Establishment Democrats’ Hubris Could Lose Us the Midterms
How they are actively preventing the bigger tent we need to beat fascism
Last Friday, I wrote about a new crop of insurgent candidates taking on establishment Democrats and incumbents across the country. One of those challengers is Marine Corps veteran and Oysterman Graham Platner, who has received an outpouring of grassroots support and enthusiasm for his Senate bid against Republican Sen. Susan Collins. A gruff-looking, coarse-speaking, flawed but refreshingly honest populist, he’s not the kind of candidate that typically tests well among the DC consultant class, and as a result, the Democratic powers-that-be in Washington already had another candidate in mind for the must-win Senate race: 77-year-old Gov. Janet Mills.
Well, this week, Mills launched her campaign, and after a somewhat embarrassing false start, she quickly secured the backing of Chuck Schumer’s Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. On the morning of her launch, the DSCC set up a joint fundraising committee with Mills, signaling its intent to pump big money into the race and tip the Democratic primary in her favor.
Regardless of your views of Platner or Mills - or Chuck Schumer for that matter, I want to remind you that this is an objectively horrible decision, and one that at best, reflects the short-term memory loss of DC Democratic insiders, and at worst, is deeply anti-democratic. Let me explain:
Ten years ago, when Bernie Sanders challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, some party operatives and legacy organizations in Washington worked overtime to make sure it wasn’t a fair fight. In doing so, they perhaps unintentionally alienated millions of potential Democratic voters - especially young men - who came away convinced the party was tethered to corporate interests and allergic to genuine grassroots energy. Democrats have been scrambling to win those voters back ever since - because we literally could not afford to lose them.
Fast-forward to earlier this year, when David Hogg was removed from his position as DNC vice-chair amid controversy driven by the very principle that party officials shouldn’t interfere in primaries. Yet here comes the DSCC in Maine, doing precisely that, and jeopardizing the trust of the same grassroots base Democrats need to beat Collins next fall.
All year long, Democrats have been in a state of dysfunction, handwringing, navel-gazing, and soul-searching over how they could have possibly lost key groups of young voters in 2024. There have been multi-million dollar studies commissioned by longtime party operatives just to examine how Democrats can win back young men. Now, with a grassroots candidate staring them in the face, who has already inspired new groups of voters to get involved, the same DC operative class is going to do everything in their power to stand against him, and setting the bar for how they will (and likely are already) working to tip the scales in other primary races. We’re seeing a very similar exercise play out in the nationalized NYC Mayoral race, by the way.
Here’s where I stand: If Graham Platner proves to be a weaker candidate than his early enthusiasm and grassroots support currently indicates (and he very well could turn out to be!), he’ll lose the primary. The same goes for Janet Mills. That’s how our democracy works. But competitive primaries serve a specific purpose: vetting candidates, recruiting volunteers, and testing messages before the general election among Democrats’ most engaged voters. What’s so bizarre about this whole saga is that Mills - a popular sitting governor - could likely win the primary fair and square, by a wide margin. But by blatantly and publicly stacking the deck in her favor, Schumer and his underlings aren’t just undermining her campaign’s legitimacy and wasting donor resources; they’re reminding voters that the party has learned absolutely nothing from the past few years, running the high risk of suppressing anti-MAGA turnout in elections that will quite literally determine whether we ever have a functioning democracy in America again. This isn’t just corrupt, it’s deeply, deeply dangerous.
I truly hoped that in this political moment where they have nothing to lose – because they have already lost all of their power with these parlor games– our Democratic leaders could find a smidge of humility in their hearts to question whether their “we know best” playbook that got us into this mess deserved one more round. Now I understand I was giving them far more grace and credit than they deserved.
- Tara
What I’m reading this week
Trump Team Plans IRS Overhaul to Enable Pursuit of Left-Leaning Groups (Wall Street Journal, 10/15)
“The Trump administration is preparing sweeping changes at the Internal Revenue Service that would allow the agency to pursue criminal inquiries of left-leaning groups more easily, according to people familiar with the matter. A senior IRS official involved in the effort has drawn up a list of potential targets that includes major Democratic donors, some of the people said.”
Everything is television (Derek Thompson, 10/10)
“When everything turns into television, every form of communication starts to adopt television’s values: immediacy, emotion, spectacle, brevity. In the glow of a local news program, or an outraged news feed, the viewer bathes in a vat of their own cortisol. When everything is urgent, nothing is truly important. Politics becomes theater. Science becomes storytelling. News becomes performance. The result, Postman warned, is a society that forgets how to think in paragraphs, and learns instead to think in scenes.”
Hundreds of people cover the Pentagon. These are the 15 who signed its new press policy (Washington Post, 10/15)
“The Federalist, the Epoch Times and One America News signed the Defense Department’s press rules. The rest are freelancers, independent or work for media outfits based overseas.”
AI-generated news sites spout viral slop from forgotten URLs (Nieman, 10/16)
“A new generation of content farms are harnessing AI to spin out clickbait — and they’re getting help from Google…”