Democrats should not play with electoral fire

During the run-up to the midterm elections, Democrats spent tens of millions of dollars across at least a dozen Republican primaries to boost far-right candidates, often those endorsed by Donald Trump, in the hope that those candidates would be easier to defeat in a general election. Here in Maryland, the Democratic Governors Association spent $1 million on TV ads to boost Dan Cox. The Democratic strategy, while highly controversial, seems to have paid off. In all the races in which Democrats helped far-right Republicans win primaries, the GOP candidates lost in the general election.

Now, we learn that President Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee are assembling a large group of White House researchers to dig up Anti-Trump material to be used in a potential contest between President Biden and former President Trump (“As Trump begins ‘24 bid, White House forms plan,” Nov. 17).

However, making anti-Trump material freely available to Trump’s Republican challengers could backfire as the Democrats could be boosting the primary chances of Ron DeSantis and other possible Republican candidates, any one of whom could defeat Trump and be a more formidable challenger to Biden or another Democratic candidate in the general election.

Politics can be a messy game and, sometimes, when you play with fire you get burned.