While nominally an opposition party facing an existential fight with an authoritarian GOP, the Democratic party establishment and their allies in the MSM are laser-focused on taking out Graham Platner before he can win the party’s nomination for one of Maine’s US Senate seats.
Normie political observers can be forgiven for being confused by the behavior of the American Democratic party and its centrist leadership.
On the one hand, Dems seem utterly feckless to resist POTUS Trump and his MAGA-dominated GOP’s open attacks on the very electoral processes upon which the American Republic is based.
At the same time, elected Dems are reluctant to oppose Trump’s very unpopular, and highly illegal war, on Iran.
Meanwhile, state-level Democratic officials consistently deploy local police in support of ICE while congressional Democrats continually vote to increase the controversial department’s budget.
But what truly motivates establishment Dems is the need to crush populists within their own ranks, regardless of the political consequences.
Perhaps the polling explains these seeming anomolies.
Let’s Look at Some Polls
Maybe Democratic voters support Israel?
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) June 8, 2026
Looks like that’s a “no.”
Maybe Democratic voters want their elected officials to help ICE with support from state and local police and more congressional funding?
How about ICE, maybe Democratic voters are supporting Stephen Miller’s goon squads?
Here’s from a Marist poll in February:
Increasing proportions of Democrats (93% up from 83%) and independents (71% up from 59%) think the actions of ICE in enforcing immigration laws have gone too far.
Maybe it’s that Democratic voters are supporting the Iran War bigly:
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) June 8, 2026
Hmmm, that’s not it either.
Let’s ask a novelist wtf is going on.
Schumer Ain’t Going Nowhere
Reporter Daniel Drake and novelist Joseph O’Neill have been discussing the American political dilemma at the New York Review of Books and the latest installment has some insights.
O’Neill opens with a litany of actions the GOP seems likely to take to interfere in the 2026 mid-term elections including: “a presidential declaration of a national emergency; an illegal executive order commanding state authorities to suspend elections; and compliance with the illegal order by corrupt red-state authorities.”
O’Neill then speculates that these acts could take place “against the possible background of riots in the summer provoked by ICE and pro-GOP propaganda obscuring and normalizing the end of US democracy.”
Drake then lists some of the feckless acts of the Democrats, including spending the first weeks of Trump’s illegal war on Iran “issuing timorous statements that criticized Trump for not doing a good enough job weakening the Iranians, rather than opposing the war outright, then pivoted to fretting about the influence of Hasan Piker, a popular podcaster, on their party” and outlining the issues where the GOP is least popular — the war, the genocide in Gaza, AI data centers, inflation, unemployment — and then bemoaning the Dems’ inability to forge a powerful opposition out of this raw material.
Then Drake pops the big question.
Drake: If you were Chuck Schumer, what would you do?
O’Neill: If I were Senator Schumer, I would take stock of the polls, which reveal an amazingly unpopular Democratic Party that is despised by its own base. I would take stock of the collapse of DNC and DSCC fundraising. I would ask myself if I was responsible for this disastrous state of affairs. I would answer this question in the affirmative. Because I, Chuck Schumer, and my network of politicians, consultants, and donors, have for decades controlled the Democratic Party—its policy platform, its brand management, its finances, its political strategy. I’d reflect that that I am indeed unequipped—temperamentally, ideologically, and (at seventy-five) physically—to engage in the politics that this moment calls for. And I’d finally accept that my loyalty to the interests of the Democratic Party conflicts with my loyalty to Israeli interests and, by extension, to the interests of Likud’s sister party in the US, the Republican Party. Then I’d resign as Senate minority leader.
This is precisely what will not happen.
Your question about feckless Democrats has never been more urgent or exhausting. About a week ago, 144 House Democrats voted to give ICE, supposedly the government agency they’re very concerned about, new surveillance powers in the name of combating—wait for it—retail theft. Then Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, succumbed to pressure from Trump to commute the prison sentence of the corrupt elections clerk and would-be election saboteur Tina Peters. The structural challenge is that enormous investments have been made in the status quo. You and I might think that we need a principled, vigorously forward-looking, worker-aligned, and adversarial Democratic Party that’s free from the corrupting influence of foreign and corporate donors. But powerful factions—the Congressional Black Caucus, the Problem Solvers Caucus, the AIPAC brigade, etc.—are intensely suspicious of any change that might disturb the current distribution of machine power, especially if the change comes from the left. It isn’t neurosis that has disabled the party’s response to authoritarianism. It’s pathological careerism.
Are Careerists Threatened by Platner?
O’Neill’s analysis goes a long way toward explaining the massive centrist Dem and MSM freakout about Maine’s likely Democratic US Senate nominee Graham Platner.
The last fortnight has seen attacks on Platner from GOP war criminal turned Democrat David Frum, Saudi Arabia’s top lobbyist, glass-house dweller David Brooks calling Platner a “moral degenerate”, and wall-to-wall handwringing about Platner in the NY Times:
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) June 8, 2026
The most damning attacks on Platner aired by the NYT come from a single woman, Lyndsey Fifield.
Ryan Grim has more on Fifield’s background:
It's kind of wild to find out that the Republican in the NYT story that says she had a toxic relationship with Graham Platner is Lyndsey Fifield. Having been in DC for too long, I know a decent number of people who know her quite well. For a long time she was the co-host of a… pic.twitter.com/4DBEKKrCEN
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) June 4, 2026
It’s kind of wild to find out that the Republican in the NYT story that says she had a toxic relationship with Graham Platner is Lyndsey Fifield. Having been in DC for too long, I know a decent number of people who know her quite well. For a long time she was the co-host of a podcast with her best friend Bethany Mandel, called Ladybrains, though she has also worked for multiple super PACs, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Heritage Foundation.
Some background, presented without judgment: In 2014, Fifield began work as digital director for American Action Network, a Republican Super PAC that oversees House races. The next year she became social media manager for the Heritage Foundation, where she stayed for the next seven years.
In 2022, she joined the Super PAC backing Nikki Haley for president, switching to the official campaign side the next year, and staying until the campaign flamed out. She now lists herself as a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, a prominent dark money group that is best known for helping usher Brett Kavanaugh on to the Supreme Court and giving Susan Collins the talking points she needed to make her decisive speech in his favor.
The NYT breezed past all this, saying she was “a Virginia conservative who has worked for right-leaning groups and Republican campaigns.”
In an interview for a news outlet called Red Alert Politics that named her to a “30 under 30” list back in 2016, she said that she wanted to “emulate the late conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart’s approach to online activism.” Breitbart, known for pushing the boundaries when it came to political combat, is perhaps best remembered for having exposed Anthony Weiner’s penchant for sending nudes to young girls, and for his work elevating James O’Keefe.
That she worked for Independent Women’s Forum recently is even wilder since IWF played a critical role in Kavanaugh’s confirmation and in persuading Collins to support it.
Heather Higgins, chair of IWF, laid out the group’s role in a talk several years ago. “We wrote a memo. It was used by a lot of members of the Senate and the House, Fox News, and elsewhere. Most important, Susan Collins told me that without that memo, she would not see how to support him,” Higgins said. “And if you look at the speech she gave on the Senate floor, it’s entirely the playing out and architecture of how we said to structure the argument — what to say and how to say it, which is just so gratifying. We’re watching TV and we’re like, ‘That’s ours! That’s ours!’”
Meanwhile, the timeline Fifield gives of their relationship is confusing, because during at least some of that time she was actually dating a different person, her longterm boyfriend who became her fiancee before she called off the wedding in 2018. We all know this because she and Mandel did a podcast episode on it that went mega-viral in Republican circles back then. Apparently this is the kind of thing the NYT thinks is important now, so I guess it requires more reporting. I’ll report back.
The NYT does at least admit that most of Platner’s supporters are standing behind him:
Many Democrats here say they’re unconcerned by reports about Mr. Platner’s personal history, dismissing them as distractions from more pressing matters. They say that they’re thrilled to see a political outsider like Mr. Platner, an oysterman, on the ballot, and that they’re inspired by his progressive message. And the prospect of handing another term to Senator Susan M. Collins, a Republican, does not sit well with them.
There’s also some inside game going on.
Who’s Who Behind the Scenes
The Bulwark has an interesting take on the intra-consultant rivalry driving some of the attacks on Platner:
…it is the Philadelphia-based ad firm chiefly behind Platner’s rise that has taken it most on the chin.
Fight Agency is a new shop that has had a fairly remarkable run of success. Launched in 2025 by alums of the campaigns of John Fetterman, Ruben Gallego, and Bernie Sanders, the group quickly set the pace for the rest of the party in re-engaging the Trump-curious voters it lost in 2024. Its formula was fairly obvious: elevate more nontraditional, outside-the-box candidates with a working-class and anti-establishment appeal. And it scored arguably one of the most significant wins over the past year, when it helped a previously unknown New York state assemblyman named Zohran Mamdani to Gracie Mansion.
Platner seemed poised to be Fight Agency’s next triumph. And he may very well prove to be.
…
Consultants aligned with the campaign have accused those critical of it of trying to plant stories designed to force Platner from the race. Their main target has been Genevieve McDonald, a former state legislator who was Platner’s political director.McDonald left the campaign in October after Platner’s old Reddit account resurfaced. And she has not hidden her concern about the trajectory of the campaign. Platner’s allies have responded by attacking her for being a source for the Wall Street Journal sexting article, releasing incredibly private details that were divulged to her by Platner and his wife.
…
THE FRUSTRATION WITH FIGHT AGENCY’S handling of the Platner race is symptomatic of a larger debate within the party—a debate not just over how to expand Democrats’ appeal but also over which consulting groups and operatives ought to be entrusted to bring the party into the future.Then there are those in the party who’ve stressed that Minority Leader Chuck Schumer deserves to shoulder just as much of the blame as Platner and his team. They argue that Schumer’s decision to recruit the term-limited Mills to the race—sending a clear signal to other ambitious Maine Democrats to get lost—led a slate of high-quality candidates to run for governor instead. While Mills hemmed and hawed all summer long about whether to run for Senate, the field was left wide open. Platner was largely alone in it, helping his candidacy to take off.
Sludge has a look at the dark money arrayed against Platner:
Two dark money nonprofits incorporated in Delaware with no public presence and no disclosed staff have contributed at least $750,000 to a super PAC working to defeat likely Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner in Maine. A federal watchdog group says the groups’ spending looks like an illegal straw donor scheme.
Condorcet Initiative Corp. has given $500,000 to Pine Tree Results PAC across two separate donations, including $250,000 on May 1 that was disclosed in a filing reported to the Federal Election Commission last week. Ardleigh Impact Corporation contributed an additional $250,000 in April. The PAC has spent nearly $4 million on attack ads against Sen. Susan Collins’ Democratic challenger Graham Platner, according to FEC data. Rather than engaging with policy, the ads are exclusively focused on personal attacks against Platner, digging up comments the candidate made online going back as far as 2013.
Both organizations list a Springfield, Virginia address—7816 Rose Garden Lane—that property records show is the home of Staci Goede, a former chief financial officer of the Republican State Leadership Committee who now runs a political consulting firm called SAGE Advisory Group. Ardleigh was incorporated in Delaware in October 2023 and began funneling millions of dollars of dark money into Republican super PACs just months later, and Condorcet was established in December 2023 and has followed a similar pattern. Neither group has a public website or any visible activity beyond writing checks to political committees.
Why All the Hate?
David Sirota’s feature on Platner at The Lever gives some clues:
In his out-of-nowhere Senate bid that could decide America’s midterm elections, Platner invokes that word a lot: “power.” Which is weird coming from a member of a Democratic Party that almost never promises to wield it, mostly casts it as something to fear, and rarely uses it for anything other than stomping its left-leaning voters and enriching its donors.
Platner is promising the opposite in his crusade to unseat Maine’s longtime Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins. After combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, a post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis, and then a political firestorm over his internet comments and tattoo, Platner seems to now be in the DGAF stage of his candidacy, not just pledging to wield power, but telling a story about agency rarely uttered outside the pages of a Howard Zinn tome.
“ We are in a new era of American history — an era that looks a lot more like the 1880s, the 1930s, and the 1960s than it does the last 40 years,” he told the crowd in a line he repeats at every campaign event I’ve seen him at. “We have entered an era of a politics of power. And in this nation, power comes from two places: organized money and organized people, and the money is organized. That’s why it’s winning.”
…
Platner used a recent Pod Save America interview to reject the historical revisionism about the Democratic Party being spewed by Barack Obama’s former speechwriter, Jon Favreau. During a discussion about the financial crisis, Platner told the program’s liberal audience that Democrats’ insistence on protecting big banks as millions were foreclosed on was part of what disillusioned so many working-class voters.Platner also refuses to code-shift on matters of war and peace, as he campaigns against the culture of permanent war.
Matt Stoller has more on Platner positions that may be setting off the oligarchy:
Platner has a clear anti-corporate philosophy, which we saw last year when he coherently discussed, of all things, lobster regulations.
“The state of Maine has passed laws over the years that have regulated the lobster industry in a very specific way, and it means there’s one boat, one captain, one license. Fishing can only be conducted while the captain is aboard. This has entirely disincentivized consolidation,” he explained. “The result is a half-a-billion-dollar-a-year industry for the state of Maine that has almost no corporate ownership.”
Platner is a populist. He rejects corporate PAC money, supports breaking up health care monopolies, called to “bring the hammer of antitrust” down on the Paramount-Warner merger, and has even gone after the Fanatics monopoly for screwing over sports fans. And his broad view is that big business today is simply too profitable.
Corporate profits are at their highest level in modern history.
They're bleeding us dry, and unless working people take this country back they'll leave us with nothing. pic.twitter.com/wZpYPPGKvu
— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) February 3, 2026
He also has a basic opposition to the U.S. alliance with Israel and the broad security architecture underpinning the post-Cold War world. Like Mamdani, Platner does not see a world dominated by American finance as a safe place, or worth preserving. And that is a frightening prospect to most political and economic elites, whose positions of prestige and wealth are dependent on this particular architecture, and whose last real challenge was during the Great Financial Crisis.
While it seems likely Platner will win the primary, time will tell if the attacks on him continue and if they have any impact in the general election.
Related posts:
- Gerontocrats Bad Jacket Tactics Not Working in Maine U.S. Senate Primary?
- Centrist Win in California, AIPAC Loss in New Jersey, Platner Under Seige
I think Platner will do quite well and will likely win the election against Collins. The Trump playbook of attacking the “crooked” media can work for any candidate, and, honestly, in this case, it looks like the NYT is trying to do a hit-job on him.
I read from other sources that Platner had a town hall yesterday that was well-attended and Mainers cheered him on. I think the attacks from the Schumer-aligned groups will likely fall flat, especially with young people.
I was listening to Ryan Grim’s analysis on Friday and his reading was that this was Democratic establishment’s last ditch effort to push Platner out of the primary race. The Maine primaries are tomorrow and Janet Mills is still on the ballot because she only “paused her campaign”, she did not drop out.
If Platner dropped out, that would leave Mills uncontested. Grim was also saying that it seems the NYT reporting duo responsible for this oversold the story to both their editors and through advance leaks, making it seem like there are serious accusations there. So Dems may have assumed there would be enough there, whereas it was really a nothingburger.
Thanks for this post. Welp, what can I say?
Platner has all the right enemies. / ;)
Yup
Nice round up, Nat. I think one of the most interesting things about this race is the parallel with Trump’s first term, when story after story in the legacy media gave readers the impression that Trump’s campaign was about to collapse from all the scandals, while polling consistently showed that Trump was a strong candidate. I like Platner a lot more than I like Trump, but there’s a weird self-feeding circularity to these stories: legacy media writers point back to the stories they themselves have written (and quotes from various Dem insiders) in order to claim that Platner’s campaign is in crisis, as if their own stories could serve as evidence. Meanwhile, polling for Platner has remained surprisingly steady: I believe Platner is beating Collins in 11 out of 12 recent polls. As someone who’s voting Platner tomorrow, it has been really disheartening to see Maine’s own media outlets like the Portland Press Herald and the Bangor Daily News participate in the same disgusting tactics as the NYT: it’s like the backwater reporters desperately want the Big Guys in media to see that they’re “in the club.” Read nearly any article by Randy Billings in the PPH and you’ll see lots of little NYT-type rhetorical strategizing. The best coverage of the Platner campaign has been from two outsiders here in Maine, Andy O’Brien on Substack and Nathan Bernhard at Dropsite–both have appeared in NC’s coverage of this race.
I honestly don’t understand why we keep doing this; putting forward a so called “progressive” and engaging in internecine Democrat Party politics and nonsense.
Has nothing been learned since AOC and the squad? John Fetterman?
I wonder how many people feel like I do. Meaning I don’t care what positions they take without having spent a single day in office.
The Ds are wholly corrupt and their unpopularity won’t be solved by picking hood ornament after hood ornament. It’s doing the same betrayals over and over and expecting the audience to show up.
It’s time to politically wipe out the scourge of the Democratic Party and replace it with a revolutionary worker’s party. Failing that nothing matters but results and the entire party is responsible for that.
I would like a lot more about revolutionary politics and a whole lot less Democrat bread and circuses.
I hear you! How do we get from here to there? The deterioration of material conditions, and they are coming, as I expect (and fear as I am flying only inches above ground). Where is the alternative power concentration? People of seemingly good faith get elected (good?) and are subsumed. I have a yard sign for Abdul El-Sayed here in MI. I struggle between a concept of a liberal democracy (which can be usurped by a residual greed), a faith in a principled overthrow (which can be corrupted) and nihilism.
I have no answer.
The socialists want to tax wealth, the communists want to abolish it. I tend to the latter.
I’m an anarchist (a spicy socialist flavor), the polar opposite of a communist (on the centralization axis), and I also believe that without significant wealth confiscation, the plutocrats/oligarchs will always maintain control.
Just my 0.02.
In the bearded one’s critique of the Gotha Program, his second stage of communism aligned perfectly (imho) with anarchist principles.
What does this critique mean?
In my very humble view it means we should not take more than we need. We do not need more than a basic home, a basic life free from needs: health, education, fulfilling work and, when we need it, help from a society steeped in those principles. I won’t repeat the placards. All of these components just jumble together and yield what?
A propagandized society which yields to its own demise.
Absent my ramblings, there are changes afoot.
To those according to their needs, from those according to their means.
Like Alice X, I hear you! We are in a position where every minute and possibly inconsequential win looks like it’s earth shaking, and that’s not a great position to be in. But the truth of the matter is it’s where we are at, at least for those of us who agree the cancer must be removed in order for the patient to live.
The hard part about revolutions is they’re hard. They also take a lot of sacrifice, something hard-pressed people aren’t in a position to give. That means we have a pretty severe budget to run on, but anywhere we can get a win, even if it amounts to a hill of beans, for the time being is still a win. In other words, the enemy is investing in this fight, so we might as well soak up their resources.
It’s time to
politicallywipe out the scourge of the Democratic PartyFify*.
No person of intelligence and integrity would ever associate themselves with the party, and by that I mean both the democrat and republican wings of it: one shouldn’t even participate in their games which only lend to these the appearance of legitimacy and public consent to abide by the outcomes of these rigged contests.
Money is not free speech.
Corporations are not people.
All must be equal in the eyes of the law.
Otherwise we are subjects, not citizens.
*Note: today it is still possible to wipe out the party via non-violent means– civil or social– but it seems that the hour is getting late and viable options are rapidly dwindling. My bet is that the state will soon resort to much greater violence and further-reaching preemptive measures in order to suppress dissent and protect established interests, at least that is what seems pretti darn obvious to me.
We hear your point but it could be that the context this time is different even if cynicism about Dem reform is always appropriate. The country may be about to face a crisis not seen since the Depression and that crisis did bring reform.
Whereas when a player like Obama came on the scene plenty of runway foam was still available.
At any rate thanks for the above report.
Hear, hear!
It is not impossible that Platner is not what we think he is. If Dip State plotters were behind his candidacy, it is entirely credible that they would at the same time push D leaders to oppose Platner knowing that would only make him stronger in the eyes of the voters.
Old history but I’m going to repeat it here one more time.
In 2016 a citizen-candidate filed to run against Paul Ryan in WI 1CD. Absolutely no one in the Wisconsin Democratic Party wanted to run against Ryan as the DNC/DCCC had made it crystal clear they would not support candidates who had no chance of winning. This was, of course, quite likely the stupidest take on elections ever.
The citizen-candidate (now deceased) recruited me to work on his campaign and I came up with a path to victory. Speakers of the House have been successfully defeated in reelection bids more than once and I studied those races.
My strategies all involved running against the party (not HRC, the candidate agreed to pay lip service to Her) and the party then stepped in to shut down our campaign. We were told by a paralegal (they couldn’t find a lawyer to lie for them) that we couldn’t do the merchandising I’d planned on. We could not use the picture we had of Bernie with our candidate (they told us this after Bernie had won Wisconsin’s primary but well before HRC clinched). Sadly the candidate caved, never having been put under so much pressure by people he knew and respected (and whose names he refused to tell me).
And Hillary lost Wisconsin. She lost our CD bigly.
Someone then took my plans (which I left on my desk every night hoping one of the HRC-smitten volunteers would copy it) and it ended up in the hands of National Consulting which was running the Wisconsin Working Families Party as a sock puppet org. WWFP then anointed Randy Bryce to run for Ryan’s seat in 2018. Bryce (a good guy who was used) ran on a watered down version of our proposed platform. His campaign cashed the check I sent them but ignored my request for a debriefing interview (what kind of sane politicos refuse to talk to the people who worked an election the previous cycle?).
Remember “Ironstache”? that was the consultant version of the merchandising I had planned. Coffee cup sales were enormous, the Ironstache campaign fueled a huge move towards campaigns selling “merch.” “Merch” for newcomers, is all the stuff campaigns used to give away for free when they were trying to win votes harder than they were trying to raise money.
Ryan decided to retire and one of his staff handily won the election over Bryce BUT Bryce did so much better in real numbers in an off-year over 2016’s depressed turnout that the extra votes were greater than Evers margin of victory in the Governor’s race. All because the DNC used cut-outs to run a real progressive. They failed because they wouldn’t let actual progressives on board and used only all-but-anonymous party hacks to run the campaign. They never tried to win, but they sure loved the improved results.
Every time a fresh face butts heads with the party, I have to wonder if they’re another fake candidate, a CIA embed, or just someone whose “turn” it was. I don’t mean to disparage Platner but I honestly don’t know how anyone can tell for sure if an insurgent candidate is real, an embed or a dupe.
One new point I don’t think I’ve mentioned. For literally years after that election I contacted every ‘journalist’ who wrote about Wisconsin, all the instant book authors, and the folks on X who were most focused on Wisconsin. Not one of them showed any interest in learning more. They were engaged in establishing alternative narratives (RUSSIAGATE!!!) to excusify Hillary Clinton’s inexcusable loss to Donald Trump. The swells don’t just control the media, they control A-list bloggers (NC clearly excepted), influencers and pundits and have abused that control to utterly discredit the news media. BTW, as often as I bore NC readers about that race, as much as I used to tweet about it on X, absolutely no one from the party or news media has ever contacted me to ask any questions. It’s still the same old neoliberal Democrat party and owned media. If you have something different to say, their response will be ‘SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!”
From the Bulwark: “They argue that Schumer’s decision to recruit the term-limited Mills to the race…led a slate of high-quality candidates to run for governor instead.”
High quality? Shenna Bellows? Continued evidence that the Dem bench is full of light-weights that can’t hit above the Mendoza Line. She got her clock cleaned by Collins a couple of years ago.
Troy Dale Jackson? A mediocre hacker. If he ever hit a home run I’m unaware of it.
Angus King III? Born on third base like Sonny Bush. Prolly hoping his old-man can bunt him home.
Hannah Pingree? Summers on North Haven with all the plutorcrats from away, but she’s got a Maine name like Angus The Third. More likely to own a tennis racket than a baseball glove.
Nirav Shah? Never heard of ’em. But this crowd of pale wiff-artists at least looks a little better with a guy like this.
Bulwark was just pointing out that Schumer and DSCC discouraged other establishment candidates from running, leaving Mills as the only establishment candidate running against Platner. This left them with no ability to pivot to a different candidate when Mills failed.
California gubernatorial race is a good example, Eric Swalwell was the favourite until his scandal. When that happened the establishment was able to pivot and push Xavier Becerra to the front in a very short time, keeping Tom Steyer on the sidelines.
Shah is the one with the billionaire money behind him. Jackson is okay in my book–good positions, and a solid working class background, if that means something to you. As for the rest, I’m pretty much in agreement. Sad to see our pathetic elected representatives being mostly concerned with building long term political dynasties.
Up top: The Democratic Party adores war. War is the health of the state. The Dems want war to give them the power that they won’t wield.
Ukraine: Nary a peep, largely because Ukraine is a war the Dem establishment wants. Hillary Clinton: But but but Putin’s a manspreader.
Genocide in Palestine: The Dem establishment argument is that the Israeli government isn’t engaged in genocide because they haven’t killed *enough* Palestinians.
Iran: You can find Hillary Clinton’s “obliterate” Iran comments from 2016 at YuToob. Trump is mainly just even more vulgarly immoral.
I even saw this in the supposedly radical Kat Abughazaleh campaign for Illinois congressional district 9. When pressed on foreign policy, She fell into the usual Dem bushwa. And feckless Daniel Biss was then anointed.
“It isn’t neurosis that has disabled the party’s response to authoritarianism. It’s pathological careerism.”
O’Neill’s point is the point. My spouse and I spent one year in DC back in the first year+ of the Carter Administration. We saw the city from different perspectives. It wasn’t ideology or party that mattered to people. It sure wasn’t the country’s citizens. It was staying in DC. Everything was negotiable, but you had to stay in DC. After getting the hell out, I’ve never had a problem understanding why DC functions as it does.
The only differences between Majority Leader and Minority Leader are the sign on the door and the size of the staff. Everything else is the same. Chuck Schumer could not care less about being Majority Leader and probably likes his sinecure as Minority Leader better. That way he has a ready excuse for his fecklessness for the people. His overarching goal is to maintain his status on K Street. Period.
Listened to Jimmy Dore and Tucker Carlson last night. Am not in the US and haven´t been for ten years. Still it is striking when two such very popular personalities agree on fighting the oligarchy. Tucker Carlson even admitting to Jimmy Dore that he´d been wrong all along and converting to Dore’s view of the US political and economic system. Maybe there’s something brewing. I sure wish so.
Jimmy Dore is a “very popular personality” now? Lord, help us.
On Platner.
The Democratic Party is where social movements go to turn into zombies. The labor movement. The civil rights movement. Feminism.
The Left remains lively, and note that I just typed the word Left. So mainstream Dems must kill off the Left. We wouldn’t want Eleanor Roosevelt to reappear.
If Platner truly dated Fifield, one wonders. Don’t tell ShoeOnHead about Fifield. Shoe would put her through a food mill and reduce her to a pulp.
I am contemplating the adjective used to describe Platner: unsettling
Many good men are unsettling.
Or are we supposed to think that acceptable men are Tim Walz, Jared Kushner, Pete Buttigieg, Tom Cotton, and various nonbinary types like Masha Gessen and Judith Butler who aspire to look like dumpy Woody Allen?
And now I am off to be unsettling…
proudly unsettling male, here.
if unvarnished honesty unsettles you, that is.
which is the exact problem, it turns out.
Here’s the latest on which Dem has the best chance to beat Senator Collins in Maine:
2026 Maine Senate https://www.realclearpolling.com/elections/senate/2026/maine
It’s clear Platner is the stronger candidate.
If I was there, I would vote for him.
As for the Democratic party, I don’t think it can change until you hear a significant majority of it’s voters willing to admit that Presidents like Clinton and Obama were not “good” Presidents. Which means a whole lotta voters and Dem party “elites” just have to pretty much age out and go to where ever they think they’re going to after departing this life. I think the younger voters that will replace them have no illusions about how they’ve been screwed by the Dems.
The bread-and-butter of Democratic Party support are upper-middle class voters in urban blue districts on the coasts; basically wine moms and Whole Foods shoppers. A quick glance at places like Balloon Juice will show you how these sorts act in the wild. They worship mainstream DNC figures like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, Kamala Harris, etc. These blue-no-matter-who types despised Bernie Sanders as well as upstarts like Zohran Mamdani and Graham Planter for not bowing their heads to the Democratic Party establishment because rich suburbanite liberals hate the actual left and basically regard them as unwashed peasants. I like to compare the modern Democratic party to having the same mentality as the classic WASPs, only less white and less Protestant but just as classist and elitist and hiding it behind a veneer of egalitarianism mixed with overbearing smugness about their own high positions in life.
Unfortunately, this core of the DNC ethos is all that is left of the party since the Democrats have chased off everybody else or the Democrats have been abandoned in disgust by people who want concrete change as opposed to empty virtue-signaling. The problem is that losing elections really does not trouble the party as an institution all that much as the main priority is fundraising, and the DNC will gladly take down anybody who upsets the apple carts of their wealthy donors even if it means that they lose electoral campaigns in the aftermath.
How do you punish a political party that does not care about its own electoral success and is more than willing to commit political suicide in the short-term as long as it can maintain its institutional hold on the US election process and thereby succeed in its real goal of keeping out the actual left?
Thank you.
You have described the British Labour Party and probably many of its continental counterparts.
Then we watch the electoral collapse of these supposedly socialist parties. Germany, France… But in UK and US the electoral system is different.
Of course #McResistance D’s and media outlets are looking to put a shank in Platner’s back. They did it to Bernie, twice, and will do whatever it takes to maintain their sinecures.
Trump? A useful fundraising device…
Bernie was shanked, he also bent over in the shower without even dropping the soap – not once but twice.
The bit about the two organizations that donated $750k to a PAC dedicated to making personal attacks on Platner caught my eye. Those organizations’ address is the home address of Staci Goede. In 2024 Goede was a board member of Forward Movement Foundation, which in that year made $4.6 million in donations, almost all to AIPAC and FDD.
https://impala.digital/public/profiles/93-4932835/overview
John Nance Garner is reputed to have said the vice presidency was not worth a bucket of p–s. (That usually gets cleaned up to spit, but ours is a saltier age.) The democratic party is not worth a barrel of p–s. It is flaccid, feckless, and fearful. It stands for incumbent protection, corporatism, slavish kowtowing to Israel. It supports the storm trooper like ICE, demands group think and backs Trump’s war with Iran. Its friends across the aisle are busily watching and cheering as Donnie usurps the powers of congress and anything else he can scoop up. The democratic party watches and toasts the process behind closed doors.
I would vote for Graham Platner in a heartbeat. Graham Platner has a slate of policy positions with which I am in total agreement. The hit pieces being published to gin up “scandal” could have been written by Chuck’s minions and the DNC if they had thought of them. The icy sweat gleams on the brow of the democratic party establishment. It should. The party has become a contemptible shambling grifting wreck. I shall cheer Platner’s victory. I hope there are more Platners here and there to run rings around the gerontocrats.
The democrats are not going to split as did the Whigs. Who would have them? They are going to stink and shine like a mackerel in the moonlight.
I was posting about this on a far left subreddit the other day and for attacked for defending “a women abuser”
The problem with the left is they spend too much time on purity tests for candidates instead of voting for people who will vote on their interests.
This also reminds me of the Pratt campaign in LA. Outside LA, it looked like Pratt had a good chance to make some noise, but those inside LA said he had no support at all.
Platner still seems really supported where it matters – in Maine.
Why do we refer to conservative Democrats as ‘Centrists’ and liberal Democrats as Leftists? As you point out, the party leadership is largely aligned with the Republican administration (on the really big things) and are in fact Right-wingers or simply conservatives. No significant Democrat is a real Leftist. Left-ism in the Democratic Party just refers to having so-called progressive or liberal social values.
They are the bad cop to repubs psycho cop.
I grew up in Maine and while there’s a small segment of older retired voters who these attacks might have an impact on, those are status quo voters were always going to vote for Collins anyway. The vast majority of the rest of the state will only see these attacks as evidence that Platner is the real deal, a normal person not a career politician, and so if anything will only make it more likely he will win. Like a lot of people, Mainers hate being told how to think by people from away, and these personal attacks coming from the mainstream media blob will just confirm that this is a smear job. Which is why I think you see the GOP joining in on these attacks as they know Platner has a good shot of unseating Collins.
Personally, I’m done voting for Democrats. I think Platner is kind of a dumbass with some good positions but even if he wins he will be consumed by the Dem donor machine. AOC and Cori Bush are the best examples. The former agreed to toe the line, vote to send weapons to Israel, and support Genocide Joe when then whole electorate was crying out for an end to the horrors. The latter actually stood up to the Dem leadership’s support for Zionism, and was thrown out of office in one of the most expensive races in history. The donors control the structure, so they control the Party, and that isn’t going to change. My reasons for not voting for Dems is that we have to break the two party cycle and the reduction of all working class involvement in politics to voting every few years if we are going to make any changes. It’s not because of this hack smear campaign.
He won! (via NBCNews)