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A number of Republican strategists and consultants are growing increasingly dismayed about millions of dollars vanishing at the National Republican Senatorial Committee just when the funds are needed most, The Washington Post reported Friday.

Cash at the national campaign fund is dwindling as candidates head into the final stretch of Senate races across the U.S.

If they were a corporation, the CEO would be fired, a national Republican consultant working on Senate races told the newspaper, referring to the committee.

There needs to be an audit or investigation because were not gonna take the Senate now and this money has been squandered, added the consultant, who spoke to the outlet on condition of anonymity. Its a rip-off.

Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who chairs the NRSC, has been attacked by Republicans for featuring himself in ads and releasing a policy agenda that caused trouble for the GOP, leading to quips that NRSC stands for National Rick Scott Committee.

NRSC funds had reportedly reached $173 million this election cycle but were already down to $28.4 million by the end of June.

The committee spent more than $12 million on American Express credit card payments with an unclear purpose, along with $13 million for consultants and $9 million on debt payments, the Post said.

Now, a number of Republican candidates are struggling to raise money ahead of the general elections in November.

Its surprising and says a lot about the Republican brand that their candidates have struggled to raise money, J.B. Poersch, the president of the Democratic-allied Senate Majority PAC, told the Post.

With extreme candidates and extreme positions, maybe Republican donors are finding these candidates are out of step with where they are, he said. Maybe voters are feeling the same way.

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Republicans Demand To Know What Happened To Vanishing GOP Millions - HuffPost

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On Friday, Gov. Greg Abbott signaled support for a yearslong call by women's health care advocates to remove taxes on menstrual products like tampons, sanitary pads and pantyliners. His statement comes after Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar and state Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, voiced their support from eliminating the "tampon tax" on Thursday.

Hegar and Huffman said theyd support efforts in next years legislative session to make such products nontaxable.

Other health care necessities, such as medicine and bandages, are exempt from sales tax in Texas. Advocates have called for the repeal of the tax, arguing that menstrual products should be classified as wound care dressings, which prevent bacterial infections and maintain a moist or dry wound environment. Given that wound dressings like Band-Aids are exempt from sales tax, supporters of repealing the sales tax on menstrual products argue that taxing them discriminates on the basis of sex.

Menstrual products are already tax-free in 24 states. Texas is among those states where consumers still pay tax on those products.

Previous attempts to repeal the sales tax in Texas have failed and will likely face more hurdles during next years legislative session. Proposals to eliminate the sales tax on menstrual products, spearheaded by state Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, have come before the legislature every session since 2017. None of those bills have made it to the governor's desk.

If next session's legislation reaches Abbott's desk, he would support eliminating the tax.

Governor Abbott fully supports exempting feminine hygiene products from state and local sales tax, Renae Eze, a spokesperson for the governor, told The Texas Tribune in a statement on Friday. These are essential products for womens health and quality of life, and the Governor looks forward to working with the legislature in the next session to remove this tax burden on Texas women.

But Huffmans support of the measure as the chair of the Senate Finance Committee that branchs budget chief is notable. The 2017 bill to remove the feminine hygiene tax died in that committee.

Every woman knows that these products are not optional. They are essential to our health and well-being and should be tax-exempt, she said in a press release Thursday announcing her support.

Hegar pointed to Texas strong economy and state revenues in explaining his support for the tax repeal. Given increasing prices and inflation, Hegar said the opportunity to exempt these products from taxation is a critical need for Texans.

Texas can absorb this lost revenue easily, but for countless Texas women, this will mean significant savings in their personal budgets over time, Hegar said in a press release. This is a small amount of money relative to the overall revenue outlook for Texas.

Hegars latest revenue estimate for the next two years, beginning mid-July, projects Texas will generate $27 billion. The sales tax revenue on menstrual supplies over the next two years would represent about 0.1% of that amount.

In Texas and across the country, institutions are working to improve greater access to menstrual products. Over the summer, the Austin Independent School District spent over $150,000 to provide free menstrual products to students in bathrooms.

Correction: A version of the bill to end taxes on some menstrual products cleared a committee in 2021 but never made it to the governor's desk.

The full program is now LIVE for the 2022 The Texas Tribune Festival, happening Sept. 22-24 in Austin. Explore the schedule of 100+ mind-expanding conversations coming to TribFest, including the inside track on the 2022 elections and the 2023 legislative session, the state of public and higher ed at this stage in the pandemic, why Texas suburbs are booming, why broadband access matters, the legacy of slavery, what really happened in Uvalde and so much more. See the program.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/08/18/glenn-hegar-joan-huffman-tampon-tax/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott joins other key Republicans in supporting repealing the tampon tax - KBTX

This weekend, Florida governor Ron DeSantis delighted the crowd at a conference for the far-right group Turning Point Action by proclaiming that the FBIs warrant to seize national-security documents stolen by Donald Trump was yet another double standard against law-abiding conservatives. You look at the raid at Mar-a-Lago, and Im just trying to remember maybe somebody here can remind me about when they did a search warrant at Hillarys house when she had a rogue server at Chappaqua and she was laundering classified information, he announced. I dont remember them doing that.

The Republican rationale for defending Trump despite clear-cut violations of the law is that the FBI has supposedly forfeited all credibility. Trump supporters are mad because the Mar-a-Lago raid fits into a pattern of behavior targeting Trump and his associates by the FBI, the Justice Department, and the intelligence community, argues Byron York. When it comes to the FBIs latest move, he garners near-universal assent and for good reason, writes National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry of Trump. It is impossible to over-estimate the effect of the Russia investigation on the Republican psyche. Margot Cleveland argues that its because of the bureaus widespread misconduct that Americans doubt the legitimacy of the FBIs decision to search the former presidents home.

Obviously, the weirdest thing about this trust heuristic is that it assumes the more credible party to this dispute is serial lawbreaker and pathological liar Donald Trump rather than the lifelong Republican he appointed to lead the agency. But the deeper and more twisted belief system being expressed by Trumps allies is the premise that the FBI has engaged in a pattern of political bias against their party since the Clinton saga.

The truth is just the opposite: The FBI has often bent over backward to placate Republicans only to be met with distrust when its results fail to conform to their most paranoid fantasies.

Begin with DeSantiss claim that the FBI never seized Hillary Clintons server: In fact, the FBI took it in August 2015. The seizure of the server, along with electronic copies of its contents maintained by her private lawyer, is in connection with a criminal investigation into the mishandling of classified information, gloated a National Review editorial at the time. It is being dressed up by a reeling Clinton campaign as Hillarys voluntary surrender of the server in connection with a security inquiry.

The fact that DeSantis has a false memory that the FBI somehow never bothered to take her server is itself revealing. Republicans spent a year baying at the FBI and demanding prosecution while agents on the inside of the organization leaked continuously to conservative media sources. Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, reported The Guardian in 2016. Its clear to me that there is a cadre of senior people in New York who have a deep and visceral hatred of Secretary Clinton, said thenFBI Director James Comey privately. The New York Times James Stewart reported that the pressure and threats of additional leaks from right-wing bureau staff drove Comey to violate DOJ protocol by publicizing the Clinton investigation.

In 2016, the FBI made its investigation into Clinton public while keeping its investigation of Trump secret, a choice that very likely swung the razor-tight outcome. The mistreatment of Clinton was so blatant that Trump even used it as a pretext to fire Comey the next year. Yet Republicans have created an upside-down history in which Clinton was coddled and Trump smeared.

The Russia investigation, of course, has loomed large among Republican grievances. Trump claimed, and Republicans came to believe, that the FBIs investigation into Trumps ties to Russia was directed by Democrats to harm Trumps campaign. Of course, such a scheme could work only if the FBI had leaked the investigation instead, it leaked to the New York Times that Trump had no clear ties to Russia.

The Justice Departments inspector general found the Russia investigation was properly predicated. Rejecting this finding, thenAttorney General William Barr appointed his own ally to produce evidence supporting Trumps suspicion that a Democratic cabal originated the Russia probe, but that effort failed miserably.

Indeed, the Russia investigation itself was hamstrung by its conservative decisions. Robert Mueller confined the investigation to direct criminal charges rather than making it a broader investigation of the counterintelligence threat posed by Trumps connections with Russia. He allowed Trump to submit evasive answers to questions in writing rather than testify and decided it would be unfair to Trump to state clearly that he had engaged in obstruction.

One lesson here is that Muellers understandable belief that he needed to maintain legitimacy with Republicans by bending over backward to demonstrate his fairness ultimately backfired. It allowed Trump and his allies to frame Muellers findings as proving no collusion which Mueller did not say and from there to paint the entire probe as a witch hunt.

You can see the same dynamic at work in the current investigation into Trumps refusal to give back documents he illegally took. Trumps supporters have held up the bureaus patient accommodation in the face of Trumps defiance as evidence it cant be trusted. Just to get this straight, were now supposed to believe that the material Trump had stored in his house was nuclear content so sensitive the FBI waited a year and a half to go get it and used the National Archives as a prop to do so? sneers Ben Shapiro.

Should the Justice Department ultimately decline to charge Trump which, barring anything deeply sensitive or incriminating in the documents, would seem to be the most likely outcome conservatives will almost certainly register the FBIs intervention as yet another case of persecution. The reality of the situation will be just the opposite: Trump openly flouting the law and getting away with it. But the alchemy of conservative paranoia will transmute it into more evidence of his innocence and yet another reason for them to rally to his side when he inevitably proceeds to his next crime.

The underlying cause of this pathological dynamic is a right-wing propaganda bubble that pumps conservatives full of rage, cordens them off from any information that would mitigate their sense of persecution, and primes them to be led by demagogues who feel free to act with impunity, knowing their base will stay loyal regardless. This dysfunction produced Trumps rise in the first place. And now every new instance of Trumps misconduct simply confirms to the Republican Party that he was right all along.

Irregular musings from the center left.

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Every New Trump Crime Makes Republicans Angrier at the FBI - New York Magazine

Ron DeSantis, seen speaking to reporters from Fox News in 2018 when he was running for governor of Florida, has been prominent in a recent trend of Republicans ignoring or actively avoiding mainstream press, particularly national outlets. John Raoux/AP hide caption

Ron DeSantis, seen speaking to reporters from Fox News in 2018 when he was running for governor of Florida, has been prominent in a recent trend of Republicans ignoring or actively avoiding mainstream press, particularly national outlets.

I went to Wisconsin in June to report on how abortion rights are affecting the Senate and governor primaries the idea was to do one story on the Democrats and one on the Republicans.

Long story short: I heard back from the Democrats but not the Republicans. Phone calls, emails, Facebook messages I didn't hear back from anyone. The top Republican governor candidates posted no events, though their social media showed they were out, talking to voters.

And so, when I happened to catch the top two GOP governor candidates walking in an Oconomowoc Fourth of July parade, I ran to the end of the route to catch them.

I found former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch greeting supporters. A staffer who then stepped between us told me they knew I had been reaching out and that I should contact a communications staffer, to whom I had already reached out. He would get back to me, she assured me.

He did not. And a day later, at a publicly-advertised meet-and-greet for governor candidate Kevin Nicholson, a staffer told me I wouldn't be allowed to even get tape of Nicholson greeting attendees.

As standalone anecdotes, these might not be a huge deal. However, they are also a part of a trend of Republican candidates ignoring or actively avoiding legacy media particularly national outlets.

The phenomenon is impossible to quantify, but many Republican candidates are showing that they don't want or need to get their messages out via legacy media outlets. That can reduce the scrutiny they face while running for public office, hampering voters' ability to make informed choices.

A large group of reporters was kept out of a rally this spring for Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania. CBS's Robert Costa confronted a man who was blocking press from entry.

"If you're with the campaign, we can have a dialogue," Costa said.

"No dialogue," the man responded.

In addition, reporters have been frustrated by getting extremely limited access to other Republicans running for public office, like Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker, and Alaska congressional candidate Sarah Palin.

And the Republican National Committee voted unanimously this year to withdraw from the Commission on Presidential Debates ahead of 2024. Chair Ronna McDaniel said the party would find other platforms for debating.

Recently, the Florida GOP allowed conservative outlets into the party's Sunshine Summit, but barred many mainstream reporters, including Dave Weigel, author of the Washington Post's campaign newsletter, "The Trailer."

"You have one person from the campaign tweeting a photo from inside the room and talking about how great the view is that the journalists can't see," he said. "Spokespeople who are not answering my basic questions, like, 'Is there a recording of this event?' are taking the time to make fun of reporters for going there."

Indeed, Gov. Ron DeSantis' spokeswoman Christina Pushaw taunted reporters on Twitter afterward.

"It has come to my attention that some liberal media activists are mad because they aren't allowed into #SunshineSummit this weekend," she wrote. "My message to them is to try crying about it."

DeSantis also held a ceremony to sign a bill into law last year that aired exclusively on Fox News with no access for other media.

It is entirely true that Democratic candidates also dodge questions and have private events.

It's also true that GOP distrust of media is decades old. Vice President Spiro Agnew, for example, famously lambasted media coverage of Richard Nixon in 1969.

But to Weigel, it's different this year on the Republican side.

"In this cycle, I've started to see more Republican candidates avoiding the press, blocking the press from events, and taking advantage of the fact that there is conservative media that will ask different questions and has a different audience," he said. "And to be honest, an interview with one of those websites might get more views from the people who vote in a Republican primary than interview with me."

"So I'm obviously not saying to the world, 'Stop talking to the media,'" he added. "I'm saying, just objectively, there is a media infrastructure built up so that you don't need, if you're a Republican candidate, to talk to us."

In other words, this is the outcome of a long-growing conservative media ecosystem. As the Republican base increasingly gets their news primarily from right-leaning news outlets they agree with, Republican candidates will increasingly grant access primarily to friendly right-leaning news outlets, meaning there are fewer and fewer outlets who can provide a broad view of what's going on in American politics.

Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist and CNN commentator, agrees and says that in deciding whether to do an interview, there's always a cost/benefit analysis. And what is the benefit, he asked, of doing a potentially adversarial interview with an outlet you think is biased anyway?

"The risk of submitting yourself to what the campaign would consider to be risky questioning the possibility that you might end up saying something that winds up in $10 million worth of ads from the other side it's like the benefit of doing the interview does not outweigh the risk," he said. "And so you just don't do it."

And in this cycle, avoiding some interviews can mean avoiding any number of tough questions about Jan. 6, abortion or same-sex marriage, for example.

In addition to using right-wing media, campaigns can also now connect with their supporters without media middlemen at all, Jennings added.

"When I started 20 years ago, you know, you spent a good chunk of every day on campaigns trying to figure out how to get the media to cover whatever you're doing that day," he said. "But now, you don't need an intermediary to connect with your supporters any more than you can connect with your most fervent supporters directly via social media, and campaign email lists, and so on and so forth."

It's certainly not only Republicans who have discovered this; after having a stroke, Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman largely stayed away from interviews and events for weeks, gaining attention instead in ongoing meme wars with Republican candidate Mehmet Oz. And this did mean that, for a period, the public couldn't be clear on Fetterman's health status.

But there is a big difference between this instance and a broader campaign of delegitimizing media, says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

"There's a difference between hunkering down but hoping that all of the available media will cover you, and planning a strategy which deliberately says you can't trust those other media venues," she said.

"You can't trust those venues" is a long-standing argument from the Republican side that legacy media has a liberal bias.

Trust numbers reflect this belief just 11% of Republicans trust the mass media, compared to nearly 7 in 10 Democrats, according to Gallup.

The question of liberal bias isn't something we can settle in a small section of one article, and coming from a legacy media outlet, a claim that we aim to be unbiased would inevitably come off to some as...well...biased.

But it is also nevertheless true that claims of liberal bias are themselves a political tactic.

Which leads to one more factor contributing to hostility toward reporters: Donald Trump, who infamously called the press "the enemy of the people."

Then-President Donald Trump points to journalist Jim Acosta from CNN during a post-election press conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC on Nov. 7, 2018. During the exchange, Trump called the reporter "a rude, terrible person" and later suspended his access to the White House. JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Then-President Donald Trump points to journalist Jim Acosta from CNN during a post-election press conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC on Nov. 7, 2018. During the exchange, Trump called the reporter "a rude, terrible person" and later suspended his access to the White House.

And now, that hostility is an overt part of other Republicans' identities.

"In the old days, your assumption would be, if a national newspaper is putting a negative story out there, we have to engage with it because we've got to get our side of the story in and make sure it's not a one-sided deal," said Jennings. "Now, I think it's actually different in that you might engage, but you might also make the determination that if you're a Republican, well, if The New York Times runs a hit piece on me, that's a badge of honor."

Mainstream news also doesn't have the broad reach it once did. If, say, the national evening news is losing eyes and ears to right-wing outlets, there's less reason for candidates to respond.

It's not every candidate, and they're not avoiding every mainstream outlet. Many candidates are more likely to be friendly to local than national press, says Mark Harris, a Pennsylvania-based Republican strategist.

"The best thing you can still do is get a 6 o'clock local NBC, ABC, CBS TV news hit," Harris said. "Local TV is number 1 and local print is number 2."

NPR contacted several political reporters from around the country and found a range of experiences. One in Texas reported nothing out of the ordinary this year. A political reporter in Iowa said they're seeing some evidence of Republicans avoiding scrutiny Republicans are far outnumbered at a popular candidate forum at the Iowa State Fair, for example.

That's important because scrutiny from local press can often get at issues more immediate to voters' lives.

Alex Burness, who recently left the Denver Post, said he sees a definite partisan difference.

"I have seen it on both sides. It is coming much more often from Republicans," he said, pointing to a recent campaign event for GOP gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl.

"Colorado's gubernatorial nominee on the Republican side held an event to announce to appear publicly for the first time with her [lieutenant governor] pick, who is an election denier," he said. "They said at the onset, 'We're not taking any questions.' And we in the little media area had a conversation before she went on. We're like, 'Well, why are we here? We're not here to give PR.'"

And those kinds of questions are important to ask, says Khadijah Costley White, a professor of media studies at Rutgers University. Rather than scrambling for access to events, she said, reporters need to think harder in an atmosphere of constant disinformation about what access will achieve.

"Is it important to have voices regardless of what they say, regardless of whether or not they're using that opportunity as a way to distribute disinformation or misinformation?" she asked. "Is that valuable to democracy?"

All of this may come off as a lament that some GOP candidates are making reporters' lives harder. That is certainly the read of people like Ron DeSantis' spokesperson when she tells reporters to "cry about it."

But as more candidates have ostensibly public events and don't allow people to tell the public what is said at those events, it raises concerns about accountability.

"I'm a Republican communications guy and engage with the traditional media and I'm on CNN," Jennings said. "So I say this with all sincerity: We have to have a trusted press. It's necessary to democracy."

However, candidates aren't incentivized to talk to the press for democracy's sake; they talk because it serves their interests. The question is where all this leads.

"I'm not saying, 'How dare they do this?' I'm interested in where this is going," Weigel said. "If we're returning to the days when Democrats have one newspaper or Republicans have another newspaper, we might not like that, but there's precedent for it."

At any rate I never did do that piece on Wisconsin Republicans. I simply didn't have enough people to talk to me.

If that's true for enough outlets, it means uneven coverage of the two parties and an electorate that has to work ever-harder to be fully informed.

NPR's Don Gonyea contributed reporting.

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Republicans have long feuded with the mainstream media. Now many are shutting them out - NPR

When Peter Meijer voted to impeach Donald Trump, breaking with nearly all of his Republican colleagues in one of his first acts as a newly elected member of Congress, Democrats praised him as the kind of principled conservative his party and the nation desperately needed.

But this election season, as Meijer fought for his political survival against a Trump-endorsed election denier in a primary contest for a Michigan House seat, Democrats twisted the knife.

It is part of a risky, and some say downright dangerous, strategy Democrats are using in races for House, Senate and governor: spending money in Republican primaries to elevate far-right candidates over more mainstream conservatives in the hope that voters will recoil from the election-denying radicals in November.

In Michigan, the plan worked for now. Meijer lost after the House Democrats official campaign arm spent $425,000 to elevate Meijers opponent, John Gibbs, a former Trump administration official who asserted, falsely, that Joe Bidens victory was simply mathematically impossible.

It is impossible to know what impact the Democrats ad had on the race, but cost more than the Gibbs campaign raised.

Now, as the primary season nears its conclusion and the political battlefield takes shape, Democrats will soon learn whether the gambit was successful. While election deniers have prevailed in Republican primaries across the country without any aid from Democrats, critics say the effort at the very least complicates the case that their priority is to safeguard the future of American democracy.

It is immoral and dangerous, said Richard Hasen, a UCLA law professor and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project. He said the risk of miscalculation was great, particularly at a moment when the January 6 committee is attempting to show just how destructive Trumps stolen election myth has been for American democracy.

Its hard for Democrats to take the high road when theyre cynically boosting some of these candidates in order to try to gain an advantage in the general election, he said. That doesnt mean that what Democrats are doing is as bad as what Republicans are doing, but it still makes it objectionable.

Meijers defeat on Tuesday inflamed an already sharp debate taking place within the party over the potential perils of the tactic, especially as Democrats warns of the grave risks posed by these very Republicans. But others argue its a necessary and calculated gamble in pursuit of keeping a dangerous party from winning power.

If you let Republicans back in power, it is going to be those Maga Republicans who are going to take away your rights, your benefits and your freedom, Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said, defending the strategy in a recent interview on MSNBCs Morning Joe. We need to stop it.

The presidents party historically loses ground during the midterms. Decades-high inflation and widespread frustration with leaders in Washington have dragged Joe Bidens approval ratings to record lows, hampering Democrats efforts to preserve their razor-thin majorities in Congress.

The ads run by Democrats and their allies are ostensibly scripted as an attack highlighting a candidates loyalty to Trump or their conservative views on abortion, for example. In Michigan, Democrats charged that Gibbs was handpicked by Trump to run for Congress and too conservative for the district. But when aired during a competitive primary, the message is intended to appeal to the Republican base.

The voters in the Republican primary had agency, said Bill Saxton, the Democratic party chair in Kent county. They had two choices.

Saxton, whose county is situated in the west Michigan district, said it was now time to set aside the bickering over tactics and focus on the real threat: Gibbss extremism.

In 2020, Gibbs could not win Senate confirmation to direct Trumps Office of Personnel Management, partly due to past comments he made, among them calling Democrats the party of Islam, gender-bending, anti-police, u racist!.

Democrats involvement in Republican primaries extends beyond a single Michigan House race.

In Maryland, the Democratic Governors Association boosted Dan Cox, a far-right figure who attended the January 6 rally and called Vice-President Mike Pence a traitor for not stopping the congressional certification of Bidens victory as Trump demanded. He won the partys nomination for governor. And in the Illinois Republican gubernatorial primary, Democrats spent millions of dollars to successfully promote the Trump-backed election denier. Both states lean Democratic and the party is reasonably confident their candidate will prevail.

The race causing the most angst among Democrats is in battleground Pennsylvania. There the campaign of the Democratic nominee for governor, Josh Shapiro, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in TV ads boosting the rightwing extremist Doug Mastriano far more than the candidate spent on his own campaign. Mastriano, who was already the frontrunner in the race, played a role in Trumps fake elector scheme and charted busses to the rally on January 6 that preceded the Capitol attack.

He is now the Republican nominee in a swing state where the chief elections officer is appointed by the governor. Polls show a competitive race.

The strategy hasnt always worked. In California, the incumbent Republican congressman David Valadao narrowly beat back a rightwing challenger despite Democratic spending on ads that highlighted his vote to impeach Trump.

And in Colorado, an outside group aligned with Democrats spent millions to boost an election denier who marched to the Capitol with rioters on January 6 over a relatively moderate Republican, businessman Joe ODea, in the race to take on the Democratic senator Michael Bennet. ODea won and now the resources Democrats spent to make him unpalatable to the Republican base could help him appeal to moderate and independent swing voters.

Meddling in the oppositions primary is hardly a new tactic. In 2012, Claire McCaskill, then a Democratic senator from Missouri, was facing a difficult re-election in a state where Barack Obama was deeply unpopular.

Surveying her prospective opponents, she devised a plan to lift the one she thought would be the weakest candidate, the far-right congressman Todd Akin. It worked: he won the primary, and she beat him decisively in the general after he infamously derailed his candidacy with a remark about legitimate rape.

But a decade later, she is urging caution.

This has to be done very carefully, she told NPR, adding: You also have to be careful what you wish for.

Maloney, the DCCC chair, has said the committee has a high bar for deploying the tactic, but insisted that there are races where it does make sense. Still, it has become an issue for Maloney in his own primary race, where his challenger, Alessandra Biaggi, has accused him of playing Russian roulette with our democracy.

Some Democrats have also expressed misgivings about punishing the few Republicans willing to stand up to Trump. David Axelrod, a longtime Democratic strategist and political adviser to Barack Obama, said Democrats involvement in Meijers primary makes them an instrument of Trumps vengeance.

In primaries across the country, support for Trumps Big Lie has become a litmus test for Republican candidates. And his endorsement, not Democrats hand, has proven to be one of the most decisive factors in who Republicans choose to be their standard bearer, said David Turner, a spokesman for the Democratic Governors Association.

In the Republican primaries where the group has spent money, he said Democrats had seized the opportunity to expose a prospective opponents extremism early and pre-emptively blunt any attempt by their nominee to pivot toward the mainstream during the general election.

Turner blamed Republican leaders for being too cowardly to tell their voters the truth about the 2020 election, a failure that he said has effectively ensured the success of election-deniers in the GOPs nominating contests.

In Pennsylvania, one of Mastrianos chief rivals was Lou Barletta, a signatory to the states fake elector scheme. And in Colorado, the more moderate candidate won the Republican primary for governor but then selected an election denier as a running mate.

There arent any Liz Cheneys running for governor, he said, referring to the Republican vice chair of the January 6 committee who may lose her primary over efforts to hold Trump accountable. In terms of gubernatorial candidates, the scary part is that all these Republicans are regurgitating the same Maga talking points.

There are also Democrats who argue that they are being held to a different standard than Republicans. They say Republicans often cheer their leaders for being ruthless while Democrats are often criticized for not playing political hardball, especially when the stakes are the highest.

As a result of gerrymandering, Republican dominance of the redistricting process and historical trends, Democrats see few opportunities to flip House seats this year. Michigans third congressional district is one of them.

Gibbs has downplayed the impact of the ads, and projected confidence that he can win in November.

Hillary Scholten, the Democrat who will face him in the Michigan House race and had no involvement in the DCCCs decision, called the focus on her partys tactics an unwanted distraction from the issues voters care most about.

Scholten said: It is the Republicans that decided who they wanted in their primary, and they chose John Gibbs, an extremist that embraces conspiracy theories and is way out of step with west Michigan. Im focused on making sure he doesnt get to Congress.

Her newly redrawn Michigan district is considerably more favorable to Democrats this cycle than it was two years ago. And many Democrats believe Scholten, a former justice department attorney in the Obama administration who came close to beating Meijer in 2020, would have been a strong contender in a rematch.

While many are confident she can beat Gibbs, those still haunted by Trumps against-the-odds victory in 2016 fear that in a banner year for Republicans, those deemed unelectable could be swept to power.

Republican voters will be blamed if any of these candidates are ultimately elected, Meijer wrote in an online essay published on the eve of the primary, but there is no doubt Democrats fingerprints will be on the weapon. We should never forget it.

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Democratic ads boosted extremists in Republican primaries. Was that wise? - The Guardian US