Effingham is the director of strategic partnerships for RepresentUs.
During the 2022 election season, an alarming trend is emerging. Dozens of candidates spouting the lie that the 2020 election was stolen are running for office in Republican primaries. And not only are many of these candidates winning, Democrats – the party on the front lines of fighting the Big Lie – are shockingly helping some of these election deniers win.
In fact, more than 100 candidates who deny that President Biden won the 2020 election have won their primaries as of mid-June. That list includes eight running for the U.S. Senate, 86 for the U.S. House, five for governor, four for state attorney general and one for secretary of state.
This trend is also a major issue at the state level. In the four battleground states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Texas, 157 legislators who attempted to block the 2020 results have advanced to the general election this November. With many more primaries to come this year, these numbers are sure to rise.
Big Lie candidates receive funding from unexpected sources
Here at RepresentUs, we’ve previously documented that corporate America is continuing to fund politicians who voted to overturn the election results on Jan. 6, 2021. And while these election liars are only running in Republican primaries, they’re receiving funding from an unexpected source: the Democratic Party.
Wait, what?
As NBC News reports, Democratic groups are running political advertisements to help the most extreme GOP candidates win in primaries around the country. This isn’t a new strategy. These groups think that by helping put such fringe candidates on the general election ballot, their party will have an easier time winning.
This strategy comes with serious risks to democracy. For example, in the Pennsylvania governor’s race, Democratic candidate Josh Shapiro ran ads that aimed to boost Republican Doug Mastriano’s chances in the primary. One of the ads even went so far as to state that “if Mastriano wins, it's a win for what Donald Trump stands for." A current state senator, Mastriano is an election-denier who attended the Jan. 6 riots and was questioned by the FBI about it. Mastriano went on to win the Republican primary, and if he wins this November, he will become the governor of a major election battleground.
This tactic has increased the chances that an anti-democratic extremist will have enormous power. These commercials are ultimately a risky gamble that directly contradict the Democratic Party’s stated goal of protecting American democracy.
Democratic groups have also launched similar ads for the most extreme candidates in the Colorado Senate race and California’s 22nd District race.
Supporting democracy, not tricking voters
Supporting a weaker candidate in the primary to improve your chances in the general election may seem like a clever strategy. But as we’ve seen in the past, these campaigns are playing with fire. Famously, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign staff privately hoped to face Donald Trump. Obviously, their assumptions about that race were wrong.
Boosting radical anti-democratic candidates may not only be ineffective, it’s also completely irresponsible. By engaging in this cynical strategy, these campaigns are in fact pushing extremists closer to power – something that should concern American voters on both the right and the left. With the Jan. 6 hearings showing how vulnerable our democracy is, Democrats are risking handing power to dangerous anti-democratic extremists for the short-term gain of facing a “weaker” opponent.
At a time when the American people already distrust the two-party system and politics generally, these kinds of partisan shenanigans only make it worse.
Americans who support democracy should instead focus their efforts on building large, cross-party coalitions to defeat these extremist candidates at the ballot box. The majority of Americans view Jan. 6 as an attack on American democracy, proving that underhanded campaign tactics are unnecessary to win elections.
One way to stop this strategy of holding up extreme candidates in the hopes of an easier general election is by changing our primary election system. Nonpartisan open primaries, where every candidate is on the ballot and every registered voter gets to participate, is one answer. And it’s already being used in places like Alaska.
RepresentUs will continue to work with partners and allies across the political spectrum to pass nonpartisan primaries, ranked-choice voting and other pro-democracy reforms that will help put an end to partisan games and give everyday voters a voice.
RepresentUs Political Analyst Adam DuBard and Research Analyst Ally Marcella contributed to this report.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.