Democrats Are ‘Muddying the Waters’ — Again

“Anxiety” is growing, the Hill reports, among Republican Senators who fear that President Biden’s prosecution of his chief rival for re-election is “actually helping” President Trump. It raises the question of whether voters would be better placed than prosecutors to decide Mr. Trump’s future. Senator Paul even suggests Mr. Biden is hoping to “boost” Mr. Trump because Mr. Biden thinks Mr. Trump would be the easiest to beat.“Maybe that’s their strategy,” Mr. Paul muses. “Maybe their strategy is: ‘Let’s keep indicting him. We’ll build him up because he’s the one candidate who won’t have appeal to independents.’ And that might be true.” If there’s anything to Mr. Paul’s theory, it wouldn’t be the first time that Democrats have sought to interfere in Republican primaries in an effort to warp the election results. In 2016, though, it backfired badly for Secretary Clinton.In part due to disclosures from WikiLeaks, we now know that the Clinton campaign sought to “pump Trump up,” as Politico put it, in the primaries in order to avoid a contest with the candidate they feared more — Governor Bush of Florida. One Clinton campaign agenda for a messaging meeting set as goals to “prevent Bush from bettering himself” while also seeking to “maximize Trump.” The tactic was described as “muddying the waters.”The Clinton campaign manager, Robby Mook, took Mr. Trump “so seriously,” Politico reported, “that his team’s internal, if informal, guidance was to hold fire on Trump during the primary” and hold off on sharing “opposition research” the Democrats were compiling. The campaign would later deploy that research, in part by mobilizing the FBI to pursue baseless allegations of Russian collusion, against Mr. Trump during the general election.Even as this interference failed — narrowly, it must be noted — for Mrs. Clinton, the tactic was applied again in 2022 with great success for the Democrats. The party and its allies spent some $53 million in the GOP primaries to back 13 so-called “MAGA Republicans” deemed easier to beat. Of those, six won the GOP nomination, then lost their race for office. The results in New Hampshire could have cost Republicans control of the Senate.Left-wing strategists laughed at their manipulation of the machinery of the democratic process. One operative with a Senator Schumer-aligned PAC, Veronica Yoo, joked that “GOP infighting is my love language.” The Washington Post lamented the Democrats’ “ends-justifies-the-means approach,” but Speaker Pelosi backed it, averring that “the contrast between” the two parties “is so drastic that we have to — we have to win.”That the Democrats’ cynicism paid off, our Dean Karayanis wrote, raised fears “that this sort of meddling could become standard.” Which brings us back to the 2024 race. The Hill’s report on the GOP’s squeamish solons quotes one unnamed senator whose constituents “complain that the Democrats are out to ambush Trump.” In reality, the senator says, “they want him to be” the GOP nominee “because he is the one who would lose.” That appraisal is vindicated by polling data compiled by the Sun’s Russell Payne. As far back as in April, when Mr. Trump was indicted by the New York county district attorney, Alvin Bragg, Mr. Payne reported that “the former president is surging in the primary polls but his general favorability among all voters is dropping like a stone.” That trend was described by Mr. Payne as a “worst-case scenario” for Republicans.The polling has remained consistent on this head, even as Mr. Trump has been indicted by Mr. Biden’s Justice Department for mishandling documents and could face more charges over January 6 and election interference. The president has a 74 percent favorable rating among Republicans, a recent Harris X poll finds, yet just 42 percent among independents. His unfavorable rating among independent voters stands at 49 percent.Yet the prospect that turning the legal firepower of the federal government against a candidate for office could boomerang on the Democrats is one about which we’ve warned before. The drive by Mr. Biden and his camarilla to defeat Mr. Trump in the courtroom, as opposed to the ballot box, looks like a roll of the dice not only for the Democrats, but for the future of constitutional government.

Democrats Are ‘Muddying the Waters’ — Again

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