I understand what it’s like to wake up and think every halfway clever idea you have is gold. I understand reading about the work of geniuses and thinking, yes, I can do that, too. It’s easy to sound smart when you have the answer key in front of you. It’s easy to feel smart when you don’t think too hard about how the geniuses you admire had to come up with their own answers from scratch.

I was in a “gifted and talented” student program, too. I understand.

Consequently, I understand the mindset of someone who looks at Sen. Harry Reid’s homework from the 2010 election — the one where he purposefully attacked every Republican candidate during the primary except for the one candidate he thought he had a fighting chance against — and thinks that strategy is worth copying. Sisolak and other Democrats, as Reid did in 2010, face flagging support and may struggle to win elections against even halfway qualified Republican candidates. Like Reid in 2010, some Democrats might think their preferred candidates would have a better chance if they ran against clearly unqualified Republican candidates. So, like Reid in 2010, I understand why some Democrats might think it would be clever to trick Republicans into nominating the loudest nonsense peddlers they can find.

What I can’t understand is why nobody around this “gifted and talented” political strategist asked the all-important question before raising millions of dollars to convince Republicans to select Joey Gilbert as their gubernatorial candidate:

What happens if you succeed?

In 2010, it might have been a defensible idea to assume that someone who suggested raped women should make “a lemon situation into lemonade” instead of getting an abortion, someone who painted Latino immigrants as armed and intrinsically dangerous to bottle blonde white families in her campaign ads, and someone who advocated “Second Amendment remedies” if “Congress keeps going the way it is” would be too radical for a majority of Nevadans to embrace. This idea looked even better when mainstream Republicans of the time disavowed Angle every chance they got — the Republican mayors of Reno and Sparks, Bob Cashell and Gino Martini, both publicly announced they would vote for Reid, for example.

With the benefit of hindsight, however, we now know Reid was astonishingly lucky. Several polls released less than a month before election day had Angle ahead of Reid. In an alternate universe in which Angle kept her mouth shut after mid-October and fellow elected members of her party didn’t treat her like the second coming of David Duke, it’s possible Democrats would be wringing their hands about the “Angle machine” and Nevada GOP chair Michael McDonald would be widely viewed as a political genius.

In this universe, however, 2010 was instead a warning shot. 

After two years of the Great Recession, a sizable minority of Nevadans demonstrated they were more interested in watching the world burn than electing qualified candidates into public office. Would Sharron Angle have made a mess of things were she elected? Clearly — and, for many Nevadans, that was her appeal. Outside of Nevada, the number of voters who were more interested in rolling electoral hand grenades into Congress than electing politicians willing to make deals on their behalf was enough to form solid majorities in several states — where this happened, Tea Party darlings like Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Michele Bachmann won. Many of them are still in office today.

Nowadays, the idea of prominent Republicans publicly turning on one of their own for being “too right-wing” this year is beyond derision — former president Donald Trump spent his Saturday in Casper, Wyoming yesterday campaigning against Rep. Liz Cheney because she voted to impeach him after the sacking of the Capitol. As for the idea that there might be candidates too odious and obnoxious for voters to vote for, I will remind you that Donald Trump was not only elected president, he was very nearly reelected.

We also live in an increasingly nationalized political environment. Local news coverage isn’t what it used to be. Neither Fox News nor MSNBC care who’s running for governor of Nevada, much less attorney general or secretary of state, nor will they bother to provide much in the way of coverage. Yes, there will be misfits, wonks and nerds who will read publications like The Nevada Independent (thank you!) and learn about who’s running for office, but most voters will walk into that voting booth knowing little more than whether a candidate has a DEM or a REP next to their name.

Given all of that, and given Biden’s increasingly disastrous polling, the chance that Joey Gilbert (who, despite denying COVID-19 was a pandemic and despite having no medical qualifications, serves as chairman of a board of quacks lobbying for bogus cures for a pandemic which, again, he doesn’t believe happened), Sigal Chattah (who “joked” about hanging current attorney general Aaron Ford from a crane), and Jim Marchant (who believes a “cabal,” including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, has been manipulating our elections) could win statewide office if they win their primaries is not zero. It’s certainly not close enough to zero for anyone to actively encourage that possibility.

Yet that’s exactly what the founders of “A Stronger Nevada” and “Patriot Freedom Fund,” two Democrat-led political action committees astroturfing as far-right organizations, are doing.

Now, if these cleverly “gifted and talented” Democrats created a fake PAC that raised funds using WinRed’s scammy and usurious model to bleed credulous Republican donor wallets dry, then used the proceeds on pro-Democratic television ad buys, I’d at least respect the hustle while I quietly wondered what limits political fraud in this country. The worst case outcome for that strategy, assuming everyone involved had the good sense to keep any elected officials well past arm’s reach from the organization, would be a few years of expensive court cases and perhaps some prison time for the organizers (oh, and some scammed donors losing their life savings, I’m sure, but caveat donator).

The strategy of nutpicking the worst Republican in a primary and elevating them into the general election, however, has a considerably and obviously worse downside: The nut might actually win.

Republicans would enjoy it, too. How many of them minded after Trump was elected? How many of them minded when Trump lost reelection? Which group stormed the capitol, again?

I understand this outcome might not seem so bad to the sort of donors who have $2.1 million or so to burn on television buys and targeted mailers — the worst that will happen to any of them is they’ll have to spend a modest portion of their fortunes on moving out of state while they tut-tut about the state of the world today, a world they materially helped shape for the worst. While those donors are aesthetically inconvenienced, however, the rest of us will be stuck in a state led by a governor who thinks Mayor Control Group didn’t go far enough; voting in elections overseen by someone who thinks Democrat-marked ballots should be hand-inspected for bamboo fibers inserted by freemason lizardmen; and “protected” by an attorney general, chief prosecutor for the state, who thinks it’s funny to joke about lynching Black men.

If I wake up on November 9th to that world, neither I nor the rest of Nevada’s residents are going to particularly care much whether the supporters and enablers of those charlatans supported them earnestly or supported them because they thought they’d be easier opponents to face in the general election. The Rule of Goats — if you lay with a goat, even if you say you’re doing it ironically, you’re still a goat-lover — does not have exceptions. I certainly won’t carve an exception out for “gifted and talented” political operatives who should have known better, nor the donors who enabled them.

David Colborne ran for office twice and served on the executive committees for his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is now an IT manager, a registered nonpartisan voter, the father of two sons, and a weekly opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].