Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.
...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).
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Notes -
One of the nefarious stratagems the Democratic Party engaged in this election was to intentionally boost and generously fund far-right Republican candidates over their more moderate opponents in the Republican primaries. This potentially risky gambit was intended to allow Democratic candidates to coast to an easy victory by knocking out the moderate Republican option from the general election. This strategy was not just an after-thought, as the Dems put in a ton of resources into the effort. In Maryland for example, the Dems spent $1.2 million on Dan Cox's campaign, more than twice the money the candidate raised at that point. I thought then and still think this is dishonorable and contemptible behavior, but from a pure power play perspective, I concede it was a sound tactical decision. All six Republican candidates (3 governors, 1 senator, 2 house) targeted by this play lost the general election, five of them by double-digit margins.
It's important to emphasize that the Dems didn't force Republicans to do anything. All they did was dangle the candidate's Republican bona fides with "oh no it sure would be terrible if this person that loves Trump and still thinks the election was stolen ends up being the nominee oh no" and voters agreed with them. Given how much of a resounding success this was for the Dems, I anticipate we'll see it again in the future.
If so, can the GOP do anything to immunize itself from this effort? Should it even try to? Also, two can play at this game but is this strategy something the GOP can successfully levy? Dems have no shortage of total crazies (as Libs of TikTok can demonstrate) after all. What would that look like and what are some candidates that come to mind?
I think it's worse than that, for some of them. The Cox ad at least had a frame of his Jan6-specific tweet, but it's notable even the Mastriano ad framed it as "audited the election" rather than anything more direct or serious. In other cases, the buys were targeted at the moderate Republican without mentioning the nutjobs.
While a different sort of ratfucking, I'd also add Michigan's primary certification system. The emphasis on more moderate Republicans (and success against the most moderate Republicans) is a really convenient accident, and the partisan nature of the review did not make it look better.
The more general class -- unelectable nutjobs sweeping the primary, sometimes with outside support -- has been a long-term problem, nearly old enough to vote today. So I think so. The question's what solutions are both possible, and not worse than the problem.
You can reduce access to the primary system to start with, cutting off nutty outsiders before they even get started. This can be subtle (eg, increasingly steep signature requirements) or less so (require goofy amounts of paperwork while having party volunteers available for favored candidates) to the overt (kneecaps). Outside of the ethical questions for how compatible with democracy this technically is, though, this has the more immediate issue of ossifying the political party, often in pretty bad ways.
You can have a big war chest that you dole out specifically to counter something like this. Which is hard, both in the "keeping a war chest" side, and in the "countering something like this" one -- note that the Dan Cox bump came in the last two weeks, not a terribly easy time frame to identify and counter this stuff, especially to the tune of 1 million USD, and especially if you don't know where it might happen.
You can have a trusted third party that's able to tell people to "bite the bullet", even if they aren't usually spelling it out. Past primary activity is pretty hard to point toward, but the NRA's continued support of Harry Reid despite his opponents being better on guns is one of the more visible versions (if cross-party) of the strengths and weaknesses of this approach, in that they got a huge amount of very quiet victories from him, and then got very publicly stabbed in a way that drastically undermined trust. Of course, even outside of the specific Dem-lead destruction of the NRA, we're running kinda low on trusted third parties, here.
You can have a powerful untrusted third party swoop in. Which... has its own benefits and downsides.
I don't think this is a sword that cuts both ways. A lot of this process works because when Shapiro does this, Reason writes it up, and no one in Pennsylvania cares until after the primary and then both Shapiro and conventional media blast him with both barrels. Shapiro didn't have a meaningful primary challenger, but if we imagine that the nuttiest stereotype and Republicans tried to draw them into the main election by pointing out gun control and criminal justice reform policies, the next day the New York Times and every local news station would have stories about it. That is, the "trusted third party" is baked-in for Democratic candidates in a way that doesn't exist and probably can't exist for Republicans.
At a deeper level, I don't think the Red Tribe or the GOP has a good enough understanding of what the Dem total crazy is, and more (maybe not wrong!) fear that misidentification or bad luck will end up in that crazy becoming the new party dogma. Partly that's because the average GOP strategist is... not good, bluntly. Same for their near-strategists: I'm still not a fan of TracingWoodgrain's trick against LibsOfTikTok, but part of the reason for that is that Libs was already jumping onto Kitty Litter fakes or random unobjectionable stuff at length. But there are also just age, tech awareness, and infrastructural limits.
I'm really hesitant to give examples out loud, because even if they wouldn't work, they're by definition the sort of weapons you shouldn't be talking about, in the same way that it's really bad that the aftermath of the Shiri's Scissor story had a bunch of people trying to identify the worst Scissors possible by manual search of the space.
What do you mean by this? That Democrats are seen as the trusted default?
If so why is this the case, wouldn't it depend on your class/upbringing?
Sorry, mean "third party" in the sense of 'not the candidate or their opponents', rather than in the sense of 'a different political party'. More that CNN/NBC can act to prove something to Democratic primary voters in a way that Fox News (or any other group) does not for Republican primary voters.
This is a relative matter and somewhat prone to limitations of evaluation as an outsider, but I think the extent media efforts against Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard turned into common knowledge for the majority of Democrats, even non-Trump Republican hanger-ons largely didn't get an equivalent, and where Trump was opposed it was often to his benefit.
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