Kansas Democrats played a dangerous game with Kris Kobach. It could backfire in 2022

What happens in Kansas doesn’t always stay in Kansas.

Back in 2020, Democrats saw an opportunity to win the seat being vacated by longtime GOP Sen. Pat Roberts — but were also realistic: The only way they’d win a statewide race in deep-red Kansas was if Republicans picked the worst possible candidate for the seat.

Enter the worst possible candidate: Kris Kobach.

The notorious former secretary of state lost the governor’s race to Democrat Laura Kelly just two years previously. Kobach was such a lightning rod that many Kansas Republicans openly worried he could fritter away the Senate seat as well. That was exactly what Democrats wanted. So groups allied with the Democratic Party poured millions of dollars into the GOP primary, buying TV ads that attacked Kobach — but in ways designed to make him more appealing to Republican voters. Kobach was “too conservative” for Kansas, the spots asserted in a bit of too-clever reverse psychology.

It didn’t work. Roger Marshall beat Kobach handily in the GOP primary, then did the same to the Democrat, Barbara Bollier, a few months later. So much for trickery.

That Senate race wasn’t the first time an American political party tried to pick its opponent, and now we know it wasn’t the last, either. During this year’s midterm elections, Democrats have meddled in GOP primary elections across the country, nudging ardent conservatives to pick antidemocratic extreme-right candidates who appeal to the base but also — theoretically — will be easier for Democrats to beat in the fall. On Tuesday night in Maryland, Dan Cox won the GOP primary for governor with the help of Democratic-funded TV ads. Doug Mastriano did the same in Pennsylvania last month. Both men have unabashedly embraced Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Democrats are playing with fire, again. There are three major problems with this tactic:

It’s anti-democratic. The GOP candidates backed by Democrats have scary ideas about elections, but there’s a bigger issue: Ideally, the rough-and-tumble of our political process ends up producing the best possible candidates to lead our government. Their decisions will affect everything from the quality of our water to the taxes we pay to what gets taught in our schools. We should want those candidates to be good, even if we don’t always agree with them.

Boosting a rival party’s bums undermines that process — breeding voter cynicism about democracy and, sometimes, putting people in office who clearly shouldn’t be there.

It’s bad messaging. Democrats have spent the last few years arguing that American democracy is at risk from an increasingly authoritarian Republican Party that won’t play by the usual rules of electoral democracy. I happen to believe they’re right.

But you’d forgive Americans for thinking otherwise. What must they think when they see Democrats funding GOP candidates who embody the party’s worst tendencies? In that light, the “democracy is in danger” rhetoric starts to look like so much political gamesmanship — something safely ignored.

It can backfire. Bad candidates can win a general election. That’s certainly the case in Pennsylvania, where Mastriano trails the Democratic nominee, Josh Shapiro, by only a few percentage points. A Republican victory in that race could have devastating ripple effects, both for Democrats and for democracy.

Pennsylvania is a swing state — and if Mastriano beats Shapiro, he’ll get to appoint the officials who run the elections there. And Mastriano isn’t a run-of-the-mill conservative: He chartered buses that ferried Trump supporters to Washington, D.C., for the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021. The possibilities for mischief in 2024 are rather clear. Why would Democrats risk that?

The consequences aren’t always so dire. In 2020, Democratic-aligned groups merely threw away a lot of money on Kobach’s Senate campaign. But danger looms. Sooner or later, a party that keeps backing the worst possible Republican candidate will get exactly what it paid for.