The views of the GOP extremists who Democrats are helping in primaries

And it’s ramped up the growing reckoning over the dicey ethics and practicality of the gambit.

Politico checked in with a number of House Democrats who derided the strategy. Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), a Jan. 6 committee member, called it “mind-blowing” to prop up someone who is “telling the very kinds of lies that caused Jan. 6 and continues to put our democracy in danger.” Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) said, “It’s dishonorable, and it’s dangerous, and it’s just damn wrong.” And Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) noted that the strategy could also lead to these candidates ultimately holding office: “Not only do I think it sends the wrong message, but it’s substantively risky.”

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), one of two Republicans on the Jan. 6 committee, offered his own choice words Tuesday: “Don’t come to me after having spent money supporting an election denier in a primary, and then come to me and say, ‘Where are all the good Republicans?’ ”

Indeed, the decision to back Meijer’s primary challenger, John Gibbs, crystallizes the debate. Not only did Meijer back Trump’s impeachment, quite possibly sacrificing his congressional career just days after it began, but Gibbs is arguably one of the most extreme Republicans that Democrats have sought to boost.

And given the growing reckoning, it’s worth running through just what he and some of the other candidates Democrats are helping — and could elevate to office, like Gibbs and Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano — have actually said and done.

Several of the candidates Democrats have sought to boost have cozied up to the QAnon movement, and at least three of them were in Washington on Jan. 6.

Both Mastriano and Maryland gubernatorial candidate Dan Cox (who won his primary last week) organized buses for the protesters, and both Mastriano and Colorado Senate candidate Ron Hanks (who lost his primary) marched to the Capitol. Both have said they didn’t enter the Capitol, but video apparently shows Mastriano crossing police lines and breaching barricades. (He also has said he abided by police lines and that, “When it was apparent that this was no longer a peaceful protest, my wife and I left the area.”)

Mastriano led the effort to not certify, and to later decertify, President Biden’s win in Pennsylvania. He would wield considerable power over future elections in the state if he were governor, including by virtue of his ability to appoint his own secretary of state. A Senate Judiciary Committee report has noted that he “raised a litany of false and debunked claims of widespread election fraud.” He held hearings to promote such claims, and also contacted the Justice Department about them and coordinated with the Trump campaign.

Mastriano was also joined by Cox in speaking at an April conference in Gettysburg, Pa., which prominently featured QAnon and other conspiracy theories, including about 9/11, vaccines, John F. Kennedy and Adolf Hitler. Cox called Vice President Mike Pence a “traitor” on Jan. 6 — even as the Capitol was under siege. He also called on Trump to seize voting machines and falsely claimed that voter fraud was “rampant.”

Cox comes from a blue state and faces a steep uphill battle in the general election, rendering Democrats’ strategy to elevate him sounder. But polls show Mastriano running competitively in a swing state despite national Republicans shying from his campaign.

Hanks, in Colorado, ran a campaign ad that featured him shooting something labeled a “Dominion Voting Machine” — recycling a long-debunked conspiracy theory about 2020 voter fraud. He has repeatedly promoted the baseless theory that Jan. 6 was the product of agitators rather than Trump supporters. He has cited “the collusion of foreign and domestic entities to swing the election to Biden” and said during debate in the state legislature last year that the Three-Fifths Compromise “was not impugning anybody’s humanity.”

Hanks’s loss came alongside another right-wing Republican whom Democrats sought to elevate, gubernatorial candidate Greg Lopez, who has falsely claimed Trump won the 2020 election, though he later tempered that.

While both of them lost, another governor candidate Democrats helped win was in Illinois: state Sen. Darren Bailey. Bailey’s paper trail on the 2020 election isn’t as lengthy, but he’s a leader of an ultraconservative faction in the state legislature known as the “Eastern Bloc.” He has proposed removing Chicago from the state. Democrats spent vast sums — tens of millions of dollars — to prop up his underfunded campaign against an establishment favorite, and it worked.

Few have amassed a paper trail like that of Meijer’s primary challenger, though. Gibbs has promoted the bogus “Spirit Cooking” conspiracy theory, which involves prominent Democrats taking part in bizarre satanic rituals involving bodily fluids. (This episode stalled his nomination to a prominent role in the Trump administration, with even Republicans balking.) He has called the Democratic Party the party of “Islam” and “gender-bending.” And he has recently cited bogus evidence to suggest that the 2020 election results were “simply mathematically impossible.”

Democrats are now “attacking” Gibbs for being “too conservative” — a common meddling ploy that is actually meant to elevate someone in a GOP primary full of conservative voters. That ploy has been successful in isolated instances in the past and there are a few instances of it backfiring by helping install a candidate like Gibbs into office. But the newly redrawn district is competitive enough — Biden would have won it by nine points in 2020 — that a candidate like Gibbs could win it in a good GOP election year, as 2022 is likely to be.

DCCC Chairman Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.) defended the strategy Tuesday on MSNBC, while emphasizing that it needed to be done strategically and saying, “We have a high bar for that.”

Democrats probably have a better shot at winning the seat against Gibbs than against Meijer. But is one seat they’d probably be favored to win regardless — out of 435 seats in Congress — really worth elevating someone like that?

Such actions certainly undercut Democrats’ argument that these kinds of Republicans are simply too dangerous to serve in elected office; why would you help them possibly win, after all, if democracy itself is at stake? But it also serves notice to the likes of Meijer that, as Kinzinger alluded to, taking courageous votes against one’s base won’t go unpunished — not just by Republicans, but apparently by Democrats, too.