Joe Biden has been sounding the alarm about GOP “extremism” and MAGA Republicans “threatening democracy” for several months. Biden believes that Democrats are in a battle for the “soul of the nation,” and he says he “will defend our democracy with every fiber of my being” from the 70 million Donald Trump supporters who he believes are a threat to America.
But if this is a battle for the “soul” of the nation and democracy is under such a terrible threat, why is the national Democratic Party pouring millions of dollars into ads touting GOP candidates who espouse MAGA principles?
This is ironclad proof that Joe Biden and the Democrats are demagoguing the MAGA movement. They are not serious about any threat to democracy. They are fixated on maintaining power even if it means their mortal enemies are elected.
Yet even as Democrats plowed money into helping election-denying candidates advance through Republican primaries, the White House stayed conspicuously silent about a practice that risks undermining the democratic traditions that Biden has vowed to protect. Biden appears to have accepted the tradeoff involved: If boosting election-denying candidates saves even a few Democratic congressional seats, it’s worth the risk.
Given opportunities to repudiate a strategy that has divided the party, the White House has refused. NBC News asked the White House what Biden thinks of the practice and whether he’s ever voiced qualms about it. Officials declined to answer.
If Biden truly believed in his incendiary rhetoric, he would do everything in his power to keep those MAGA Republicans off the ballot, not countenance his party supporting them. It may be the most cynical political ploy in a generation.
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And sometimes, this sort of thing backfires on the Democrats.
Some Democrats see in the White House’s approach a willingness to prioritize winning over principle. They want a more full-throated repudiation of the practice from Biden on down and question the bet that MAGA Republicans are easier to defeat — elections are notoriously tough to predict. During the 2016 presidential campaign, many Democrats saw Trump as the weakest and, hence, most desirable opponent in the general election. They paid dearly for misreading the public mood.
If Biden hadn’t portrayed MAGA as an existential threat to American democracy, the strategy would be more understandable. The Democratic National Committee has a lot of cash and they see giving to an opponent they believe is too extreme for the state’s mainstream as being a good strategy.
They spread $53 million across 13 races.
“All told, Democrats directly interfered in at least 13 primaries — six gubernatorial races, two Senate contests, and five House campaigns,” according to the Washington Post.
The reality is that in most of those races, the Republicans wouldn’t have been competitive anyway, whether or not they were MAGA. In the end, it seems a gigantic waste of money that Democrats may need in other races before the election is over.
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