So much of the media's focus has deservedly
been on the chaos of both the current administration and the Republicans in
Congress that many may not have noticed that things aren't exactly going well
for those members of the far-left in Democratic Party. If nothing else, its
more then demonstrated just how foolish and incompetent they can be when the
spotlight's on them and how badly they can govern when given the opportunity.
AOC went to the Munich Security Conference with
the intention of showing that she had chops in foreign relations in planning to
run for higher office. Instead she engaged in word salad on an international
stage and was so incompetent that not even her most loyal followers rushed to
defend her. This past week a clip where Ilhan Omar, in the process of railing
against Trump, referred to World War II as 'World War 11' has gone viral. Left
out of it was that she did so when she was reintroducing one of her bills
'Neighbors Not Enemies Act' which never made it out of Judiciary when she
introduced it in January 2025. Jasmine Crockett, one of the loudest members of
the Progressive Caucus was humiliated in her run for the Democratic nomination
for the Senate in Texas by James Talrico and it is likely her career in the
House is at an end for the foreseeable future.
Most notably Zohran Mamdani, who rode into
office on a wave of democratic socialism, has not exactly been killing it as
Mayor of New York. In his first hundred days in which he promised to roll out
seven major parts of a campaign platform, all but two have either been tabled
or quietly dropped from his agenda. (The New York Times reported on
this.) He has been forced to acknowledge that the city is suffering from a
budget deficit and that most of his programs have no really chance of getting
done, which has earned him mockery on the right and scorn from the left. This
Tuesday there was an election in the New York City Council District 3 the first
test of Mamdani's value in political endorsement. The day before the election
he endorsed Lindsay Boylan. Instead Carl Wilson ended up winning by nearly
seventeen points over her. Boylan had been endorsed by the New York Working
Families Party and leaders of the Progressive Caucus. Mamdani carried this
district with 55 percent of the vote. Boylan got 27 percent of it. The idea of
Mamdani being a kingmaker in New York popped so badly its small wonder he
wanted to get back to celebrating May Day to forget.
Nor have the Justice Democrats exactly been
tearing it up at the ballot box. This past March two of the primary candidates
they endorsed in Illinois, Junaid Ahmed and Kat Abughazaleh for the eighth and
ninth districts respectively, each barely got more than a quarter of the vote
in the Democratic primary. Two weeks before that Nida Allam challenged North
Carolina 4th and received endorsements from every single left-wing
Democratic organization. She lost for
the second time to her opponent Valerie Foushee. Meanwhile the Democrats have
been rejected left-wing candidates in the House and increasingly embracing a
centrist position. This has been seen in the candidates who are running for the
Senate in red states. I've already written in regard to why I believe Mary
Peltola and Sherrod Brown will be formidable contenders and I will do the same
for James Talarico. Roy Cooper is a similarly strong candidate in North
Carolina and they may have a chance in states such as Iowa and even Florida.
In my introduction to this series I argued
that in order to win back the Senate the Democrats needed to expand the map
because they couldn't keep trying to unseat Susan Collins. It’s a good thing
that they are because earlier this week the Democrats did the biggest favor
possible in Collins's campaign to win reelection. Ada Mills dropped out of the
race, leaving the field open to Graham Platner.
Platner is a problematic candidate for
Senate the same way that Jeffrey Dahmer had a very specific dietary
restrictions. He is the exact kind of candidate that I associate Republicans
nominating in my lifetime well before the era of Trump and that they've never
quite gotten away from. It has constantly cost them races that they absolutely
should have won from nominating Christine O'Donnell for the Senate in Delaware,
a woman whose biggest claim to fame was claiming she had once been a with, to
Roy Moore's to fill Jeff Sessions' Senate seat in Alabama and losing to Doug
Jones to the last midterms when Dr. Oz and Herschel Walker's candidacies in
Pennsylvania and Georgia cost the GOP senate seats they most likely could have
won with less eccentric (to use a euphemism) candidates. But I've never seen a candidate for public
office, much less a Democrat, who is running for a Senate seat whose
essentially done the opposition research for his opponents before the primaries
were even over.
Platner has no qualifications for public
office. He may be combat veteran who has served his country with distinction
but his most recent career is that of an oyster farmer. Perhaps I shouldn't be
shocked that his main adviser worked for Mamdani – and considering we've just
seen the limits of that in New York, I can't imagine how it'll play in Maine.
He calls himself Maine's Mamdani because he has openly opposed Israel's war in
Gaza.
In the lead up to last November several
high level staffers included his political director, his campaign manager, and
his campaign treasurer resigned. Several Reddit posts have made it clear that
he is a 'communist, called cops bastards and said rural white Americans are
stupid." The fact that he has a Nazi tattoo – and that somehow he wasn't
aware of it until recently – is the least of his problems.
Platner has yet to be endorsed by the
Justice Democrats but he essentially is following much of their platform,
opening in favor housing affordability, ending US involvement in overseas wars,
and Medicare for all. He argues for higher taxes on billionaires and while he's
never called himself a socialist he has admitted that he was pretty far left
and never supported Hilary in 2016. The closest thing he has to moderation is
on gun control where he supports background checks but not a ban on
semi-automatics.
Platner did begin his campaign early, long
before Ada Mills could formerly organize, and by the end of March had nearly a
thirty point lead over her in the Democratic primary. Mills was governor but is
nearly 77 years old and couldn't compete with the financial lead Platner had
built. She ended her campaign which means that Platner is the prohibitive
Democratic nominee. Or to put it another way he's the greatest gift to the GOP
since Mamdani came along.
This will almost certainly do long term
damage to the Democrats regardless of whether Platner wins or loses. If nothing
else his candidacy is going to put the Democratic establishment on defense for
the next six months – a position that is bad enough most times and worse when
your opponent actually has the moral high ground. I saw an interview on CNN where the question
was put forth to a young Democrat whether if the Republicans were to run a
candidate like this Democrats would justifiably tear him down. Asked how they
could defend a man with a Nazi tattoo, the best this young man could say was
that: "Well, Trump has dinner with Nazis."
(Little advice from a Democrat. You spend a
decade saying everything Trump and the GOP has done as the second coming of
Hitler and your first argument for a freshly minted candidate for Senate wearing
a Nazi tattoo is to go to the whataboutism defense, that's not a great look.
Its bad enough for so many in your party to argue that Israel is committing
genocide in Gaza; when one of your candidates for Senate does so with a Nazi
tattoo, that argument you're not
anti-Semitic, you're anti-Zionist really falls apart.)
This is the kind of thing that Republicans
will absolutely be making a meal of with every candidate for the next six
months. I don't know how much good it will do them; they admi they're almost
certainly going to lose the House and that the Senate is becoming an uphill
battle. What bothers me about Platner –
aside from what absolutely should be obvious – is the defense the Democrats are
trying to convince themselves for endorsing him: he's the only one who can win.
At best, I find that argument shaky. As I
wrote in my previous article about Maine elections in the 21st
century Maine is by far the most conservative state in New England. This is a
state that has a district that has gone for Trump twice and the only reason
that Jared Golden was able to win was because he ran more to the center. You
guys essentially pushed him out of the party for that and now you're trying to
win a seat in the Senate with a guy who is arguably so far to the left that
Bernie might be nervous by some of his statements.
I've already mention that for all the
supposedly liberal nature of New England, the Justice Democrats have not been
able to do well in this neck of the woods. Betsy Sweet tried to run as a
Justice Democrat in Maine six years ago and she got flattened by Sara Gideon.
The current argument for nominating Platner
is that he's leading Collins in every public poll in the race. Well six years
ago when Gideon was challenging Collins she was leading her in every public
poll in the race. Every major report said right up until the election day that
at worst it was a toss up and at best it was going to flip. Gideon was endorsed by Elizabeth Warren and
Chris Murphy, the most progressive members of the Senate and every single
progressive group. Gideon represented all the progressive positions including
criminal justice reform, endorsing the affordable care act, and rejoining the
Paris Climate Accord. The polls had Gideon winning by an average of 4 points
She lost to Collins by eight points.
As of this moment according to 270towin the
consolidate average of all polls going back to November shows Platner with 49
percent of the vote to Collin's 41,7 percent. I grant you this will give the
Democrats a heady feeling. You would think that the last decade involving Trump
would have told them that you can't trust polls and you'd think if nothing else
considering how the polls got the Collins-Gideon race so spectacularly wrong
six years ago that they've had learned something from that. No one ever argued
Democrats were quick learners.
Collins is, as I pointed out in my previous
article, more popular in her state than Trump or any Republican has been in her
tenure in office. Considering that the
Democrats last won a Senate seat in Maine in 1988 and that they're
trying to unseat someone who keeps beating them even as they continue to win
the state in national elections. And considering that this is a state where a
Blue Dog democrat won multiple times –
and they're running one of his own in the Senate in Alaska – you'd think they'd
have realized that in some states there's far more room in the middle then
there are people in the left.
But no. Once again, demonstrating the
belief of Charlie Brown saying this time he'll kick the football, they've
decided the answer is to run the most far left candidate they can in Maine and
leave a candidate who's already a centrist even more ground to pick up on when
it comes to the fall election. That the center in this case also contains the
moral high ground is another one of those unforced errors I really hoped we
were done making after 2024.
Just a reminder. I am a Democrat (very)
still and I live in New York. I didn't put Mamdani on my ballot when he was
running for Mayor last spring and I voted for Cuomo in the general. I thought
he was utterly unqualified to lead New York City as Mayor and he has lived down
to those expectations over the last three months. I'm not shocked the
institutions are against him and that so increasingly are the Democratic
Socialists who endorsed him. Tuesday's elections just proved that Mamdani has
less power over the electorate then everyone thought when he won by a landslide
in November. I believed at the time the
only reason he won was because the New York Democratic party was in a shambles
and that much of it was out of repulsion to Andrew Cuomo as governor rather
than some great movement for democratic socialism that was sweeping the
country. Nothing I've seen in the last six months has changed my thoughts on
that matter. I really do believe the only place and time a politician like
Mamdani could have been in New York City now and we're probably going to pay
for it.
Needless to say Maine is not New York City.
Or New York State. Or for that matter Massachusetts or Vermont. There are few
places in this country where the brand of left-wing Bernie style populism plays
with the electorate. Maine has never been one of them and that has not changed
during the rise of the Bernie-AOC movement. Left-wing candidates can't win in New England at almost any level and certainly
not at a statewide office.
I can only assume that when it comes to
Susan Collins the DNC gets tunnel vision wondering how she keeps winning in a
state they keep carrying. They're sure they can beat her. So in the case the
Lucy whispering in their ear that this time it'll be different is Elizabeth
Warren or AOC or any other member of the Squad overwhelming their good sense
and telling them that if they just put their backs behind this left-wing
candidate, they'll absolutely kick the ball this time.
Well I'm not going to stay around and watch
the inevitable. I'm going to focus my attention on expanding the map and
working to win in new states with moderate centrists who are trying to get
elected without catering to the tempting whispers of the far left who overcome
this logic. I actually remember the
results of past elections, not just in Maine but other states where we've tried
this exact plan of attack. I have no reason to believe if we do the same thing
we'll get different results. And if the DNC really thinks they can do it this
time, I have two words for them:
Good grief.
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