In Michigan, Democrat Hillary Scholten
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.that closely linked Gibbs with Trump which helped him win the Republican primary against incumbent Rep. Peter Meijer who was one of the few Republicans in Congress who voted to impeach Trump after the January 6 riots.
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.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
, with Lake trailing her Democratic opponent by less than two points with around 63% of the votes counted.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 itseveral millions of dollars into attack ads targeting moderate Republicans.
Well, sure they did. But the only reason it actually worked is because there's such a strong impulse for conspiracy theory rubbish instigated by the Trumpian voter bloc to begin with. Should they apologize for taking advantage of the thing that ostensibly made them lose in 2016?