Democrats spend millions helping ‘ultra-MAGAs’ win primaries

Democrats have spent $US44 million so far supporting the most ardent supporters of Donald Trump in the Republican primaries.

Donald Trump with Donald Jr ad Ivanka Trump (C. Picture: AFP.

As Donald Trump inches closer to declaring his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election expect Democrats to ramp up the risk of a scary autocratic future.

“I fear for our democracy if the Republicans were ever to get the gavel. We can’t let that happen. Democracy is on the ballot in November,” said Democrat House speaker Nancy Pelosi earlier this year, echoing similar sentiments expressed relentlessly by the party’s elite.

It turns out Republicans are so dangerous Democrats are spending millions to help them win.

The ruling party has spent a fortune – $US44 million so far – elevating and supporting the most ardent supporters of Donald Trump in the Republican primaries, elections which determine which GOP candidates will stand against Democrats in the November midterm Congressional and gubernatorial elections, in the hope they’ll be easier to beat than moderates.

Such sums are more than any major US political party has spent meddling in the affairs of its opponents, with well over three months still to go.

In California, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Maryland, among the biggest US states, the Democrat Governors’ Association and a gaggle of Democrat-aligned political action groups have bought prime-time television advertisements to tip the scales in favour of so-called ‘ultra MAGA’ Republicans, in elections where there is no Democrat on the ballot.

It’s a risky strategy – Hillary Clinton mentioned Donald Trump as much as possible throughout the 2016 Republican primaries, seeing him as the easiest candidate to beat.

In Illinois alone Democrats put down US$35m to smear moderate Republican mayor Richard Irvin and boost the chances of state senator Darren Bailey, whose campaign bus is emblazoned with Bible verses, making the race most expensive non-presidential election in US history, according to Open Secrets, which tracks campaign financing.

Bailey won and will face off against billionaire Democrat governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, whose family own Hyatt hotels, in the governor’s race.

In Pennsylvania, which narrowly voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 election, the campaign of Democrat state attorney-general Josh Shapiro, who’s running for Governor in November, spent almost $1m to help Doug Mastriano, who attended the January 6th riots at the Capitol building in 2021, clinch the Republican nomination.

“I’m going to have to send him a thank you card,” Mr Mastriano told LNP, a local Philadelphia news outlet, after seeing the Democrat advertisements.

The US$7 million Democrats spent in Colorado and California – unsuccessfully, Mr Trump’s loathed RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) still won there – was about US$4m more than Republicans spent on themselves according to the Colorado Sun.

Hypocritical? Yes, Democrat surely wouldn’t bankroll candidates they really believed were a threat to democracy.

But playing political hard ball is nothing new in US politics, and Democrat hardheads may have a point.

Donald Trump’s sour grapes after the 2020 election cost the Republicans not only two Senate seats in the January 2021 run-off elections, but their potential Senate majority, reducing the GOP’s red chamber headcount to 50.

Republican Glenn Youngkin won Virginia’s state election in November, against the odds, in a race the former president stayed well clear of, allowing the former hedge fund executive to talk about school curriculum rather than the 2020 election.

Will he or won’t he has quickly become when will he, even though no candidate has signalled a presidential bid so early in the US political cycle.

The former president, no stickler for convention, declared himself the 45th and 47th president while playing golf as far back as January, and has repeatedly hinted he intends to run, just shy of triggering campaign finance laws which would place restrictions on his US$100 million political donations war chest.

“Well, in my own mind, I’ve already made that decision, so nothing factors in anymore. In my own mind, I’ve already made that decision,” Mr Trump told New York Magazine in an interview published last week.

“Do I go before or after? That will be my big decision”.

Democrats will be sincerely hoping it’s before, wanting nothing more than the final three months of the midterm election campaign to be about the findings of the January 6th commission, which has already cast the former president’s actions, criminal or not, in a bad light, drawing almost entirely on former supporters and family.

Republicans would much prefer to be talking about 9.1 per cent inflation, the spread of far-left ideology into school curriculums, and the millions of refugees streaming across the southern border than relitigating the 2020 election and declaring their loyalty to Mr Trump.

Even Republicans appear to be tiring of the former president, according to a recent Sienna poll that found 47 per cent of them wanted another Republican to run for president in 2024, compared to 49 per cent who wanted Mr Trump.

A highly polarising, 78-year-old Mr Trump, as he would be in the lead up to the 2024 presidential election, potentially fighting sedition charges and obsessed with the 2020 election, might not be the ideal Republican candidate to win let alone heal a divided nation.

To be sure, Democrats, in the midst of the highest inflation in 40 years, under the leadership of a man that more than half the nation believes is mentally unfit, remain the underdogs this November.

But if anyone can pull off a political miracle, it’s Donald Trump.