Rep. Peter Meijer (R-MI) blasted Democrats on Sunday for “meddling” in his primary election, which he lost last week.
Appearing on CBS’s “Face The Nation,” Meijer, one of ten Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump, criticized the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for spending $325,000 to boost his Trump-endorsed primary challenger, John Gibbs.
Meijer said that the Democrats’ strategy “highlights the cynicism and hypocrisy” of current politics and said such tactics could backfire in November.
“I lost my primary, and that is on me. I take responsibility for that,” Meijer said. “But it’s important to note that it wasn’t just former President Trump who was in this race. There was about a half million dollars that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, in their first expenditures of the 2022 midterms, dumped in to help boost him. So we had a scenario where not only did I have the former president aligned against me, but in a rare showing of bipartisan unity, Nancy Pelosi and the House Democratic campaign committee also united to try to knock me off the ballot. Now, this just highlights the cynicism and hypocrisy of our politics today.”
“I should note that this ad … was not playing on MSNBC,” Meijer added. “It was not playing in places where Democratic voters might see it. It was targeted in places to try to sway and convince Republican primary voters to try to give my primary challenger a boost up and over.”
Meijer, however, downplayed the idea that helping Gibbs win the primary would make the general election easier for Democrats.
“While I think there is certainly a cynical calculus at play with the Democrats’ meddling, this is a risky strategy. It’s a dangerous strategy,” he said.
“Where President Biden is in his approval is so in the gutter … it is easy to see that strategy backfiring in a spectacular way, which is all the more reason why we should not be embracing the zero-sum idea of politics. We should not be embracing this notion that if we can keep a problem alive, keep it festering, but be able to gain a marginal advantage in the process, that that somehow equates to a victory.”