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.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
____
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.