Boosting Extremists Is a Dangerous Game

In a series of primaries this year, Democrats appear to be trying to Todd Akin the Republicans. Todd Akin? He was the very conservative candidate for a Senate seat in Missouri back in 2012, who Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill boosted in the Republican primary by running ads bashing him for being too conservative. The strategy was simple: Republican voters would reflexively support anyone who was being called a conservative extremist, but then that candidate would be easier to beat in the general election.

Democrats have been using a version of that strategy this year in contests including a Senate primary in Colorado and primaries for governor in Illinois, Nevada and Pennsylvania. So what can we say about it?

For one thing, be careful about buying the hype. Yes, ads can move votes in primaries — much more easily than in general elections. But this is exactly the kind of thing that pundits tend to overemphasize in interpreting elections. Campaign professionals behind this kind of ad may give wink-wink denials to reporters on the record while falling over each other off the record to claim credit for their cleverness and skill, and one of the things that election analysts and pundits in general tend to respect is cleverness. That’s not to say that this stuff never has real effects. But be cautious.

For another, note that this is all at the level of party operatives. At the voter level, things can work differently. In Georgia’s recent primaries, for example, Democratic voters who supported Republican Governor Brian Kemp and Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger apparently did so because they thought those Republicans would be better if elected than their Donald Trump-supporting opponents, not as a plot to elect Democrats to those offices.

That said, as long as the campaign is honest — that is, as long as the candidates accused of being extremely conservative are in fact extremely conservative — I don’t think there’s anything unethical going on here. What Democrats are attempting to do is to exploit the preference for extremism among Republicans that in other ways can be very damaging to Democrats. That’s ethically kosher.

Whether it’s wise or not is a different question. After all, if the presumably weak general-election candidates wind up winning, then the strategy will have backfired. National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar asks, “After all, how seriously does the party take its own argument that American democracy itself is threatened by Republicans when they’re boosting some of the most radical conspiracists and election-deniers for naked political gain?”