Partisan meddling in primaries makes everything in Washington worse

Last Tuesday’s election revealed the extent to which both of our political parties have yielded to the unethical practice of helping more extreme elements of the other party win primary campaigns. Both Democrats and Republicans have become increasingly willing to boost the prospects of more extreme, less collaborative, more antagonistic candidates for Congress because they believe doing so will help them elect their own party’s candidates. But not only does this practice risk sending extremists to Washington—it undermines public faith in our system of government and makes the prospect for substantive bipartisanship much more difficult for those who remain in office. For the sake of our democracy, it must end.

Both parties have engaged in this sort of duplicity before, putting party before country, before honesty, and before public trust. In 2016, for example, Republican nominee Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters backed Green Party candidates in a ruse to siphon off votes from Hillary Clinton in key states, including Pennsylvania. This year, Democratic campaign groups are embracing this similar deceit as standard practice, boosting extremists who deny that Joe Biden is America’s legitimately elected president even after courts throughout the country, with judges with a wide variety of political and ideological histories have ruled that Biden is our president.

That’s what was so troubling about this week’s primaries. In western Michigan, most notably, Democrats worked successfully to oust moderate Republican Rep. Peter Meijer, a young conservative who bravely supported former President Trump’s impeachment. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee backed his Trump-supporting opponent who says the 2020 election was stolen. During the Maryland Republican gubernatorial primary, the Democratic Governors Association came to the aid of a Trump-backed primary candidate running against the candidate favored by one of the most bipartisan Republicans in our country, my No Labels co-chair Gov. Larry Hogan.

These cynical schemes are profoundly dishonest, and they undercut the trust voters must have in the integrity of elections in our democracy. For an American political party to support a candidate in the other party who they think is weaker, even though they disagree with him or her on policy, is the kind of behavior we have come to expect from Russian cyberattackers—not from Democrats or Republicans.

The other downside to this partisan chicanery is that it erodes what is left of the incentives for bipartisanship in Washington by destroying trust. Most of the American people are desperate for the two parties to work together to solve problems. Democrats regularly express incredulity when Republicans won’t work with them on what appear like commonsense solutions to big problems, and vice versa. But these sorts of backhanded tactics create profound disincentives for those considering bipartisan collaboration because they warn that the very people reaching plaintively across the aisle will subsequently bludgeon the hand that meets it, potentially ending their partner’s career.

Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton who, like Meijer, is a combat veteran, and who joined Meijer on a controversial visit to Afghanistan last year, recently summarized the current crisis with jarring clarity: “I think Peter is exactly the kind of Republican we want to have around, but at the end of the day we have to win the majority, and that is the bigger concern.”

Meijer’s defeat will now spur others to reconsider whether to work across the aisle. You can imagine the circumstances. Support our climate change bill and we will use that support to end your political career. Join us in trying to pare back government spending and we will use those efforts to thwart your reelection. Entreaties to bipartisanship will be seen as little more than bait-and-switch. At a time when there is such a deep desire to see the parties work collaboratively, this pattern of deceit will make real bipartisanship that much more elusive.

For years, those of us who believe that the best answers to big challenges emerge when the two parties work together have rued the incentives that prize political tribalism — the endless quest for campaign contributions, the bottomless desire for partisan media attention, and the divisive influence of the political parties. But this is a new level of perniciousness and immorality.

If the parties make a standard practice of trying to make the other more extreme, America’s governing institutions will have a hard time rebounding. We can, and should, have spirited elections, but campaigns should be about ideas. If the penalty that legislators face for working in good faith across the aisle is to be undermined by those seeking their cooperation, our country will suffer greatly. Democrats and Republicans should call out this practice for what it is — politics at its worst. And they should stop it.

Joe Lieberman represented Connecticut in the U.S. Senate, 1989-2013, and is founding Co-Chair of No Labels.