Results of the 2022 election cycle are still rolling in, but the “MAGA Republicans” who won their primaries with Democratic funding all lost in the general election — as the Democrats hoped — raising the specter that this sort of meddling could become standard, injecting yet more cynicism into America’s body politic.

According to the Washington Post, “Democrats directly interfered in at least 13 primaries,” spending more than $53 million. Senate Majority PAC — allied with the Democratic majority leader, Senator Schumer — backed New Hampshire’s GOP Senate candidate, General Donald Bolduc, to the tune of $3.2 million alone. 

“What a sign of weakness,” the former Granite State governor, Republican Chris Sununu, says of the Democrats bankrolling General Bolduc, who won the nomination by just 2,000 votes against Mr. Sununu’s preferred candidate. 

The Boston Globe called the incumbent, Senator Hassan, “the most vulnerable Senate Democrat” in March of 2021. Last month, CBS News reported that she “was unpopular in poll after poll among New Hampshire voters.” 

On Tuesday, however, she cruised to victory by about ten points. The Democratic Governors Association and their Illinois incumbent, Governor Pritzker, spent $34.5 million to get a former state legislator, Darren Bailey, on the ballot for Illinois governor, and he also lost by a ten-point margin. 

In the Maryland and Pennsylvania gubernatorial races, Democrats spent $1.7 and $1.2 million respectively, securing victories by 23 percent and 14.2 percent. House races paid similar results. After $425,000 spent to back a “pro-Trump conservative” Republican in Michigan’s 3rd District and $100,000 spent to support what the New York Times called a “right-wing candidate aligned with former President Donald J. Trump” in New Hampshire’s 2nd, Democrats in both races prevailed by about 12 points.

“All eight Democratic candidates who benefited from the strategy were projected to win their races as of Wednesday morning,” Reuters reported. “The results could provide a blueprint for the 2024 presidential election,” and change the course of the nation should these races prove the controlling majority in one or both houses of Congress.

A former Democratic congressman from Indiana, Timothy Roemer, told Reuters that the gambit “was ultimately destructive as it sacrificed the party’s moral high ground and helped to amplify Trump’s false claims about election integrity.”

Senator Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, gave CNN’s Dana Bash the same sort of answer. “I’m not a big fan of spending money on other candidates and messing around,” she said of the question. “I will admit that, and I have said that.” 

“Meddling” in elections has become a cardinal sin in America. In 2008, Democrats were left with a headache with another innovation from the other side. When it looked as if President Obama had the Democratic nomination sewn up, my boss, Rush Limbaugh, encouraged listeners to vote for Secretary Clinton in the remaining primaries to keep her campaign alive. 

Asked to speculate on the radio host’s motivations, Mrs. Clinton didn’t reject the help, saying only, “He’s always had a crush on me.” Not exactly a cease-and-desist order.

Dubbed “Operation Chaos,” this attempt to influence a party’s primary drew calls for prosecution in Indiana. The Democratic secretary of state in charge, Jennifer Brunner, rejected the idea. “I think it’s very bad form,” she said, “but I think most voters are intelligent enough to make their own decisions.”

In 2022, Democrats did their meddling with cash, but they also had a measure of hypocrisy, wagging the finger of one hand about assaults on our democracy while bankrolling the sorts of candidates they declared existential threats.

Will other Democrats cry foul now that this game plan has run the table? And if not, will voters on the right demand that Republicans run similar scams, bankrolling Manchurian Candidates in Democratic primaries across the nation? 

The consequences of rooting for a candidate you judge unelectable are obvious. Democrats need only look at how many leftists hoped for President Trump to head the 2016 Republican ticket or to face Arizona’s Republican nominee for governor, Kari Lake, whose race as of Saturday morning is undecided. 

In what the Washington Examiner’s David Mark calls “a supreme irony,” the leading Democratic champion of the practice of meddling, Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, lost his own bid for re-election.

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Correction: The far-right Republicans candidates who won their primaries with Democratic funding in the 2022 midterms all lost in the general election. An earlier version misstated the outcome.