Democratic Lawmakers Blast Their Own Party for Boosting Election Deniers in GOP Primaries [View all]

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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/07/dccc-peter-meijer-john-gibbs-election/

July 31, 2022
Democratic Lawmakers Blast Their Own Party for Boosting Election Deniers in GOP Primaries
“The DCCC is not God.”
Tim Murphy

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But the DCCC isn’t just bolstering Republicans who aren’t very good campaigners or who might be poor fundraisers—in Michigan’s third congressional district, it’s specifically spending money to boost John Gibbs, an election-denying Trump loyalist, over incumbent Rep. Peter Meijer, one of a handful of Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after January 6. Specifically, the DCCC has spent $435,000 on ads that call Gibbs “too conservative for West Michigan” and note that he was “handpicked by Trump”:

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Meijer isn’t happy about this, telling Politico that he’s “sick and tired of hearing the sanctimonious bullshit about the Democrats being the pro-democracy party.” But interestingly, a number of Democratic members of Congress aren’t happy either, and they’ve criticized the move publicly. New York Rep. Kathleen Rice, for example, called the use of campaign funds to help election deniers “unconscionable.” Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips said it was “just damn wrong.”

On ABC’s This Week on Sunday, New York Rep. Ritchie Torres joined the parade of Democratic critics, slamming the move as “embarrassingly hypocritical.”

“We cannot credibly defend democracy and then prop up candidates who are an existential threat to the very democracy that we’re defending,” Torres said. “And in politics, when you try to be too cute and clever, it often backfires. The DCCC is not God. It cannot guarantee the outcome of the general election. And when you prop up a conspiracy theorist in a Republican primary, you run the risk of sending an extremist to the United States Congress, and that’s an egregious misuse of Democratic resources.”

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But as we’ve seen over the last few years, it also matters what individual members of Congress say and do once they get there. There are costs to adding more election deniers and Trump acolytes to the chamber—and to using money you’ve raised from grassroots donors to help them get there. In this case, elected Democrats’ vocal complaints about Gibbs are notable. After all, they’re the ones who’d have to work with him.