Battleground target

Dems unite Jan. 6 and Roe for new battleground target: 'MAGA' Republicans

The party's House campaigns chief, working against headwinds to try to save the majority, is going on offense against the GOP's most hardline candidates in the suburbs.

By SARAH FERRIS

Democrats are readying a new strategy to help save their House majority that unites two topics currently riveting Washington: the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

The heart of the approach: calling out GOP candidates’ most hard-line positions on multiple issues. Take, for example, the Republican hopeful who recently suggested rape victims were less likely to get pregnant. Or the Republican who’s defended the far-right militia, the Oath Keepers, alongside several more who have shared QAnon conspiracy theories with their supporters.

All of those candidates will be on the ballot in some of the toughest House battleground districts this fall. And the House Democrats’ campaign arm will spend the next several months campaigning against what its chief calls the “MAGA Republican” brand — on everything from abortion to Donald Trump-backed election subversion.

“There’s all these dangerous people running under the new MAGA Republican brand. They’re going to pay a price for it,” said Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), who leads the House Democrats’ campaign arm. Using the term “MAGA” nine times in a roughly 9-minute interview, he said: “We’re going to beat them over the head with that.”

With less than five months until the election, it’s going to be tough for Democrats to pivot voters away from a teetering economy and dissatisfaction with the Biden presidency. But majorities are saved on the margins, they say, and Democrats are betting they can play offense against the GOP fringe to protect critical turf in states like New Jersey, Virginia and Ohio.

As Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) may find in her own primary battle across the aisle next month, it’s not clear how much Jan. 6 is resonating with voters. The addition of women voters’ fury over abortion rights to the mix, however, has Democrats hopeful they can block the GOP’s path to power in the suburbs.

“Swing voters are, by definition, reasonable people,” Maloney said. “MAGA Republicans’ obsession with ending abortion, ignoring Jan. 6 and ignoring violence in our schools is not going to sit well with the suburban swing voters they need to win the election.”

Privately, few Democrats believe the strategy is enough to hold the House against this year’s brutal headwinds, even with the nation’s focus briefly turned from inflation to abortion, guns and the GOP’s role in the Capitol riot. And using “MAGA” as a label, as President Joe Biden himself has found, runs the risk of emboldening Trump’s base to turn out.

The biggest theme in November will likely still be Biden’s handling of the economy. Democrats will be counterprogramming those inflation worries with hits against the roughly half-dozen GOP candidates who’ve created headaches for their party on issues like rape or anti-government conspiracy theories — all of whom have either won their primaries or are set to do so this summer.

Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) said she was stunned when she heard the leaked audiotape of her Republican opponent, Yesli Vega, questioning whether a women was less likely to become pregnant as a result of rape.

Spanberger called the comments “devoid from reality.” And she pointed out that it wasn’t the first time Vega, a local sheriff’s deputy, has made headlines with her remarks. Earlier this spring, Vega defended rioters on Jan. 6 as a “group of Americans exercising their First Amendment rights.”

“Can you rely on a person like that to fix real problems?” Spanberger said. A spokesperson for the GOP campaign arm declined to comment, and a Vega campaign contact did not respond to a request for comment.

Despite Democratic eagerness to go after far-right candidates, House Republicans have had some luck as several of those candidates have fallen in primaries during the first half of primary season. That includes a Republican famously jailed for “chugging wine” at the Jan. 6 riot, a one-time GOP gubernatorial candidate who refused to concede his race and a candidate who consulted with a white nationalist on his social media strategy.

Still, Democrats are eyeing several other GOP candidates with obvious weaknesses in tough turf in Wisconsin, Texas and North Carolina. According to a 34-page internal document obtained by POLITICO, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is tracking at least six GOP candidates who attended D.C. events on Jan. 6, in addition to “over a dozen” more who have challenged the legitimacy of elections in other ways, such as claiming their own losses were fraudulent.

That includes Derrick Van Orden, who’s favored to flip a battleground seat in Wisconsin. A prized recruit in 2020, the former Navy SEAL now faces criticism for using old campaign funds to travel to D.C. on Jan. 6, where he entered a restricted area of the Capitol during the riot by Donald Trump supporters.

In another Midwest swing seat, Democrats are going after Air Force veteran JR Majewski, who raised $25,000 to send people to the Capitol on Jan. 6. He has said his group “packed up and left” before that day’s violence. But his opponent, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), recently ran an ad that accused him of breaching the police barricades outside the building.

Kaptur isn’t the only battleground Democrat using that approach.

Days after the start of public Jan. 6 investigative hearings, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) launched an ad slamming his opponent for defending the Oath Keepers.

“That is not what people want from their leaders, they don’t want extremists. They want people who are actually going to work with both sides,” Gottheimer said. The hearings, he said, are “a reminder of what we don’t want to go back to.”

In some ways, the party’s more assertive style of attacks parallels what Republicans have done for years — slamming their opponents as “far-left liberals” or “radical socialists.” Battleground Democrats haven’t always been so willing to take direct shots at the GOP, noting that many of their voters as well as their allies in Congress are conservative.

Things have changed. Deal-making Republicans are something of an endangered species, and their relationships with Democratic counterparts frayed in the Trump years. Maloney’s campaign arm has been much more willing to tie GOP candidates to the former president, eager to stir up its same base of suburban, anti-Trump voters who catapulted them into the majority in 2018.

“I think the point is that the MAGA Republicans are different than other Republicans,” Maloney said, when asked to explain why Democrats were leaning into the label even as some in the party disagree with the tactic of borrowing Trump’s preferred acronym. “MAGA is an important distinction between the extreme elements of the Republicans and the old-fashioned version of the Republican party that used to be less crazy.”

Top Republicans are mostly shrugging off the play. Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), who leads the National Republican Congressional Committee, has been clear that his party will keep hammering inflation as its top issue.

One early sign that the GOP might not need to fret: A poll by Republican state operatives conducted hours after the Supreme Court’s decision found that 56 percent of people chose the economy as their most important issue, while 8 percent said abortion.

“Prices are extremely high because of Democrats’ extremely reckless spending. That’s the policy voters care about most and what November will be decided on,” NRCC communications director Michael McAdams said in a statement.

In recent years, the NRCC has remained neutral on its most contentious candidates — including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). Now, Democrats have no problem using her and her firebrand colleagues as a warning to their base.

As retiring Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) put it: “If we win, it’s because we scared the crap out of people about the maniacs who will be in charge.”