On the Republicans’ decision to choose extremist candidates in high-profile close races

In retrospect this has turned out to be a mistake even looked at from a purely short-term tactical perspective (i.e., without considering that filling up the government with election deniers could be a bad outcome), and lots of people are giving Republican leadership and voters a hard time for throwing away a bunch of seats in Congress and maybe some governors too.

Remember how things looked like a year ago, or six months ago, when party leaders and Republican voters were deciding who to send to the general election. Midterm elections are all about partisan balancing, so with the Democrats in possession of the presidency and both houses of Congress, it made sense to expect a big swing back toward the out-party. There was also discussion of difficulties with the economy (stalling real incomes) and Joe Biden’s unpopularity, but balancing was the main thing. Sure, Donald Trump remains unpopular, but he wasn’t going to be on the ballot.

Again, place yourself in the frame of mind of November 2021 or May 2022. Republicans are expected to do well, to win big. If you’re on the extreme right (as are many Republican leaders and primary election voters; no surprise there, as activists tend to have stronger and less centrist political views), then this is the time to put some extremists in Congress, people who might have a difficult time getting elected in a normal year but can slip in with the wave. Even if you’re just on the center-right, you might value some right-wing extremists as the sort of fighters who will shift the political center of gravity to the right. Maybe you’re not an election denier yourself, but you appreciate that the occasional fire breather will help keep the Democrats honest and balance out some of the extreme liberals on the other side.

But . . . running an extremist will lose you some votes, right? Sure, but not so many votes on average. As Jonathan Katz and I wrote in our article from a few years back, Moderation in the pursuit of moderation is no vice: The clear but limited advantages to being a moderate for Congressional elections:

It is sometimes believed that is is politically risky for a congressmember to go against his or her party. On the other hand, Downs’s familiar theory of electoral competition holds that political moderation is a vote-getter. We analyze recent Congressional elections and find that moderation is typically worth less about 2% of the vote. This suggests there is a motivation to be moderate, but not to the exlusion of other political concerns, especially in non-marginal districts.

See also the discussion here. If ever there was a time to take a 2% hit, this was it: a predicted balancing landslide. Especially given the Senate maps which are favorable to Republicans in 2024 and 2026.

And then . . .

All the above was before the Supreme Court started to throw its weight around with controversial decisions on gun control and abortion that, in addition to being unpopular in their own right, also made it clear that the judicial branch of government was firmly under the control of the Republican party. And this completely changed the meaning of partisan balancing. All those things that annoy moderate voters about one-party control of government: this was now happening in the courts, and under an unambiguous 6-3 Republican majority.

Choosing extremist candidates in high-profile close races: Was this a prospectively bad decision?

No doubt, the Republicans’ decisions on candidate choice were retrospectively mistaken, as it seems they could’ve won a few important races with more mainstream candidates.

Prospectively, though, it’s not so clear. Without accounting for the assertive court decisions, we could imagine a nationwide swing toward the Republicans which would’ve swept in enough Republicans to handily capture both houses of Congress.

On the other hand, the Supreme Court was what it was, and a savvy political strategist might have anticipated, back in November 2021 or May 2022, what would be coming. The gun control thing was maybe more of a surprise, but many observers of the court were talking about when a major abortion ruling would be coming.

Anyway, my main point is that running politically extreme candidates was not an obvious bad choice from a strategic perspective (again, setting aside issues of governance), at the time the decisions were being made.

36 thoughts on “On the Republicans’ decision to choose extremist candidates in high-profile close races

  1. More than 35% of eligible voters don’t vote. Many people who do vote are locked into voting for the incumbent. To get people to vote for you, to get off the couch and not mindlessly vote for the status quo, you must motivate them. A bland moderate will not stir up votes even if that moderate is the rational choice. Faint heart never won fair lady.

    • Oncodoc:

      The data seem to show that, on average, moderate candidates do better in elections. You talk about blandness; that’s a separate dimension. A candidate can be moderate without being bland.

  2. It does seem like the Dem strategy of supporting extreme right candidates in the primaries was successful, or at the very least not destructive.

    Interestingly, your argument could just as well apply to Democrats going back to 2016 at least. It still amazes me that Democrats don’t seem to get what an amazing feat they pulled off in losing to Trump in 2016 and, really, to not win by that much in 2020, even losing seats in the house. What would have happened if the Dems overall were more centrist and the far left was muzzled throughout the last four elections? Would the Dems be riding solid control of the government today?

    • > what an amazing feat they pulled off in losing to Trump in 2016

      > if the Dems overall were more centrist…

      Clinton (and Biden) were solidly in the “centrist” territory of the Democrat Party. Indeed, the center-left of the American public.

      Clinton had an historically very low favorability rating for a presidential candidate (as did her opponent).

      Attributing her loss to being an “extremist” candidate seems typically a conflation of opinion and fact.

      • Only if you take “centrist” to mean “combining the worst characteristics of Left and Right”, i.e., pandering to the woke (“Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat.”) and being essentially Dick Cheney in drag when it comes to foreign policy.

  3. Andrew, you suggested that that “the judicial branch of government was firmly under the control of the Republican party” referring to the Supreme Court and specifically to gun laws and abortion. You might want to re-examine that take, insofar as the Associated Press article you cited regarding gun laws (as evidence) has this as its key finding:

    The poll finds that majorities of U.S. adults view both reducing gun violence and protecting gun ownership as important issues.

    The black man who is quoted at some length at the end of the article expresses his concerns about violence in his community and states that he plans to purchase a gun for self-defense as soon as possible. Most proponents of gun safety, according to that poll, are concerned about preventing convicted felons and mentally incapacitated people from purchasing guns. Both Republicans and Democrats agree on this.

    As for abortion, yes, you’re right. It certainly was the primary issue of concern in the state of Pennsylvania at 36% (CBS exit poll). It likely propelled Fetterman to his win as a Democrat U.S. Senator.

    Regarding extremist right-wing candidates, I am uncertain that it was the Republican’s decision to run extremist candidates in high profile, close races. The following is no secret; even my mother, a registered Democrat for 50 years, knew about this (long before I did):

    billionaire Democratic governor JB Pritzker and the Democratic Governors Association just spent $35 million to promote the MAGA credentials of one Republican candidate. The transparent strategy was engineered to defeat a moderate Republican candidate. This is politics at its most hypocritical and cynical.via moderate Republican Ken Griffin, with citations

    Here is a full article on the subject by Hamilton Nolan, The Democrats are purposely boosting far-right Republicans.

    The Washington Post (“Democrats interfere in Republican primaries” 12 Sept 2022) found that Democrats had spent close to $20 million in eight states on ads meant to elevate the profile of far-right candidates and election deniers running for governorships and for Congress. A number of those candidates… did in fact win their primaries, setting up easier races for the Democrats in those states to win, because, in theory, swing voters prefer not to vote for lunatics.

    Hamilton Nolan, Ken Griffin, and I agree that:

    The historic figures who have done the most to promote justice did not do it by deviously clever manipulations of voter data. They did it by fighting for stuff that was right. Spending money to try to dupe hapless Republican voters into backing the goofiest fascist is not just stupid; it goes against justice. Tricking people is not part of organizing.

    • Ellie:

      It was absolutely the decision of Republican primary voters to choose Doug Mastriano and various other extreme candidates. As I wrote above, to vote for an extreme candidate is not necessarily a bad idea: if you think your party’s candidate is going to win no matter what, there’s a rationale for choosing someone extreme. After the Supreme Court rulings, it was not so clear that there would be a big vote swing in the Republicans’ favor, but at that point many or most of their choices had been baked in.

      The question of whether the Democrats should’ve advertised during the Republican primaries saying that some of the candidates were too extreme . . . that’s a separate question. In my above post, I’m just addressing the decisions of Republican activists and voters.

      • Andrew! Did you not read my post, nor the links to The Guardian or WaPo? Democrats did NOT

        advertise during the Republican primaries saying that some of the candidates were too extreme.

        Democrats advertised IN FAVOR OF THESE RIGHT-WING EXTREMIST CANDIDATES. Read what chipmunk says in the comment preceding mine by 2 minutes please. Read the Washington Post and The Guardian articles, affirming my statements. Democrats are spending advertising money, millions and millions of dollars of it, in order to OPENLY promote extreme right-wing candidates.

        Please don’t gloss over what I say because you might think I am a silly right wing Jewish woman. Please take my comments as seriously as you do the men, and the less partisan comments? I admire you so much. You and my beloved Professor Iverson of Swarthmore College earned PhDs in statistics at Harvard University. You are a brilliant, handsome, accomplished man. I don’t make idle comments here. I read what you write, and I admire you.

        Do you understand what I am saying? Republicans ran all sorts of people in the primaries. In many cases, the right-wing extremists won their way through to the “general” elections BECAUSE of Democrats. You said this:

        It was absolutely the decision of Republican primary voters to choose Doug Mastriano and various other extreme candidates.

        Unless you completely discount the impact of advertising in politics, and of money spent on elections, it is Democrat strategists and those who funded them who are cynically responsible for the Republican candidates being a slate of extreme right wingers (in some part which I cannot quantify… but Ken Griffin of Citadel hedge fund finds to be the case, see above).

        • Ellie:

          According to the linked article, the Democrats’ approach “often involves TV ads suggesting that a far-right GOP candidate is too conservative for a state or district and drawing attention to the candidate’s hard-line views on abortion, guns and former president Donald Trump — messages that resonate with conservative primary voters.” I agree that the short-term effect of such ads could’ve been to help the more extreme candidates win the Republican primaries, and I guess that was the Democrats’ goal here; also I think my statement is correct that they were advertising during the Republican primaries saying that some of the candidates were too extreme.

          Again, there are two separate questions here. One is the decision of Republican primary voters to go for more extreme candidates when they had the option of someone more moderate. A different question, also interesting but not the point of my post, is the decision of Democratic strategists to run ads during the Republican primaries. Much has been written on that second question; it’s just not the point of my post.

        • Ellie:

          I followed the link to the Guardian article and it doesn’t have details on the ads that the Democrats ran; it just points to the Washington Post article, which says, that the Democrats’ “approach often involves TV ads suggesting that a far-right GOP candidate is too conservative for a state or district and drawing attention to the candidate’s hard-line views on abortion, guns and former president Donald Trump — messages that resonate with conservative primary voters. In other cases, Democrats have run ads attacking GOP candidates seen as tougher to defeat in general elections in ways that could erode support for them in Republican primaries.”

          I’m not disagreeing with you that the Democratic party did this strategy; there’s been much discussion of it in the news media: discussions about the short-term effectiveness of the strategy and discussions of the longer-term implications, as emphasized in the Guardian article you linked to.

          By discussing the decisions of Republican voters to choose extreme candidates, I’m not denying the Democrats’ actions to promote some of them. Both questions are worth considering.

          I wrote the above post because there has been lots of discussion connecting some of the Republicans’ election losses to extreme candidates, and I wanted to point out that, from the standpoint of a year or six months ago, it was not a clear strategic error for Republicans to choose extreme candidates for the upcoming election. Your point about the decision of Democratic groups to promote extreme Republican candidates is interesting too; it’s just a different issue from what’s discussed in my post.

        • I’ll save everyone some time and link to the actual ads because the Guardian article just links back to the Washington Post article as a source.

          https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2022/democrat-ad-spending-republican-trump/

          Nobody involved unambiguously admits to promoting far right candidates, and they are, as you describe, attack ads on the surface. But it does look pretty suspect.

          Nonetheless, the claim that Republicans didn’t choose these candidates is nonsense. If the salesman gives me the hard sell on heated seats in my car and I say “fine, I want the heated seats”, it’d be ridiculous to say that I didn’t choose the heated seats. The salesman may have caused my choice, but it was a choice.

        • Please don’t gloss over what I say because you might think I am a silly right wing Jewish woman. Please take my comments as seriously as you do the men, and the less partisan comments? I admire you so much. You and my beloved Professor Iverson of Swarthmore College earned PhDs in statistics at Harvard University. You are a brilliant, handsome, accomplished man. I don’t make idle comments here. I read what you write, and I admire you.

    • Ellie –

      > Andrew, you suggested that that “the judicial branch of government was firmly under the control of the Republican party” referring to the Supreme Court and specifically to gun laws and abortion. You might want to re-examine that take, insofar as the Associated Press article you cited regarding gun laws (as evidence) has this as its key finding:

      >> The poll finds that majorities of U.S. adults view both reducing gun violence and protecting gun ownership as important issues.

      >>>The black man who is quoted at some length at the end of the article expresses his concerns about violence in his community and states that he plans to purchase a gun for self-defense as soon as possible. Most proponents of gun safety, according to that poll, are concerned about preventing convicted felons and mentally incapacitated people from purchasing guns. Both Republicans and Democrats agree on this.

      I don’t get your point. None of those statements put into doubt that (1) SCOTUS is firmly under control of the Republican Party, or that (2) SCOTUS’s rulings on gun control and abortion are a reflection of Republican control of SCOTUS.

      Both of those SCOTUS rulings are clearly, widely supported by Republican voters and widely opposed by Democratic voters (and yes, black men can be Republican voters).

  4. I would have agreed with you that prospectively, this issue wasn’t so clear.

    But it’s telling that Democratic money, and a good deal of it, went toward supporting many of the more extreme candidates, especially in the primary etc. stage.

    Now maybe those efforts would have backfired. But they apparently didn’t. Without question they seem a pretty big *prospective* endorsement of the idea that extreme candidates will do worse.

    Tangental pet peeve: I wish we dropped the term “election denier”, as no one denies (be it now, 2020, 2016, or whenever…) that an election took place. Compare “Holocaust denier”.

  5. Andrew –

    > On the Republicans’ decision to run extremist candidates in high-profile close races

    Seems to me this suggests too much agency to the party machinery of the Republican Party. Extremists ran because they were disproportionately popular among Republican Party primary voters. We saw a similar phenomenon with the Tea Party candidates back in the day.

    I don’t see how this is a “decision” so much as a reflection of where the Republican Party is electorally. It’s interesting that in contrast, in swing constituencies, there seems to me to be more push to nominate more moderate candidates in the Democratic party. It would be interesting to read a careful analysis of these phenomena. My sense is that the Republican Party is more likely to run more extreme candidates in swing districts than the Dems are. Because, essentially, Trump (and the Tea Party to some extent) drove moderates out of the Republican Party. Is there any real rhetorical equivalent to the pejorative of “RINO” in the Democratic party? Do you see the Democratic party leaders attacking moderates as we see Trump doing with the Republican party?

      • Andrew –

        Still seems kind of off to me.

        I don’t think, in general, Republican voters “decide to run” candidates. They vote for the candidates they prefer.

        Saying they “decide to run” candidates suggests they’re making a strategic decision about which candidate is likely to win in the general. That’s certainly possible for some, but I question how many it’s the operative process for.

        I don’t think very many would be likely to choose a candidate they like less because they think that candidate would likely win the general – because they hate that moderate RINO, who’s maybe even more despicable than the Democrat. That RINO may have said dear leader didn’t have the election stolen. Despicable.

  6. It seems like we’re stuck in some cycle of extreme begetting extreme. I know Biden is not extreme, but certainly the progressive wing of the Democratic party has been more vocal and visible in recent years (in part as a response to Trump), leading the charge on things like “defund the police,” lax bail rules, educational policies that appear to favor teachers unions over student outcomes and narrowing gaps by weakening support for high achieving students rather than helping low achieving ones (to the dismay of minority Asian parents, see San Francisco for one example), favoring extremely large spending bills (which would’ve passed if not for Manchin), etc.

    And instead of applying the median voter theorem through which they could Democrats as comparatively extreme, the Republicans respond by presenting an even more out of touch message as their platform.

    Does anyone else think we might benefit from doing away with the primaries? Instead of allowing the median of each party to choose candidates (and it’s probably worse than that, since it seems more polarized voters participate in the primaries, and we saw Democrats supporting extreme Republican primary candidates, which suggests primaries can be gamed), parties could directly choose who they think can win elections, which (if they are rational) would be closer to the median American (or median for each relevant state or district). We like to “democratize” everything around here, but it may not always lead to the best results, and a primary is not a requirement for a democracy.

    • Dave:

      You refer to instead of “applying the median voter theorem” . . . You should take a look at our above-linked article. As we wrote, there is evidence of an electoral benefit to moderation, but it’s a small benefit, enough to have been very consequential in 2022, hence there is a logic to running more extreme candidates, even without primary election voters being involved.

      To put it another way, in a more normal midterm election (without the Supreme Court thing), we’d have expected enough voters to swing Republican for balancing, that the extremism of their candidates wouldn’t have hurt them enough to have them lose their elections. So, to the extent that party leaders themselves have extreme views or find extremists in their party to be useful in advancing their party’s agenda, there’s a logic to running extreme candidates.

    • “Does anyone else think we might benefit from doing away with the primaries? Instead of allowing the median of each party to choose candidates (and it’s probably worse than that, since it seems more polarized voters participate in the primaries, and we saw Democrats supporting extreme Republican primary candidates, which suggests primaries can be gamed), parties could directly choose who they think can win elections, which (if they are rational) would be closer to the median American (or median for each relevant state or district). We like to “democratize” everything around here, but it may not always lead to the best results, and a primary is not a requirement for a democracy.”

      What you are proposing is, in effect, a return to the system that prevailed before the 1970’s. The expansion of primaries and giving them the lion’s share of the decision making on nominations was a deliberate reform instituted after the fiasco of the Democratic party’s 1968 and 1972 nomination processes. The process was widely perceived as undemocratic, unresponsive to popular opinion, opaque, and concentrating too much power in the hands of a small clique of political elites. Both parties chose to democratize their nomination processes, and the reformed system worked reasonably well for the subsequent four decades or so. It has not functioned so well since then, but, in my opinion, this has more to do with the hardening of partisanship into identity and the drastically different communications landscape we now live in.

        • Yeah, good point. I was wondering about the distribution – plus Cali comes in late and will prolly reduce the gap? I remember the pattern previously where late votes break towards Dems.

          Also, not sure what to make of the chatter about implications to the conventional wisdom about redistricting.

  7. I’ve never thought about this point before, and I grant the logic of it. But I think it’s important (is it not?) to separate the effects of getting in and staying in. Maybe I’m naive, but getting more extreme candidates elected tends to hurt that party in the longer run (and the longer run is now around an election cycle… not that long at all!) because their extreme policies are generally disliked… that’s what makes them extreme.

    As people said above, strong *parties* would moderate this problem, since parties don’t care about policy… they care about the durability of the power of the party too much to worry about policy. In that sense this is just another critique of the general point that many of our problems today stem from the extreme weakness of Parties and the corrosive power of the activist-dominated primary process.

    • Jonathan:

      From your perspective, yeah, filling your party with moderates is good long-term strategy. But . . . you’re a moderate! More extreme partisans have big policy goals and are willing to take the short-term hit to satisfy those goals.

      If elections are “all about” the economy, or polarization, or balancing, and if all that matters is party labels, then why not go for it? That’s the rationale.

      Of course, elections are not “all about” just one thing, and candidates do matter—a bit.

      You can think of there being two fallacies: first is the “fundamentals” fallacy, under which nothing matters, there’s a political business cycle, and your political party should just grab what it can in the high points of the cycle and obstruct during the low points. The opposite view is the “median voter” fallacy, under which the voters pretty much always get what they want. Both fallacies are wrong . . . that’s why I call them fallacies!

  8. I think the word “extreme” is a poor fit in this context. The Republican party is a mix of ideological partisans and culture warriors, and it has been so for a while — dog-whistle strategies have always been predicated on a tacit contract between cultural voters and ideological ones. In most places, for most of the past couple generations, the ideological republicans (now sometimes called ‘old guard’) primarily ran the show and wrote the contract while the culture warriors were given the choice to either accept the contract or let the other guys win. This is arrangement totally flipped with Trump.

    The term “extreme Republican” is currently mostly to describe full-time culture warriors who have little interest in governing philosophy beyond perhaps a vague idea that less government is better (except where that idea fits poorly with their culture war strategy). In other words, we’re using the word “extreme” to describe a difference in type (culture-driven versus idea-driven) rather than a difference in degree (further on some spectrum common to all republicans).

    So another way to frame the big question from the OP is whether someone in May 2022 could have or should have foreseen voters getting turned off by the culture war stuff. I think a lot of Democrats were sort of betting on declining culture war energy and rising yen for boring old good governance. That’s not quite the same as prospectively knowing it, but it’s not too far off either.

    Why didn’t republicans know it? Well, some obviously did, but not enough of them to dominate the primaries.

  9. I think you need some qualifiers to give your argument some rigor. As in, I am familiar with NH, where the GOP ran some absurd candidates. Look at the Senate candidate, Don Bolduc: if not for his extreme views, he would have been a terrific outsider candidate, being a war hero General. The House candidate against Chris Pappas would have been a terrific ‘youth’ candidate; she’s young, energetic, attractive, and has a good media presence, qualities which recent experience says can get a person elected. But her Trumpist views turned off NH voters. I would say similar things about the GOP candidates in MI, that they mostly fit a model of success if you took away the Trumpist nonsense. In other words, it’s true that nominating extreme candidates might be a reasonable strategy but only if those candidates have the same strengths that other successful candidates have.

    This says to me the Trump nonsense really hurt. I’m not sure Bolduc could have beaten Maggie Hassan, who filled the airwaves with ads about her fiscal responsibility and NH fiscal values, but it would have been close, given that he fit the mold of a successful outside candidate. Example: MA elected a guy to the Senate because he was good looking and drove a pickup, which signaled outsider values. He didn’t have strong negatives other than his lack of experience.

    And that’s a major point: successful outsider candidates seem to me to have negatives associated with them being outsiders. Like being too young or not have enough experience. These people can overcome those by force of personality. But the negatives associated with these candidates were their actual views and their ties to Trump. Trump motivated some people to vote for him and ‘his’ people, but he turned off the people who would have voted for outsider candidates if they weren’t ‘his’.

    To finish, my reading of the polls in MA and MI is the races were never close, but that the media presented them as closer than they were, largely by not reporting much on polling or by repeatedly mentioning the polls that showed more of a contest. Just a guess, but my impression is that TV has become heavily reliant on election ad spending, and that has altered coverage toward making races appear competitive.

  10. I have little doubt that this analysis is correct. It’s depressing that leaving aside issues of good governance seems to be exactly the dynamic that’s pushing American politics further down a sinkhole of factionalism where it’s OK to elect wingnuts as long as they’re “our” wingnuts and the real-world capacity of our government is degraded a little more every year.

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