"WE WANT CANDIDATES WHO AREN'T WOKE! ... NO, NOT LIKE THAT"

According to two new polls, Graham Platner is struggling in his race against Senate Susan Collins. Greg Sargent writes:

Two major polls of the Maine Senate race dropped this week, and they told the same story: The race is incredibly close, and Democrat Graham Platner has real work to do among the working class....

The [New York] Times survey has Platner up two among likely voters overall, 49–47, and the Fox poll has Collins up three, 50–47. It’s a dead heat—it’s winnable, but he should probably be leading by more given the state’s Democratic lean, which is being outweighed by the brutal press he’s sustained over his Nazi-like tattoo and alleged violence against women.

You might think the Fox poll has an anti-Democratic bias, but as I've said many times over the ycears, Fox surveys are surprisingly unskewed. A survey released the same day shows Democrat Jon Ossoff leading the Georgia Senate race by double digits.

Sargent focuses on Platner's apparent failure so far to win blue-collar Mainers over with economic populism:

But note this: In the Times poll, Platner trails among voters without a college degree, a proxy for the working class, by 37–58. In the Fox poll, that’s 41–56.

... [Platner] speaks in a left-populist idiom that seeks to connect with working people’s struggles. So his numbers among them are concerning.

But Sargent also notes this:

The Times poll has working-class voters saying Platner has “good character” by 37–57 and “the right kind of moral values” by 36–57.

Many Democrats thought that the way to appeal to voters who work with their hands is to run a candidate who works with his hands. That's not working in Maine. But we were also told that rough-hewn voters with dirt under their fingernails are turned off by the prissy moral scolding of ordinary Democrats, and that in 2024 they responded well to Donald Trump's frequent appearances on podcasts hosted by bros who aren't feminist and use a lot of slurs.

At one time, I thought the unsavory stories about Platner's past might actually be helping him. In early June, I wrote:

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.... 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 tattooed on his body -- and polls say the voters of his state are embracing him....

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.

But now he's struggling, and making no inroads with blue-collar voters -- which tells me that these mostly right-leaning voters decide whether to forgive politicians' transgressions by first looking at the transgressors' party affiliation.

We knew that, obviously. For years, blue-collar whites eagerly recited the latest Fox talking points on the mid-level corruption of Hunter Biden -- but now Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are engaged in corrupt activities on a massive scale, and they don't care. We knew that Trump voters were upset about the Epstein files when they thought only their political enemies were implicated, and now that that's clearly not true, they're a lot less interested.

So they think Platner has bad moral character, but apparently they don't believe that people they like who have spoken or behaved the way Platner has, and have expressed much less remorse for it, have bad moral character. Many of them will reject Platner while casting a House vote for Paul LePage, the Trump-like former governor with a long history of offensive and racist remarks, because they like his politics. They'll condemn Platner's reported rough treatment of former girlfriends while shrugging off Donald Trump's sexual assaults; they'll believe Trump's denials, but not Platner's.

So economic populism doesn't appeal to the people who'd most benefit from it if the economic populist is a lefty, and having poor values (now or in the past) is only relatable to right-leaning voters if the current or former bad boy is right-coded. Which we probably should have guessed.