For Joe Biden’s party, the idea is simple: it is a question of weighing in the process of the primaries of the Republican camp, by giving a boost to the most radical candidates, so that subsequently the Democratic candidate finds himself in a position of strength against a rival who is difficult to elect or who is not very presentable.
In other words, the bet is that, on election day in November, voters will turn away from a Republican candidate who is too Trumpist, too populist or too new to politics in favor of a Democratic candidate presenting more serious pledges. or stability.
– Unscrupulous –
With the mid-term elections in sight, financial efforts have been concentrated in certain pivotal states, such as Arizona or Michigan, likely to tip the majority in Congress to Washington.
The Democrats hope in particular to increase their chances of rallying the vote of women in the polls where Republican candidates who are openly anti-abortion will line up.
On the side of voters on the left, many welcomed this new unscrupulous strategy, seeing it as a way to make room for political maneuvers by Republicans to circumvent certain Senate rules or secure the confirmation of conservative judges on the Supreme Court.
But others warned that the calculation to back the extremes was like playing with fire.
“By burning villages under the pretext of saving them, we risk leaving only ashes,” said Peter Loge, an expert from George Washington University.
“Meddling in the rival party’s primaries by raising political issues can be strategically shrewd,” he told AFP. “But amplifying lies about the elections, promoting unfounded conspiratorial theories and opening the microphone to attacks on democratic institutions is a mistake”.
During the Republican primary in Michigan, Trumpist candidate John Gibbs, who assures that Joe Biden did not win the election in 2020, beat Peter Meijer, one of the ten elected “Grand Old Party” to the post. to have voted in favor of the impeachment of President Trump after the assault on the Capitol.
Mr. Gibbs, who even once mentioned so-called satanic rites, can thank the Democratic Party, which spent half a million dollars on his campaign. Deliberately misleading, a TV spot claimed that Mr Gibbs was “too” conservative, in a falsely critical way rather likely to be seen as praise by right-wing voters.
Democrats have also spent fortunes on candidates denying the presidential outcome in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Arizona.
A tactic decried by various Democratic parliamentarians or by political consultant David Axelrod, chief architect of Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns.
Dan McMillan, who heads the organization Save Democracy in America, also denounces the situation which, according to him, illustrates the harmful role at its peak of “big money” in politics. “They manipulate voters instead of listening to them. It’s disgusting,” he laments.
Other voices believe, on the contrary, that it is legitimate to toughen up one’s game on a terrain that has become tougher and more polarized.
“In this two-party system, there is already a master party in ruthless politics”, notes Aron Solomon, lawyer for the Esquire Digital agency, in reference to the Republican Party. “To place yourself above the fray may seem respectable but today it is the best way to find yourself ousted from power, not for an election, but for a generation”.