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It’s election season. Cicadas are chorusing from the trees, the first ad buys are frolicking on the networks, and the thoughts of pundits turn lightly to “Dems in disarray” opining.
At the New York Times, opinion writer Michelle Cottle pressed the argument that the Trump administration was ushered into power by “the excesses of woke,” with the implication being that fascism is the left’s fault. The Hill sucked its thumb and opined that “Democrats’ progressive surge could complicate [Hakeem] Jeffries’s path to unity.” CBS’s Gayle King tried to get progressive Democratic Florida Senate candidate Angie Nixon to disavow left-wing streamer Hasan Piker and was flummoxed when Nixon explained that she barely knew who he was. The New York Times (again) wondered breathlessly whether Democratic Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is too radical for the state and would cost the party a crucial seat.
And so on. If you follow centrist mainstream pundits and only centrist mainstream pundits, you’d get the impression that Democrats are locked in a damaging fight for the soul of their party, so focused on their circular firing squad that they can’t even lift their heads to confront the remorseless fascist Republican death machine which will inevitably crush them in the midterms.
But if you turn from the Cottles and Chaits and look instead at what Democratic candidates and voters are saying and doing, the picture looks very different.
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The fact is that Democrats are ready to crawl across broken glass, through acid baths, and over fields swarming with velociraptors in order to defeat the bloated fascist oligarch and his corrupt minions. And Democratic politicians are responding to those very clear incentives by focusing their ire first and foremost on the crime boss president.
The result is a Democratic Party that, yes, includes a broad range of ideologies, but which is nonetheless remarkably unified — and which looks poised for a historic midterm win.
Maine
It wasn’t that long ago that pundits were certain that Maine, not Michigan, was the winnable seat that Democrats were going to lose through disunity and dysfunction.
This panic did for once have substance behind it. Graham Platner, the oyster farmer who dominated the Senate primary, was an extremely flawed candidate with a host of grotesque and disqualifying scandals. During the campaign, the press turned up evidence he had a Nazi tattoo on his chest, posted bigoted garbage on social media, and engaged in reckless sexting. His campaign was finally destroyed when women came forward credibly accusing him of domestic violence and sexual assault.
