OH, LOOK -- THE DEMOCRATIC PROMOTE-THE-EXTREMISTS STRATEGY IS WORKING

When Democrats began doing this, the pundit hand-wringing was loud enough to be heard from space -- but it seems to be working:

Tuesday marks exactly six weeks until Election Day, when we’ll finally get resolution on one of the most widely discussed — and consequential — storylines of the 2022 election: the Democratic Party’s practice of meddling in Republican primaries in the hopes of producing unelectable nominees.

It was a risky bet, but at the moment, it appears to be paying off....

In the Illinois governor’s race, incumbent Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker has led Republican Darren Bailey by double digits in nearly every poll since July....

There hasn’t been much polling in Maryland’s gubernatorial race, but what’s out there shows a huge advantage for Democrat Wes Moore. You can tell Republican Dan Cox is feeling the heat: He’s upped his attacks against Moore since the unflattering numbers were published.

... FiveThirtyEight’s polling average has Democratic Attorney General Josh Shapiro leading Republican Doug Mastriano by 10.4 points....

In the New Hampshire Senate race, Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan ... has a massive fundraising advantage over Don Bolduc, a retired Army general, ending last month with more than $7 million in cash on hand, compared with just $83,900 for Bolduc.

And according to the Real Clear Politics average, Hassan is leading Bolduc by 8 points, even though Hassan was expected to be quite vulnerable this year.

The criticism of Democrats was based on two faulty premises. One is that the Republican Party is salvageable: If we all just give Republicans a nudge in the right direction and root them on, like parents teaching a small child to ride a bicycle, they'll ride off into the land of democracy and civic responsibility, abandoning their extremist ways and voting instead for safe, upstanding candidates. Liz Cheney will win a bipartisan landslide victory in the 2024 presidential election and all will be right with the world. In fact, it's the opposite: Given the slightest hint that there's a candidate out there who wants them to embrace their inner fascist, they rush to vote for that candidate. No one puts a gun to their heads and forces them to vote for democracy-haters -- they do it willingly. This year, Democrats made sure they heard the call of Trumpism, and they eagerly responded.

The other faulty premise is that the median voter is a Republican who -- understandably! -- is repulsed by Democrats. Mainstream commentators believe this even though, on issues from guns to abortion to the legitimacy of Joe Biden's victory, Democrats and independents largely agree and constitute solid majorities, while Republicans are the extremist outliers. Democrats ran ads for Big Lie crazies in states where they were counting on liberals, moderates, and a small number of non-insane conservative to outnumber the crazy right. As it turns out, at least in Democratic and swing states, it's possible to get a majority of voters to rally around a Democrat if the alternative is a whackjob Republican. The commentariat, which has internalized the right-wing characterization of Democrats as woke LGBT soy-boy CRT police-defunders who can't utter a sentence without using the word "Latinx," feared that this was impossible, because voting for the candidate in the "R" column is just so ... normal.

This Democratic strategy might not work on a national level, but it's working in the races the party singled out, because millions of Americans will actually vote for a Democrat if the alternative is the triumph of sociopaths.