Republicans Have a Choice to Make

By Jim Geraghty

Wednesday, July 27, 2022

 

If you’re a right-of-center person who would like to see the GOP break its habit of nominating the worst, least-electable figure out of crowded fields of candidates, this week brought some welcome news. It looks like Eric Greitens — the disgraced and nearly impeached former governor who resigned over allegations of abusing his mistress and breaking campaign-finance laws — is finally losing ground in the Missouri GOP Senate primary that he briefly led. As National Review’s Dan McLaughlin lays out, three recent polls in the race all show Greitens sinking and state attorney general Eric Schmitt pulling ahead:

 

·        Trafalgar has Schmitt at 26.5 percent, congresswoman Vicky Hartzler at 24.4 percent, Greitens at 20.2 percent, congressman Billy Long at 6.7 percent, 6.6 percent with minor candidates (Mark McCloskey and Dave Schatz), and 15.6 percent undecided.

 

·        Emerson has Schmitt at 33 percent, Hartzler at 21 percent, Greitens at 16 percent, Long at 5 percent, 8 percent for minor candidates, and 17 percent undecided. Sixty-one percent have an unfavorable view of Greitens, double the unfavorables for Schmitt and nearly double those of Hartzler.

 

·        When undecideds are pushed to choose, Emerson shows the race at Schmitt 39 percent, Hartzler 25 percent, Greitens 18 percent, Long 7 percent, and 11 percent for the minor candidates. In other words, a third of independents would pick Schmitt if they had to decide today, but barely more than one in nine would choose Greitens.

 

·        Republican pollster Remington’s Missouri Scout poll has Schmitt at 32 percent, Hartzler at 25 percent, Greitens at 18 percent, Long at 8 percent, and 7 percent with the minor candidates, with 10 percent undecided.

 

The Missouri primary is on August 2. The lesson of Doug Jones beating Roy Moore should have been a vivid lesson to Republicans that there is no state so intensely GOP-leaning that they are guaranteed to win, even when they nominate a turkey of a candidate. Yes, the national political and economic environment is likely going to carry a bunch of subpar Republican candidates to victory this November. But a party would be foolish to count on uncontrollable outside factors carrying it to victory, and a candidate who wins because of a national wave usually loses the next cycle.

 

(Candidates should also remember that they can only really run as outsider opponents against the status quo once. Once you’re in office, you’re a relative insider and part of the status quo!)

 

If Missouri Republicans nominate Greitens, they’ll take a Senate race that should be a slam dunk and hand the Democrats, at minimum, a competitive race that will suck up GOP resources better used elsewhere. It would also suggest that a large plurality of Republican primary voters are so easily seduced by the candidate who takes the most over-the-top combative stance — “We’re going RINO hunting!” — that they can’t be bothered to take even a moment to think about a candidate’s’ competitiveness in the general election.

 

Democrats are getting deservedly raked over the coals for their extraordinarily high-risk strategy of running ads in GOP primaries that are designed to help nominate the most extreme candidate. Many of these most extreme candidates are little-known and underfunded compared to their more mainstream competitors; many have declared that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, attended the January 6 Capitol Hill riot, or demonstrated that they’re much more interested in conspiracy theories than actual public policy or passing laws.

 

A few Democrats who think they’re clever insist that the ads aren’t really designed to promote those most extreme candidates, and that defense would work if we didn’t have eyes and ears. We all know what a political attack ad looks like; this hilarious Reason parody lays out all of the instantly recognizable cliches: “Our candidate is in flattering lighting and full bright color. Their candidate is in grainy, high-contrast black and white, spotted through a telephoto. . . . The voiceover for our guy is calm, measured, bright. Their guy gets the lower register, and sometimes . . . we . . . slow . . . down.”

 

Check out the DCCC ad for John Gibbs, who is challenging GOP incumbent Peter Meijer in Michigan’s third congressional district, with that higher-pitched, almost cheerful and enthusiastic voice over:

 

John Gibbs is too conservative for West Michigan. Hand-picked by Trump to run for Congress, Gibbs called Trump ‘the greatest president’ and worked in Trump’s administration with Ben Carson. Gibbs has promised to push that same conservative agenda in Congress: a hard line against immigrants at the border, and so-called ‘patriotic education’ in our schools. The Gibbs-Trump agenda is too conservative for West Michigan.

 

Keep in mind, Gibbs has lived in the district less than a year, and he has run no TV or radio ads.

 

Now, we know that when the DCCC wants to slam a guy, it doesn’t call him “conservative.” It calls him “extreme” or “right-wing.” It doesn’t tout his support for securing the border or “patriotic education.” (That sounds pretty good, when you’re worried that the schools are teaching “unpatriotic education.”) If Gibbs wins the nomination, the tone and content of those DCCC ads are going to change really quickly.

 

Then again, this is a fairly Republican district (R+6 in the Cook Partisan Voting Index) and Meijer won by six points in 2020. In this kind of a year, with Biden’s job approval at 31 percent in Michigan, if Gibbs wins the nomination, maybe he ends up winning the general election anyway — and the DCCC will have helped replace a bright, reasonable Republican with a guy who thinks Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager took part in Satanic rituals.

 

At least a few congressional Democrats realize that the DCCC strategy is astonishingly risky, spectacularly stupid, and undermines all of the party’s arguments that Donald Trump and his like-minded allies represent a unique threat to American democracy.

 

Dean Phillips, a fairly centrist Democratic congressman from Minnesota, fumed, “I’m disgusted that hard-earned money intended to support Democrats is being used to boost Trump-endorsed candidates, particularly the far-right opponent of one of the most honorable Republicans in Congress.”

 

“Many of us are facing death threats over our efforts to tell the truth about Jan. 6. To have people boosting candidates telling the very kinds of lies that caused Jan. 6 and continues to put our democracy in danger, is just mind-blowing,” Representative Stephanie Murphy of Florida seethed to Politico.

 

The fact that the DCCC is helping promote a normally longshot stolen-election candidate against Meijer, one of ten Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, tells you everything you need to know about how most Democrats see anti-Trump Republican officials: Suckers and chumps. Democratic Party institutions will never, ever, ever help out a Republican official, even if that Republican does exactly what the Democratic Party wants them to do.

 

There’s a hard lesson in this. A Republican should defy the rest of his party when he thinks it’s the right thing to do — not because he thinks the Democrats will have his back when it counts.

 

It is indeed terrible that Democrats and their allied groups are running these ads, promoting the most extreme candidates. But Republicans also have a choice, and no primary has so many crossover voters that Democrats can single-handedly ensure the nomination of the worst choice.

 

As mentioned on an episode or two of The Editors, I wonder if the chaos and circus-like atmosphere in Washington in recent years is degrading the quality of candidates who want to run for Congress. If you’re a smart, accomplished, scandal-free figure who wants to help your country, do you really think running for the House or Senate is the best way to spend your time, energy, and money? If you’re in the minority in the House, you’re just voting against bad ideas the majority brings to the floor. If you get elected to the Senate, you vote on nominations and a giant omnibus spending bill once a year.

 

Is that how you want to spend the next decade or so of your life? Is it worth putting your family through all that scrutiny and aggravation?

 

Or would you be better off establishing some new nonprofit organization or something?