WASHINGTON — Democrats have spent years trying — and mostly failing — to find a Republican lawmaker who’s so politically toxic they become a national liability, harming GOP candidates up and down the ballot.
Has their search finally ended with Marjorie Taylor Greene?
In the aftermath of last month’s deadly attack on the Capitol and resulting concern about once-fringe conservative movements gaining a foothold in the GOP, Democratic strategists are mulling a plan to make the freshman Georgia congresswoman and past supporter of QAnon conspiracy theories a central part of their 2022 midterm election strategy.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has already featured Greene in TV and digital ads tying the GOP to QAnon in a select group of battleground districts, a sign of what some Democratic leaders promise is only the beginning of a sustained effort to make her the face of the Republican Party.
“Washington Republicans are stuck on the horns of a dilemma,” DCCC chairman Sean Patrick Maloney said in a statement. “They can either continue to cave to the QAnon mob that is the driving force in their party, or they can reject the QAnon mob’s violent extremism and attempt to appeal to increasingly diverse swing voters who are disgusted with what they saw on January 6th.”
But the wisdom of putting time and effort into elevating Greene to a national boogeyman is a hotly debated subject among Democrats, in large part because the party would need to break new ground to do so.
No Democrat doubts that the congresswoman’s background — in the past, she has made incendiary remarks, endorsed violent threats against Democrats and embraced outlandish conspiracy theories — should make her uniquely vulnerable to this sort of effort.
But while Republicans have spent a decade relentlessly pillorying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and more recently New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in campaign ad after campaign ad, Democrats have only intermittently sought to tie GOP leaders like Sen. Mitch McConnell or former Reps. John Boehner and Paul Ryan to lesser-known Republican candidates across the country.
The discrepancy is even more stark with rank-and-file members of Congress, whom Republicans regularly highlight — including Ocasio-Cortez and other members of “The Squad” — in an attempt to drive a wedge between Democrats’ liberal base and more moderate voters.
The reasons for that past asymmetry between the two parties run deep, Democrats say. But what’s more important to determine, they add, is the still-unanswered question of whether Greene’s emergence can bring an end to it.
“It’s been tried before,” said former DCCC chairman Steve Israel. “It was harder to do with Paul Ryan. But Marjorie Taylor Greene gives Democrats a lot to work with.”
Pelsoi has recently been the primary target of Republican candidates and allied outside groups. During the 2020 election cycle, the Democratic House speaker was featured in 19% of all of the GOP’s campaign ads, according to data from Kantar/Campaign Media Analysis Group. The group also found that Republicans have spent a total of $331 million over the last two elections on ads that mentioned her.
Meanwhile, Republicans mentioned or featured an image of Ocasio-Cortez in 8% of their ads in 2020, Kantar/CMAG found. By comparison, Democrats included McConnell in just 4% of their ads.
Democrats have toyed with making attacks on GOP members of Congress a larger part of their national strategy in the past. The party made noise about doing to Ryan what the GOP had done to Pelosi after he became House speaker in the fall of 2015, arguing that the Wisconsin congressman had become toxic to many voters.
But in the 2016 election cycle, Democrats mentioned Ryan in less than 1% of their ads, Kantar/CMAG found.
“There’s not been a concerted Democratic effort to find the one member of Congress that incites fear across the country in a way that Republicans have done for cycle after cycle,” said Rebecca Pearcey, who served as the political director for Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign.
Democratic strategists point out that for the last four years, Donald Trump’s presence made pinpointing a congressional Republican to focus on less important. No GOP figure, they said, could ever motivate their progressive base or alienate swing voters more than the former president.
But the absence of attacks against Republican lawmakers in Washington also predates Trump. One Democratic strategist recalled the DCCC examining in 2011 whether then-Rep. Michele Bachmann could become a liability for the GOP after her presidential campaign raised her national profile.
But Democrats ultimately mentioned the Minnesota congresswoman’s name in a handful of press releases and moved on, the strategist said.
Democratic operatives say even relatively unpopular Republican leaders often fail to scare voters enough to include them in paid media, where every second of airtime is a precious commodity to deliver the most effective message. Whereas images of Ocasio-Cortez or Pelosi might elicit concern about tax increases, images of Republican leaders call to mind anxieties that are less politically resonant.
“When you’re trying to do that with people like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, it’s kind of an inside game,” said Kelly Ward, who served as the DCCC’s executive director in 2014 and 2016. “We don’t really know how Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are damaging the country unless you’re looking through the lens of what they’re doing in Washington, D.C., which doesn’t always connect.
“Voters are like, ‘What are you talking about? He looks like a nice guy,’” Ward added. “It never worked.”
Privately, Democrats and Republicans also say that gender and race are clear reasons why the GOP has been so easily able to incorporate Ocasio-Cortez and Pelosi into their national message. They also cite the dominance of Fox News with conservative audiences, which makes it easier to disseminate negative coverage against politicians who might otherwise escape mass attention.
Those factors explain, at least in part, why someone like former Rep. Steve King of Iowa, whose racist rhetoric made him a reviled figure on the left before leaving office this year, never became a prominent part of the Democrats’ case against the GOP.
“He was simply never that well known, and never that interesting,” said Michael Steel, a former Boehner spokesman. “He was an old, bald, white dude with reactionary political views. It’s like getting stuck sitting next to the wrong uncle at Thanksgiving.”
While Trump was in office, Republicans also had the advantage of a president who relished attacking Ocasio-Cortez and other Democratic members with the country’s biggest bully pulpit.
President Joe Biden and his aides, on the other hand, refuse to even comment directly on Greene. In at least three instances, White House press secretary Jen Psaki has declined during press briefings to respond to questions about the Georgia congresswoman.
“We don’t want to elevate conspiracy theories further in the briefing room,” Psaki told reporters last month.
Democratic strategists defend the White House’s approach, arguing that voters want the president to focus on more pressing matters, like the coronavirus pandemic and the economy.
There’s also evidence Greene is developing the kind of national reputation necessary to make her an effective boogeyman even without Democratic campaign to elevate her. The congresswoman, who earlier this month had her committee assignments stripped following a House floor vote even after apologizing for some of her past statements, has been the subject of intense media scrutiny and even mentioned on “Saturday Night Live” twice.
Her poll numbers reflect the increased attention: She’s now as well-known as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, according to a recent poll from Morning Consult, with more than twice as many people holding a negative view of her than those who hold a positive view.
And while Greene has become better known, the political situation across the country has changed after last month’s attack on the Capitol that left five people dead, making the threat posed by some right-wing extremists newly tangible for many voters.
It’s why some political operatives, even if they remain broadly skeptical of the strategy, think Greene offers a better target for criticism than other Republicans.
“When Steve King was talking to white nationalists, white nationalists hadn’t just stormed the Capitol and bludgeoned a police officer to death,” Steel said.
Democrats also argue that even if Greene doesn’t appear in ads, she can be an effective fundraising tool for the party among its grassroots donors. Pearcey, Warren’s former political director, said every Republican candidate in the country will be pressed on whether they want Greene to campaign for them.
And Democrats stress that to the extent they deploy Greene, she would be used as evidence that the GOP has been overrun by its more extremist elements. The DCCC ad that featured Greene, for instance, included her image, but otherwise made an argument about Republican leaders failing to stand up to QAnon.
With Trump now out of office, that’s an argument Democrats hope will resonate.
“In the absence of him, she personifies the fact that the party is still connected to Trump ideologically, and she’s even more extreme than that,” said Ward, who is now president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “If they don’t check that as a party, then that is a conversation voters are going to have about Republicans.”
Strategies devised in the February of a non-election year lose resonance as the cycle wears on, overtaken by more recent and pressing issues. Many Democrats quietly express views ranging between uncertainty and skepticism that Greene will ultimately be a focal point of the campaigns next fall.
Greene might have a larger profile than former back-bench members like King, they say, but she ultimately may fail to motivate voters on the key issues Democrats want to emphasize.
“I’m skeptical that this is the way we ultimately beat Republicans in swing districts,” said one Democratic strategist, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about party strategy. “If you can’t point me to an economic impact on people’s life, then I tend to think it’s not the best argument to be making.”
