DOES J.D. VANCE EXIST?

Back in March, we learned this about J.D. Vance:

Vice President JD Vance, the country’s most powerful Roman Catholic politician, will publish a memoir about his conversion to the faith, his publisher, HarperCollins Publishers, announced on Tuesday.

The book, titled “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” will be released on June 16 and will detail Mr. Vance’s return to Christianity after leaving the loosely evangelical practice of his childhood and his eventual conversion to Catholicism.

... The announcement comes as many Republican strategists, officials and voters look to Mr. Vance as the early front-runner in the 2028 Republican primary race to succeed President Trump.

So how are Vance and HarperCollins promoting this book about Vance's Catholicism? By publishing a 1753-word excerpt in The Wall Street Journal about the late Charlie Kirk, Vance's evangelical Protestant friend, and a shorter excerpt in USA Today about the beginning of Vance's relationship with his Hindu wife, Usha.

It's not surprising that a man running for president would want to soften his image by praising his wife, although J.D.'s memories of his budding interest in Usha are a bit awkward:

I called my buddy Mike, who asked about law school, the classmates, the vibe, and the girls.

“Dude, I think I’m obsessed with this chick in my small group. It’s unhealthy.”

The small group, I explained, was the collection of sixteen students with whom I shared all of my first-year classes.

I told him all about her: That she was smarter than everyone. That her smile could light up a room. That she had the most amazing posture.

Posture?

“She doesn’t even walk like normal people. Normal girls seem kind of unstable in high heels,” I told him. “Not her. She glides across the room in whatever shoes she wears. And her laugh, man. Whenever she laughs it’s, like, the most wonderful thing. She’s super reserved, but she has this chortle that is the best sound I’ve ever heard.”

Chortle?

Okay, J.D., whatever. I guess it's geekily genuine. But the Charlie Kirk excerpt leads me to believe that Vance is trying to say, Don't think of me as J.D. Vance. Think of me as a loyal follower of the beloved Charlie Kirk. Vote for me in 2028 because I promise to carry on his legacy.

Charlie perhaps came to be my best friend and closest confidant in the world of politics.

He was one of the few people I talked to regularly about the stresses national politics placed on our family. He stood in the front row during my 2024 Republican National Convention speech—the biggest moment of my life in the public eye—smiling and cheering the whole way. Because he was incapable of envy, he was everyone’s biggest cheerleader.

Politics is a dirty business sometimes, one where you have to make compromises and shape the public narrative in order to achieve the best possible—rather than the perfect—outcome. Charlie served as my sounding board and strategic partner.

When Kirk died, the Vances raced to absorb the reflected glory.

Usha and I flew the next day to Utah to escort his body back to Arizona. It was the least I could do.

Yes -- for your career.

Near the end of the Journal excerpt, Vance creepily ascribes his wife's decision to have a fourth child to Kirk's assassination.

As my wife held Charlie Kirk’s widow on the first day of her terrible sorrow, Erika told Usha between sobs that she regretted having only two kids with Charlie.

For years I had asked Usha to have another baby, and for years she had told me she was done—especially now that public service had elevated us into the national spotlight.

But something changed for Usha, and not long after we buried my friend, she became pregnant with our fourth child, a boy.

One life was stolen from us, but another was given.

Vance appears to be suggesting that his own child will be the reincarnation of Charlie Kirk. That's weird.

Is J.D. Vance a real person, or is he just a series of mentor-mentee relationships pretending to be a person? At Yale Law, he was a protégé of Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld. In Silicon Valley, he became one of Peter Thiel's favorites. Then there was Donald Trump.

I've argued that if Trump dies in office, Vance will consolidate GOP voter support by becoming the leader of a posthumous Trump cult.

The key thing J.D. Vance will do if he becomes president after Trump's death is wrap himself in Trump's mantle and act as the great preserver of Trump's legacy. He'll keep all the tacky gold decorations in the Oval Office. He'll continue planning the ballroom, which he'll call the Trump Ballroom. In fact, he'll preside over a massive campaign to name paractically every inanimate object in America after Trump -- airports, roads, schools, military bases, maybe even the White House. (The Trump House?) He'll urge the Nobel committee to give Trump a posthumous Peace Prize, even though Nobels are never awarded posthumously.... he'll begin the process of allocating funds to put Trump on Mount Rushmore.

This might not be what Vance will want to do as president, but it's what he will do.

Vance is trying to ascend to a position of alpha dominance in American politics by always being someone's beta -- in the case of Kirk, a dead guy who was nearly a decade younger. Will it work? Well, his main competition is Marco Rubio, someone who's equally inclined to subordinate himself to whatever the current thing is in right-wing politics. The real leader of the post-Trump right will be whoever tells Republican voters what to hate, but that person might not want to run for office. (Rush Limbaugh didn't in the aftermath of Ronald Reagan's presidency, and Tucker Carlson didn't in the Barack Obama era.) So the leading politician in the GOP might not be the party's overall leader. It might be a lickspittle like Rubio or Vance.

AND BY "AMERICA FIRST" WE MEAN "WHITES FIRST EVERYWHERE"

Why is J.D. Vance, the second in command to our "America First" president, weighing in on a British murder case?

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has hit out at people “trying to interfere in our democracy” after US Vice President JD Vance waded into a national controversy by blaming “mass migration” for the recent murder of a student.

The killing of Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old White student, sparked a national outcry after it emerged that police officers had handcuffed him as he lay dying from stab wounds inflicted by Vickrum Digwa, a 23-year-old Sikh man, in an attack late last year.

Digwa, who at the time falsely claimed to police that he had been the victim of a racist attack, has since been convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, but the case has been co-opted by the far-right to accuse British institutions including the police of being biased against White Britons.

This is a terrible story. What the police did can't really be defended. But Nowak's family has said, “We do not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred or tension.” Also: “This is not a case about Sikhism. This is not a case about racism. This is a case about murder.”

Vance wants Nowak's death to stir division and hatred. His tweet is one of the most Nazi-like statements I've encountered from a member of the Executive Branch not named Trump or Miller:

Henry Nowak died the same way a civilization dies: abandoned, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit. His murder is as tragic as it is enraging. He should still be alive today, and he would be if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.

Henry was far from the first to so needlessly lose his life, and I fear he won’t be the last. Each time a life like his is lost, the proper response—the only response—is righteous anger. One of the most important things the Trump administration has proven to the world is that stopping the flow of mass migration and defending national sovereignty is a matter of political will and leadership. Anything else is an excuse.

It is because we love the West that we want to preserve it. We love our civilization. We love our country. We love our children. And nobody—nobody—should ever die the way that Henry Nowak died. May God comfort those who loved him, and may God rest his soul.

I want to focus on a small detail here. In the final paragraph of this tweet, Vance says, "We love our country." Who is "we" here?

If "we" means "members of the Trump administration," then what does love of America have to do with weighing in on another country's affairs? But if it means "those of us who care about the civilization of the West," then why the singular "country"? Unlike President Trump, Vance knows how to use the English language. He (or whichever staffer proofreads and copyedits his statements) could have changed "country" to "countries" -- which would also have suggested that the U.K.'s separation from Europe was good and that all European nations should follow that example, something I assume Vance believes.

Maybe it's just the kind of grammar mistake that even articulate people make. Maybe Vance means, "You love your country and we love our country." But he never mentions America or Britain, and in a 209-word statement, he mentions "the West" twice. This tells me that Vance sees "the West" (white Europeans, white Americans, white Russians) as one country -- call it Whiteistan -- that's at war with dark-skinned people everywhere.

(No, I don't know where Vance's wife and children fit in all this.)

Remember that Vance went to Hungary and asked a crowd of Viktor Orban supporters, “Will you stand ... for truth and for the God of our forefathers?” Prior to this, he met with the leader of Germany's far-right, anti-immigrant AfD party, defended Elon Musk's open embrace of the party, and attacked European leaders on immigration, telling them,

The threat that I worry most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.

It's not just Vance, of course. Earlier this year, Marco Rubio told the same European leaders,

we do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame. We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it.

And just today, Pete Hegseth played the white supremacist card at a D-Day event in Paris:

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned on Saturday that Europe faced what he called an invasion of dangerous ideologies arriving by sea, linking immigration to the legacy of the D-Day landings in remarks in Normandy....

“Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different, dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria, boats and men arrive,” Hegseth said in a speech at the Normandy American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer.

“When will European capitals do something about that invasion or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not,” he said.

None of this is surprising. We know these people are fascists. But please note that they're not America First fascists. They're whites first fascists. They want this ideology to spread. They want to meddle in European politics to promote the leaders and ideology they favor.

In this way, they're as globalist as the liberals and moderates they despise.

PLATNER'S REPUBLICAN-OPERATIVE EX IS A SORE WINNER

I don't have anything constructive to add after reading the big New York Times story about Graham Platner's toxic behavior in past relationships, but I'll direct you to this story, from which we learn that the political operative who is the story's main source is reacting to it in a quintessentially Republican way:

Graham Platner accuser calls NYT article 'a gift' to his Senate campaign

The woman who was quoted extensively in a New York Times article accusing Graham Platner of abuse during their past relationship is now claiming she was "set up" by the journalists who spoke with her.

In her first public messages since the article was published Thursday, Lyndsey Fifield, Platner's ex-girlfriend, posted a series of messages on X detailing how she initially "resisted her conservative bias" and decided to "fully trust the Times journalists."

... Fifield is a conservative activist whom the Times reported has worked for right-leaning groups and Republican campaigns....

"It dawned on me that this really was a set up all along," Fifield wrote Friday morning. "The journalists I trusted who convinced me to share a story I never wanted to tell methodically delayed and twisted this into a gift to the Platner campaign. Violating the trust of his victims. Shattering the trust I placed in them with the most vulnerable story of my life."

I believe what Fifield said about Platner's anger and toxicity -- she might have embellished details, but it's consistent with what a couple of other women say in the story, and it's consistent with other bad behavior we know about. I know that Fifield is a GOP operative. I still largely believe her account.

But Republicans are so spoiled by having been the dominant political party in America for nearly half a century -- Fifield's entire life -- that this particular Republican can look at highly damaging story published at nearly the worst possible time for Democrats and think, The media is still displaying liberal bias.

Maine's primary is on Tuesday. The only rival to Platner who's shown any vote-getting ability dropped out of the race more than a month ago. There isn't enough time for Maine Democrats to coalesce around an alternative candidate. And a large number of Democratic voters don't want to.

So what's likely to happen is that Platner will win the primary and limp into the general election, weakened and probably highly beatable.

Fifield's two long tweets in response to the story are here and here. She says she went on the record reluctantly, provided diary screenshots that the Times never used, and offered names of people who could corroborate her story. She says she was told that other women had similar stories, and was put in touch with them while the story was being put together.

After the story went up I began to ask them ... wait, where are the stories from the other women? Where are their accusations of sexual assault? Why am I the focus? Why are there 11 paragraphs dedicated to detailing my work history (more than has been published about Graham’s by far)?

(What? Is she saying that Platner's work history hasn't been reported anywhere?)

Why does it say “nobody could corroborate” when I offered them sources that COULD corroborate?

(I can only assume that the friends didn't say to the Times what she thought they'd say -- perhaps because they remember the relationship differently, perhaps because they didn't want to get involved in the story to that extent.)

It dawned on me that this really was a set up all along. The journalists I trusted who convinced me to share a story I never wanted to tell methodically delayed and twisted this into a gift to the Platner campaign. Violating the trust of his victims. Shattering the trust I placed in them with the most vulnerable story of my life.

This story is an invitation to every ambitious reporter in America: Find more dirt on Platner. Fairly soon, for instance, someone will report on Platner's behavior during his overseas postings, and the stories probably won't be pretty.

Fifield set this in motion with stories like this:

... she said he regularly grabbed her by the shoulders — sometimes hard enough to leave marks — and, on one occasion, yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the car.

During one argument, she recalled, he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was “calm.” Eventually, Ms. Fifield said, she fell asleep and left the next morning.

And this:

He had what she described as a “warrior ethos” and would fantasize about killing people he deemed a threat, she said. She said he told her that rape was about power.

It was something that stuck with her through the years, Ms. Fifield said.

“He said this a lot: If anybody ever broke in here, I would rape them,” she recalled, saying that he added that it would not be in “a sexual way, not in a gay way.”

“He was like, I would rape them to show them that I’m dominant,” she said.

Is it all true? I don't know. Has it damaged his campaign? Undoubtedly. Lyndsey Fifield should understand that. Take the win, Lyndsey.

As for me, I'm with Lauren Mae:

There are a lot of lefties on social media scolding anyone who's supported Platner. Fuck that. People supported his platform. They thought he was a good messenger, and they wanted to believe he was working on not being a bad person. Some still feel that way. They're not the enemy. They're not like Republicans, who wallow in Donald Trump's evil.

WHEN TRUMP DOES BIZARRE THINGS, THE MEDIA ISN'T AGHAST -- IT'S IN AWE

Stephen Robinson asks, yet again, why the bizarre words and deeds of the aging Donald Trump aren't covered the same way Joe Biden's "senior moments" were:

This past weekend, Trump’s social media feed was a wellspring of lunacy. He posted more than 50 times on Saturday alone, hurling personal attacks at Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Rosie O’Donnell — one of whom was never actually president. He shared an absurd AI-generated image of himself as a New York Knicks player dunking on Gov. Kathy Hochul. He boasted about defeating “disloyal” Republicans in their primaries. He continued picking fights with the Pope. He attacked the judge who ruled that he couldn’t illegally deface the Kennedy Center with his name....

Yet Trump’s unhinged posts last weekend weren’t the stuff of front-page coverage at the New York Times or Washington Post....

The rate of Trump’s manic posting on social media accelerated in May.... He resumed his unprecedented threats against a US ally with two Truth Social posts that depicted his massive face looming sinisterly over Greenland. He posted an AI image of Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna in a sheep costume with vampire teeth, witing, “A Dumocrat! Don’t allow this lying sleazebag on FoxNews!”

Trump posted an image of a fighter jet seemingly about to drop a bomb with the words “Thank You For Your Attention To This Matter” written on its side. He shared an image of himself holding a shotgun over a slain rhinoceros with the menacing caption “NO RINOS”

On the subject of Trump and his predecessor, Robinson writes:

... Trump and Biden simply don’t belong in the same conversation about a president’s deteriorating mental state. As amply covered in the press, Biden was in fact old and thus experienced age-related decline, but the worst-case scenario with him at the wheel was not a potential nuclear holocaust....

Biden on his worst day was emotionally stable. Trump, on every day, is outright sadistic, and his resulting behavior is increasingly reckless. Biden’s diplomacy united allies against Russia after Putin invaded Ukraine. He successfully negotiated bipartisan bills in Congress. But Trump has blown up longstanding alliances while purging dissenters and weaponizing government against his foes.

Robinson says:

... unfortunately, the mainstream media covers [Trump's] disordered thinking as a colorful “quirk” — Trump being Trump — rather than a serious, escalating threat to the nation.

No, it's worse than that.

The press doesn't think Trump's disordered thinking is a "quirk." The press thinks Trump's disordered thinking is a superpower. The press doesn't cover Trump's behavior the way it covered Biden's because Biden wasn't trying to impress his base with his shuffling gait and verbal stumbles. Trump clearly wants to be praised for all his late-night Truth Social shitposting. He wants likes and "re-truths," and he gets some. The press, still unable to comprehend how a man as impolitic and unhinged as Trump won two elections, simply assumes that Trump's rage and blather add up to a peculiar form of political genius.

In the past, it was understandable that the press might think Trump had invented a new kind of political charisma. (It wasn't new, really -- it was basically Bill O'Reilly's assholism plus an infomercial pitchman's aura of fake financial expertise, all of it married to a Perez Hilton-style posting addiction.) But his poll numbers are plummeting now, and he's failing in everything he's doing as president.

And yet the press still believes in his alleged genius. I think that's for a few reasons.

First, his party hasn't collapsed. Trump is admired by perhaps 35% to 38% of Americans, but he leads the party that gets approximately half the votes in America, so he seems more popular than he is.

Second, he's still good at grabbing eyeballs. Journalists want to do good work, perhaps, but perhaps more than that, they want to do work that gets attention. I think they envy even the aging, unpopular Trump because he still knows how to go viral. They wish they were as good at it as he is (at his age!).

And finally, after decades of ref-working by the GOP, I think they feel that his habit of regularly abusing them to their faces is a punishment they deserve.

Trump attacking Kaitlan Collins: Be quiet. You should be ashamed of yourself. You used to be conservative from Alabama. CNN does such false reporting, but now they have new ownership, so maybe it'll straighten it out. It’s hard to straighten garbage out.

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— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) June 3, 2026 at 4:36 PM

Getting to 0:28 in this video and seeing all those reporters watching raptly as he rambles on and insults them makes me sick. Fuck him. Don't show up anymore. Let him ramble to the Fox reporter and no one else. You're literally giving him lifefuel by meekly standing by as he insults you.

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— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) June 3, 2026 at 6:13 PM

I'm serious when I say that reporters shouldn't participate in these Oval Office gaggles. They should boycott them as a group in response to Trump's insults, or they should walk away as a group the second he insults one of them. Obviously, there'd be consequences -- but Trump would be limited in his ability to impose consequences if every top-tier non-right-wing media outlet participated in the boycott.

But they won't, because they think taking his punches reveals their toughness. It does, but it also turns their relationship with him into an abusive marriage. The abuse makes him happy, and his base is also happy to see reporters abused. That's a gift he and his base don't deserve. These reporters and their bosses need to recognize that and stop giving him what he wants.

IF DEMOCRATS AREN'T CLOSING THE SALE, IT'S FOR A GLARINGLY OBVIOUS REASON

In nearly every poll this year, disapproval of President Trump's job performance has been much greater than the Democratic advantage on the generic House ballot. However, until now I haven't seen a poll with a gap this large:

A new Marquette Law School Poll national survey ... finds that Trump’s overall support continues to decline....

In this May poll, 38% approve of how he is handling his job as president, while 62% disapprove, a net approval of -24 percentage points....

Looking ahead to the November congressional elections, among registered voters, 46% say they would vote for the Democratic candidate and 45% would vote for the Republican, with 7% saying they would vote for neither and 1% who say they would not vote. The slight Democratic advantage is also seen among likely voters, i.e., those who say they are certain they will vote, with 49% saying they would vote for a Democratic candidate and 48% for a Republican candidate.

The congressional vote has tightened substantially from April when, among registered voters, 48% backed Democratic candidates and 44% supported Republicans, and there was a large Democratic advantage among likely voters, 53% for Democrats and 43% for Republicans.

So Trump is at -24, but Democrats are only at +1. Among likely voters, Democrats were at +10 in April, but that advantage shrunk by 9 points. We're told:

Some of this shift is due to an increase in likelihood of voting among Republicans and a decline among Democrats. In April, 56% of Republicans said they were certain to vote in November, which rose to 59% in May. Among Democrats, those certain to vote declined from 67% in April to 58% in May.

It's just one poll, and maybe it's an outlier -- in the Real Clear Politics average, Democrats have an advantage of 6.8 points. But Trump's job approval is at -16.7 points.

Why the gap? The Marquette poll makes this fairly obvious:

Among nine issues, the Republicans are seen as considerably better able to handle three issues than Democrats and slightly better on two issues. Democrats are seen as slightly better on two issues and substantially better on two issues.

After sixteen months of Trump and a GOP House and Senate, Americans are disgusted at the state of the country -- but they still prefer Republicans on five of nine issues.

Republicans have substantial advantages on crime, immigration and border security, and national defense, and a have a slight advantage on the federal deficit and taxes. Democrats have slight advantages on the economy and on inflation, and have large advantages on the topic of Medicare and Social Security and on health care.

I understand why voters might back Republicans on immigration and border security -- polls suggest that voters want a tighter border and deportations, though they don't approve of Trump's heavy-handed approach. And it seems to be impossible to persuade Americans that crime has been falling since the 1990s, and is low in many Democratic-led cities.

But national defense? Do poll respondents understand which party refuses to intercede to stop Trump's unpopular and ruinous war with Iran? Do they understand which party won't challenge Trump's attacks on allies and organizations meant to sustain global peace?

And on taxes, do respondents know which party voted for the very unpopular One Big Beautiful Bill, which was a giveaway to the rich?

We know they don't know who's running up a massive federal deficit right now, because they were asked: While 72% of respondents say they've "heard or read a lot" about the war with Iran, only 28% say the same about news that federal debt is now greater than U.S. GDP.

Why don't voters link these governing failures to Republicans? Democrats blame Trump, but they don't blame the GOP, and they need to start.

On the campaign trail, individual Democrats will link their opponents to Trump. That will be effective -- but they need to do more. The Republican Party needs to be thoroughly discredited. It needs to be portrayed as a party that always blows up the deficit in order to make billionaires richer, while slashing programs for ordinary people. It needs to be discredited as a party that always gets America into ill-advised wars. Add that to the abortion restrictions, the refusal to raise the minimum wage, the deep health care cuts, and dozens of other failings, and you might start building a case for why the GOP and not just Trump needs to be opposed, and needs to be opposed in every election for the foreseeable future, not just while Trump is in the White House.

THE PLATNER NEWS HAS ESTABLISHMENT DEMOCRATS DOING WHAT THEY ENJOY MOST: BEATING THEMSELVES UP

Graham Platner is, or was, a lousy husband. He was sexting with other women in the early days of his marriage. He and his wife, as she noted in a video over the weekend, are in marriage counseling, and are looking into fertility treatments in order to have a baby. They're trying to make the marriage work. It was Platner's wife who brought the texts to the campaign's attention. That happened last fall. For some reason, this story broke now, more than a month after his main primary opponent suspended her campaign, and with very little time for Maine Democrats to pick another candidate. (In the most recent public poll of the primary, Platner has a 73-point lead over the only remaining Democratic opponent who's on the ballot and actively campaigning. The primary is a week from now.)

Do Maine Democrats even want to switch candidates? In isolation, this is the kind of story that hasn't derailed politcal careers in the past few decades. Ever since Bill Clinton, voters have decided that marriage is personal, people are flawed, and relationship troubles are none of our damn business. Down in Texas, opponents of the GOP's Senate nominee, Ken Paxton, have tried to use his marital woes against him in more than one election. Voters don't care.

But many members of the Democratic Establishment have decided that they should be angrier about Platner's philandering than the voters themselves are likely to be. First out of the gate was Cory Booker, over the weekend on ABC:

Asked Sunday if Booker had concerns about Platner jeopardizing Senate control for the Democrats, Booker said he did.

"Yes, I have concerns. That guy has questions to answer,” Booker said.

Booker didn't have to say this. Booker could have shut this down. He could have changed the subject by giving a rah-rah response about Democrats, or by attacking the GOP, President Trump, and the complicity of Susan Collins in Trump's reign of terror.

But no. The happy place for Establishment Democrats is self-flagellation. Democrats love saying Democrats are flawed. They love being Artie Fufkin, the promo guy who fails to draw a crowd for the band Spinal Tap at a record store event in Chicago, and then berates himself and asks the band to physically abuse him:



Booker, to be fair, expressed mild concern. The Democrat who really makes me see red is an anonymous consultant quoted in this Politico story:

“Is he going to be an albatross to run with? Absolutely,” said one Maine Democratic strategist, who, like others in this article, was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “He’s going to lose. All these polls showing him up against Susan Collins — people forget that the voters who decide this race make their decisions in the last two weeks.”

A Politico reporter shoves a mic in your face and you, a Democratic strategist, say, of the presumptive Democratic nominee in a critical Senate race, "He's going to lose"? Seriously? What the fuck is wrong with you?

And he's not alone:

“Up until now, the things that have come out, most Mainers have been pretty forgiving — enough to force out a sitting governor in a primary,” said Chuck Rocha, a longtime Democratic strategist who is advising multiple Senate campaigns but is not involved with Platner’s bid. “The thing that bothers me about Graham is every week it seems like it’s something else. … I worry because I have the scars of trying to beat Susan Collins for many cycles.” ...

“If [Platner] dips below like 65 percent or something [on Tuesday] I think he’d be in trouble,” said a second Maine Democratic strategist. “That’s gonna be tough for him.”

The sitting governor, Janet Mills, dropped out of the race in April, but she's still on the ballot -- and she reminded voters of that over the weekend in an interview with a Portland Press Herald columnist. That's an obnoxious thing for her to say. If she wants to try to take Platner down, she should reenter the race. She should start campaigning again. This half-in, half-out nonsense helps no one except Susan Collins and the Republican Party.

But for observers of American politics, Democratic self-hatred is, in the David Foster Wallace sense, the water we swim in and don't even notice. We think it's normal that Democrats routinely attack their own party ("Weak!" "Woke!") and are afraid to say categorically that their own party is better than the opposition party. We think it's normal that Democrats echo Republican framing of Democrats. We think circular firing squads like the one in Maine are normal.

You know who's not organizing a circular firing squad right now, in response to the voters' choice of a flawed Senate nominee? The Republican Party. Graham Platner damaged his marriage, but it's still intact. Ken Paxton of Texas broke up his marriage with multiple adulteries, and is a sleazebag in many other ways -- he was once impeached, though not convicted, in a Republican-controlled Texas legislature.

Yet Republicans are uniting in opposition to his Democratic opponent, James Talarico, defining him as trans and vegan, and preparing the party for a meme war:

All these memes are (apparently) coming from outside the official GOP, but the GOP has made the campaign's message abundantly clear, and these memes are in perfect sync with that message.

Democrats could unite around the goal of winning the Maine election the way Republicans are uniting around the goal of winning the Texas election, but too many Democrats are comfortable in defeat, because they don't really believe that their party's ideas and values are better than the GOP's. Graham Platner might win this race anyway, but he'd be better positioned to win it if his party had his back.

MAYBE GRAHAM PLATNER IS THE DEMOCRATIC JOE ROGAN

It pains me to say that I agree with anything in The Free Press, but I think River Page's "Why the Attacks on Graham Platner Don't Work" makes some good points (free to read here).

Getting a regrettable tattoo while drunk does not necessarily prove that you are an antisemite—or at least it didn’t to Platner’s Jewish relatives, who he claims knew about the tattoo for years and never said anything about it. It does, however, suggest that you might be a guy who made an egregious mistake without thinking about what the political consequences might be in 20 years, rather than a neurotic careerist who’s been ruthlessly plotting his rise to political power since grade school, which is worse. If voters liked ambitious robots, we’d be halfway through a second Pete Buttigieg administration by now....

In some sense, the [sheer] scale of Platner’s Reddit-related controversies—which run across the political gamut—do actually suggest that he was, as he claims, more of an internet troll than a hardened ideologue.... On the whole, from his Reddit to the regrettable tattoo to that video of him getting wasted and dancing shirtless at a wedding, Platner comes across as a bonehead, and maybe even an asshole—but never a schoolmarm, careerist, or self-righteous hypocrite. Most politicians do, and that’s why people don’t like them.

I give Page credit for pointing out that voters are responding to Platner's political views, and acknowledging that those views are popular.

... when it comes to ideas, people seem to like Platner’s—if they didn’t, perhaps the attacks on his character would have worked better. Proposals that are ostensibly radical by Washington standards, like Medicare for All, are actually supported by a majority of Americans—including Platner. Similarly, like most Americans, Platner wants to tax the rich. And so forth.

Even what might be considered one of his most controversial positions—that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza—is not a fringe belief by polling standards. Half of registered voters believed this to be the case by the end of last year, including four out of 10 American Jews....

Platner’s willingness to support bold ideas and run against the Democratic Party establishment, despite the skeletons in his closet, makes him look like he’s interested in enacting genuine political change. At the end of the day, this is all people really want. And the fact that, despite his upbringing, he genuinely does seem like a guy you could meet at a dive bar doesn’t hurt either.

Do you remember the moment, about a year ago, when Democrats were talking about the need to find a "liberal Joe Rogan"? Many Democrats felt that the party lost the 2024 election because Donald Trump and other Republicans were eager to sit down with podcast bros who aren't "woke" and don't self-censor. Kamala Harris has expressed regret because she didn't appear on Rogan's show during the campaign. Personally, I never wanted Democrats to cozy up to podcasters who demean women or gleefully use slurs, but many very smart people thought the party should embrace them.

Well, now there's a candidate who, in the past, demeaned women, Blacks, and others on Reddit, and who thought it was badass to get (and keep) a Nazi symbol tattoed on his body -- and polls say the voters of his state are embracing him. I hope they're embracing him because they like his politics (I like his politics), and because they think he's sincere about wanting to be a better person than he was when he was a Reddit shitposter and Nazi tattoo acquirer.

And now we have his bad behavior early in his marriage to contend with, although his wife's video response over the weekend seems like a sincere plea for voters to let the two of them work it out.



Platner has not been well behaved for much of his life -- but not being well behaved is what a lot of Democrats seemed to like about the podcast bros, or at least what they thought their fans liked about them. Now there's a badly behaved candidate in a statewide race, and he's leading in the polls. Draw your own conclusions.