three questions.

1. Did Meijer lose because of the Democratic intervention?
2. How much support did Gibbs have?
3. Was this just the grim art of politics?

Should you not wish to read further, the answers are “probably not,” “enough” and “no.”

Did Meijer lose because of the Democratic intervention?

A quiet secret in politics is that much of it is less science than art. Campaign consultants will tell you they know how to win for the same reason that weight-loss systems will tell you they know how to help you shed unwanted pounds. But in part because elections are increasingly complicated systems with a lot of moving parts and because there are often poor controls for measuring effectiveness, a lot of campaigning comes down to guesswork, instinct, habit and luck.

In close races, things get more complicated still. If your candidate wins narrowly, lots of factors might have contributed to the win — and lots of people who were involved in those factors (creating direct mail, endorsing, calling voters) will try to take credit for the narrow margin.

The Meijer-Gibbs race was relatively close but not a squeaker. Gibbs won by just under 4 percentage points, enough of a margin that observers could call the race on election night. In other words, this was likely not a race in which a small push made the difference.

Was the DCCC ad a small push? The committee spent a bit under $500,000 on a spot that began running in late July. That’s more than a month after early voting began in the contest, though. And in recent years, Republicans have been more likely to vote on Election Day itself. It seems to have been designed to be a last-minute prod for voters — perhaps to reduce the likelihood that Republican primary voters would hear news reports about Democrats being more worried about facing Meijer in November.

It’s hard to argue that the ad — run when election ad time was at its most expensive — was the sole reason that Gibbs got about 4,000 more votes than Meijer. I don’t think many people would argue that individual last-minute TV spots can make a 4-point difference in a House primary. Again, it’s hard to know what would have happened had the spot not run, but there is certainly reason to think that Meijer’s fate was affected more by Trump’s endorsement of Gibbs last year than the DCCC’s intervention in this one.

How much support did Gibbs have?

Speaking to CNN on Wednesday morning, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) blasted the DCCC’s ad. “If Peter’s opponent wins and goes on in November to win, the Democrats own that. Congratulations,” he said on CNN’s “New Day.”

Kinzinger also voted to impeach Trump in January 2021. But he has gone further, serving on the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot and embracing the role of one of the foremost anti-Trump voices within his party.

“Don’t keep coming to me asking where are all the good Republicans that defend democracy,” he continued on CNN, “and then take your donors’ money to spend half a million dollars promoting one of the worst election deniers that’s out there.”

Kinzinger’s “the Democrats own that” is interesting. That’s not simply because of the question of ownership, which we just assessed, but also because it attributes full culpability to the left. The implication for a viewer is clear: Meijer lost because of the DCCC.

Yet consider Kinzinger himself. Like several other Republicans who voted to impeach, Kinzinger decided to retire instead of battling through a Republican primary. (His House district was redrawn to force him into competition with another incumbent representative — one who didn’t vote to impeach. Meijer’s was also redrawn to make it more blue, contributing to the DCCC’s decision to target it.) Kinzinger’s retirement has clearly colored how he understood his party to have shifted and by the recognition that his view of Trump and the 2020 election was unpopular with the GOP.

Consider our first question in a different context. If Michael Jordan scores 90 of the Bulls’ 96 points in a 5-point win over the Nets, should the win be credited to the 6 points scored by Scottie Pippen? Even if those were the last 6 points scored, wouldn’t it be sensible to give Jordan substantial credit for the win? (Extending this analogy to Michigan, of course, we don’t know how many points Pippen scored. Maybe none! But that’s beside the immediate point.)

In other contexts, Kinzinger recognizes that Republicans have moved from a party that might appreciate holding Trump accountable for the Capitol riot to one that demands that its candidates demonstrate loyalty to Trumpism. The DCCC ad, shown above, simply elevates the mutual appreciation between Gibbs and Trump. It explicitly aims to leverage the existing predilection for Trumpism within the electorate. It’s Pippen scoring points because Jordan is under quadruple coverage.

Writing for the Bulwark, Jonathan Last used a different analogy. If he ran ads for poison suggesting that it was healthy, and people drank the poison, it’s his fault that they got sick. If, however, he ran spots noting the poison’s toxic effects, but people drank it anyway — who’s to blame?

Was this just the grim art of politics?

But there is a totally fair point to raise in response to that analogy: If you knew that even your negative spot might lead more people to drinking the poison, why would you run it?

Some Democrats have waved away the DCCC’s intervention as normal political jockeying. There have certainly been past examples of party committees boosting fringe candidates in the (often successful) hope that they will prove to be easier to beat in the general election. The most common example here is Sharron Angle, who Sen. Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) helped win her party’s primary in 2010 just to beat her that November.

What’s happening at the moment, though, is different. Democrats and Republicans like Kinzinger and Meijer have been raising alarms about the threat to democracy itself posed by pro-Trump candidates and rhetoric. The DCCC has the very direct goal of winning as many seats as possible. But in this case it actively sought to do so by helping to increase the likelihood that the House will have one more member who might reject the results of a close election.

Writing for the New Yorker, Amy Davidson Sorkin points out that the effects are not solely electoral.

“[E]ven if it helps the Democrats win some seats … it habituates Republicans — voters, activists, local officials — in the practice of uniting behind extremists after the primary,” she wrote. “It cajoles them into discarding whatever taboos might be left at this point. And making the most conspiratorial voices the loudest changes the tone of the political conversation.”

In other words, the DCCC spot and other similar interventions aim to intentionally leverage and stoke distrust of the system. They’re using reverse psychology to sell poison. As writer Josh Barro notes, this may itself be a cynical long-term play: making it less likely that any moderate (and potentially more-viable) Republican candidate will want to set up shop in a poison-focused bazaar.

“The Democrats are justifying this political jiu-jitsu by making the argument that politics is a tough business. I don’t disagree,” Meijer wrote earlier this week. “But that toughness is bound by certain moral limits: Those who participated in the attack on the Capitol, for example, clearly fall outside those limits. But over the course of the midterms, Democrats seem to have forgotten just where those limits lie.”

He went on to note (as I have in the past) that this sort of hyperclever selection of preferred candidates is particularly fraught in a year that continues to show significant signs of being a particularly good one for Republicans. The year 2010 was also good for Republicans (for many of the same reasons), but if Sharron Angle won, it meant one fewer Democratic vote. Her win didn’t increase the number of federal officials open to subverting elections themselves.

On Wednesday, Meijer and Gibbs participated in an event in Michigan at which Meijer offered Gibbs his endorsement for November. It was billed as a “unity” event, one in which the two candidates set aside their primary season differences to come together as Republicans.

The irony of such an event is obvious. Meijer lost in large part because he is disunited from his party on a central issue — an issue that was at the center of his fight against Gibbs, who took the opposite position. But for Meijer, as for the DCCC, having that vote for his party in the House took priority.

Not that he would be inclined at this point to make the DCCC’s job any easier.