What Maine — and every other thing happening in politics right now —teaches us
The DC establishment really doesn’t get it
I am more than a little bemused by the punditry’s reaction to Governor Mills deciding to drop out of the Senate race. An incumbent Governor backed Chuck Schumer couldn’t compete with an outsider populist? Shocking! Stunning! Mind blowing!
Unless you looked at pretty much every other thing happening in politics right now. There are some clues that DC pundits might want to take note of.
Take a look at the current state of Senate primaries where Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has played a role. I list the following facts not to beat up on Schumer, but to make a point: voters are not in a mood to be told what to do by the Democratic leadership in Washington, DC.
In Michigan, the primary candidate backed by Schumer, Haley Stevens, is trailing not one but two populist anti-establishment candidates. In Texas, the candidate backed by Schumer, Colin Allred, who lost badly to Ted Cruz in 2024, was recruited to run again, and ended up pulling out because two outsider candidates were beating him badly. In the end the least known candidate at the start of the race, James Talerico, won. In Iowa, the candidate recruited by Schumer, Josh Turek, has been trailing the populist running against him, Zach Wahls, by a huge margin. Vote Vets, a group aligned with Senate democrats, just raised $5,000,000 to try and save Turek’s candidacy, but I suspect it won’t work. And in Minnesota, Schumer’s preferred candidate Angie Craig has been trailing Lt Governor Peggy Flanagan.
Take a look at the recent history of how elections have gone in this country.
With the exception of the 2012 re-election of Obama, who beat Mitt Romney by running a populist campaign exploiting Mitt’s background as the CEO of a private equity firm, every election in the last 20 years has resulted in the party in power losing either the presidency or control of either the House, the Senate, or both. In 2006, President Bush’s party lost both the House and Senate. In 2008, the Democratic establishment frontrunner (Hillary Clinton) lost the primary, and then the young upstart that beat her won the general election. In 2010, Obama’s party lost 63 seats in the House and 6 in the Senate. Bain Capital saved us in 2012, but then Democrats got hammered in 2014. Clinton got shocked by Trump in 2016. Dems proceeded to win 40 seats in the House in 2018, and then beat Trump and his party in 2020, winning a trifecta. In 2022, Dems stemmed the expected red tide, but still lost the House, and in 2024 that red tide came to shore.
Finally, take a look at current polling trends. Trump is way, way, way underwater, as one would expect a president this disastrous to be. Not surprisingly given that fact, Democrats are leading in the generic Congressional ballot. But Democrats as a party are not much more popular than Trump.
Why is that? Two reasons. One is that Democratic voters (and the Independents who usually vote Democratic) themselves are not enthusiastic about what they perceive the party is these days. Democratic leaders in DC are not popular with Democratic voters. The other is that working class swing voters don’t like either political party’s establishment.
This is not a left-right thing: big numbers of voters really don’t like either party. That is true with working class swing voters, with voters who voted for Democrats in 2020 but didn’t vote in 2024, with fervent Democrats who don’t get why we aren’t fighting back harder against Trump. What all three of those crucial blocs of voters share is they don’t like either Trump or the Democratic Party leadership.
What they do like is candidates and elected officials who will fight the powers that be—greedy corporations, powerful billionaires, party leaders—in order to deliver for them on the issues they care the most about. They want politicians who will fight like hell for higher wages, lower costs, and taking on greedy corporations who are constantly screwing people. If Democrats give them fighters like that, people will vote for them every time they are on the ballot.
One final thought: candidates who do not feel like they were born and bred to be politicians, candidates who don’t sound like everything coming out of their mouths was poll tested, are a lot more likely to be forgiven for their flaws than the establishment candidates served up by, well, the party establishment. Going back to Maine, what Platner said and did in his youth was dumb and offensive, but voters know they did a lot of dumb and offensive stuff when they were young, too—especially coming out of a trauma like war. That is why the millions of dollars of attack ads from the Mills campaign had no impact at all. When people see candidates like Platner and Dan Osborn, they think: those people’s lives are a lot like mine, maybe they will actually fight for me.
Our country is at the high water mark in terms of a kind of screw the establishment populism. Democratic leaders should embrace the moment rather than fighting it.