The Republican Party's attempt to manipulate Democratic primaries by boosting beatable candidates is falling flat on its face.
According to MS NOW's Steve Benen, the loss by progressive Francesca Hong on Tuesday night in Wisconsin's Democratic gubernatorial primary, despite Republican PACs spending millions on ads supporting her, showed voters have caught on to the "meddling."
As he wrote, Republicans had identified Rep. Tom Tiffany, an election denier and member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, as their likely nominee. Recognizing that Tiffany would struggle in a statewide race in one of the country's "most competitive battlegrounds," the party decided to intervene in the Democratic primary.
The strategy was straightforward: spend millions of dollars to support Francesca Hong, a Democratic Socialist state lawmaker, turning the race into a referendum on her progressive views and controversial social media history to alienate moderate voters and independents and take the focus off Tiffany's MAGA ties.
According to Benen, "Following Hong’s narrow loss, the party’s win-loss record can charitably be described as a mixed bag. The fine folks at The Downballot have kept a running list of 2026 races in which Republicans have tried to boost a specific Democratic candidate in the primary, and with primary season nearly over, the GOP has racked up more failures than successes."
The party's record shows only five successful examples of GOP meddling compared to 11 failures, the report notes, with Benen writing, "The plan had a certain logic to it, but it didn’t work out."