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The Democratic Party’s risky gambit of boosting far-right candidates during the Republican primaries appears to have paid off with most of these candidates losing to Democrats in key battleground states on Tuesday night.
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker looks to supporters after he defeated GOP challenger Darren Bailey.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Key Facts
Republican candidate and election denier Donald Bolduc—whose candidacy was aided in the primaries by some Democrats who sponsored primary ads promoting him—lost the U.S. Senate race in New Hampshire to incumbent Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan.
In Michigan, Democrat Hillary Scholten defeated Trump-backed right-wing candidate John Gibbs—who had also repeated the former president’s false claims about a stolen 2020 election—to flip a red seat.
The Democrats ran ads that closely linked Gibbs with Trump which helped him win the Republican primary against incumbent Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.) who was one of the few Republicans in Congress who voted to impeach Trump after the January 6 riots.
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Unsurprisingly, the most significant impact of this risky strategy was felt across multiple gubernatorial races on Tuesday night, as the playbook had been most widely used by the Democratic Governors Association.
Right-wing candidates Doug Mastriano from Pennsylvania, Dan Cox from Maryland, Darren Bailey from Illinois and Geoff Diehl from Massachusetts all lost to Democratic candidates in governors’ races across the country on Tuesday.
What To Watch For
Kari Lake, the vocal election-denying, Trump-backed gubernatorial candidate from Arizona, also benefited from the risky Democratic strategy but the outcome of her race still remains in the balance, with Lake trailing her Democratic opponent by less than two points with around 63% of the votes counted.
Key Background
Democrats adopted the risky strategy of elevating hard-right candidates in Republican primaries, anticipating that this would give them an edge in swing states with large numbers of independent or moderate voters. The Democratic Governors Association was the biggest proponent of the strategy as it poured several millions of dollars into attack ads targeting moderate Republicans. The idea was that hard-right candidates who questioned the election results and hitched their wagons with Trump would be easier to beat in November—something that has largely turned out to be true. The strategy turned out to be especially helpful for Sen. Maggie Hassan as she faced low approval ratings and was fighting to hold on to a seat that the GOP believed it could easily flip. Despite its eventual success, the strategy faced some blowback from within the party as many expressed displeasure for what they saw was a cynical attempt to boost election deniers and conspiracy theorists while warning this could blow up in the party’s face.
Further Reading
‘Red Wave’ Optimism Quickly Fizzles Among Republicans—Here’s Why (Forbes)
