Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene—who has been stripped of her House committee assignments for writing inflammatory social-media posts, thrown off Twitter for spreading COVID-19 misinformation, and fined more than eighty thousand dollars for violating House rules on masks—is facing a primary challenge. Three Republicans are running against her for the Party nomination in Georgia’s Fourteenth Congressional District, in the northwest corner of the state. The most serious of these challengers, it seems, is Jennifer Strahan, a health-care executive who has tried to portray herself as right-wing, just not loony right-wing. Strahan claims to be “uniting conservatives who want a congresswoman who can accomplish something other than managing to embarrass the Republican Party and the entire state of Georgia.”
A poll released last week suggested that Strahan might have a shot at beating Greene—if, that is, she gets a lot of help. The poll, conducted by a firm called TargetPoint, was designed to test anti-Greene messages. Respondents were asked, for example, whether they’d be more or less likely to vote for Greene after hearing that she had called the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, “false flag” operations. (The Web site Jewish Insider, which first obtained the poll, reported that it was financed not by the Strahan campaign but by a group of anti-Greene Georgia Republicans.) By the time respondents had been informed of some of Greene’s most outrageous positions, including her claim that 9/11 was a hoax, she and Strahan were roughly even. Meanwhile, when respondents who said that they were planning to vote in the Democratic primary were asked whether they would consider, instead, voting for Greene’s opponent, in order to “hold Marjorie Taylor Greene accountable,” all of them said yes.
Georgia is an open-primary state, meaning that voters can choose which party’s primary they want to participate in. (Voters in Georgia do not register with a party.) Thus, some of Strahan’s help could come from people who disagree with her and have no intention of casting a ballot for her in November. All of this raises the question: Should it?
Crossover voting, as it’s known, has an unfortunate reputation. Usually, when it’s been advocated for, this has been done with the intention of undermining the opposition. In March, 2008, for example, the conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh launched what he called Operation Chaos. At that point, John McCain had already clinched the Republican Presidential nomination, and Barack Obama was leading in the race for the Democratic nomination. Limbaugh urged his listeners to vote for Hillary Clinton, to prolong the Democratic contest. In Indiana, an open-primary state, it seems that Limbaugh was either effective or else served as a convenient excuse, because the Obama campaign blamed crossover voters, at least in part, for Clinton’s victory in that state’s May primary.
Twelve years later, in South Carolina, another open-primary state, several G.O.P. politicians urged Republicans to cross over and cast their ballots for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Presidential primary. They, too, dubbed their campaign Operation Chaos. The Greenville News reported that conservative political groups were calling on Republicans to “vote for the ‘worst’ Democrat.” “We don’t see this as in any way improper or underhanded because we’re being very open about it,” Stephen Brown, the former chairman of the Greenville County Republican Party, said at the time. (Whatever the impact of the effort, Joe Biden won the South Carolina primary by a wide margin.)
Voting for the “worst” candidate in order to sow “chaos” is, for obvious reasons, a bad idea. Universalized, such conduct would—or, at least, could—lead both parties to nominate extremists and incompetents. But what about voting for the least worst candidate in an effort to save the Republic? This would seem to fall into a different ethical category. As John Stuart Mill put it, in “Utilitarianism,” “The morality of the action depends entirely upon the intention.”
Because Republicans are nominating extremists, Democrats could engage in crossover voting with the very best of intentions. In Greene’s district, they could vote for Strahan in the hope of defeating a dangerous conspiracy monger. Were G.O.P. voters in blue-leaning districts to do the same—to engage in what might be called principled crossover voting—they would end up voting for the most centrist candidates in Democratic primaries. If that happened, it’s hard to see how the country would be worse off than it is now.
The lines for Greene’s district have recently been redrawn in such a way as to render it slightly less red. (Greene has blasted the new lines, calling them a “fool’s errand that was led by power-obsessed state legislators.”) Still, the district leans heavily Republican, and whoever wins the G.O.P. nomination will, almost certainly, head to Washington. Indeed, Democrats in the district are such a minority that it’s not even clear they could swing a primary. But, it could be argued, they have an obligation to try.
Why Republicans keep electing politicians like Greene is a question that will occupy historians and political scientists for decades. Part of the reason, though, would seem to be structural. In safe red districts, which sophisticated gerrymandering is producing more and more of, the only campaigns that matter are primary campaigns, and voters who turn out for primaries tend to be the most politically committed. (James Huntwork, a Republican election-law expert, once described the primary-campaign dynamic in a lopsided district as a race between one candidate who says, “I am completely crazy!” and another who claims, “I am even crazier than you!”)
In total, fifteen states hold open primaries. These include Michigan, where Representative Peter Meijer, who was one of ten House Republicans to vote for Donald Trump’s second impeachment, is facing a primary challenge from a former Trump staffer, John Gibbs, who is perhaps best known for claiming, in 2016, that Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, was a satanist. (Asked whether he regretted his rhetoric, Gibbs said, “I regret that it’s unfortunately become an issue.”) Nine other states allow unaffiliated voters to participate in either party’s primary. These include Colorado, where Greene’s ally Representative Lauren Boebert is facing a primary challenge from State Senator Don Coram, who’s considered a moderate. (Boebert has repeatedly been criticized for anti-Muslim remarks; most recently, she is reported to have asked a group of Orthodox Jews visiting the Capitol whether they were there to conduct “reconnaissance.”) The lines for Boebert’s district, too, have been redrawn, and it is considered a safe Republican seat. But unaffiliated voters in the district outnumber both registered Democrats and Republicans, so they, presumably, could decide the race’s outcome. Let’s hope they turn out for the G.O.P. primary, because right now leaving the future of the Republican Party to Republicans seems way too risky.
