Bad Idea Politics
In California, Republicans are embracing absurd conspiracy theories and in Maine, Democrats are in danger of throwing away a winnable Senate seat.
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I woke up this morning, took one look at the political headlines on Twitter, and wanted to do this …
First, there's the conservative response to the Los Angeles Mayor’s race:
President Trump is leading Republicans’ unfounded claims of fraud in California’s glacial vote counting as his preferred candidate was knocked out of the runoff for Los Angeles mayor.
Progressive Los Angeles City Council member Nithya Raman was projected by Decision Desk HQ to finish ahead of Republican Spencer Pratt, a reality television personality, as the two challenge incumbent Mayor Karen Bass (D), despite Pratt’s significant lead on election night.
“No way this could have happened. Rigged Election!” the president said in a post on Truth Social in response Monday morning.
…. This is a joke. Everyone sees what’s happening,” Rep. Abe Hamadeh (R-Ariz.) said in a post on the social platform X. “When will Republicans recognize the urgency and pass legislation to fix this broken system before Americans lose faith in our elections?”
“The ballot corruption is happening in California right before our eyes,” posted Katie Miller, a former communications director for former Vice President Mike Pence and the wife of White House adviser Stephen Miller.
Bill Essayli, a federal prosecutor for the Central District of California, announced Friday that his office had “multiple election fraud investigations underway,” though he didn’t offer specifics. He said he’s working with Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Civil Rights Division, to audit the state’s voter rolls.
These delays happen every election in California. It takes forever to count ballots because mail-in ballots in the state are tallied as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. Is it a lousy system? Absolutely. Is it evidence of corruption? Not at all.
That Spencer Pratt, who is a Republican, lost ground to a progressive member of the Los Angeles City Council in a city that is overwhelmingly Democratic is not remotely surprising or unexpected.
Meanwhile, in the California governor’s race, Republican Steve Hilton appears well-positioned to hold off billionaire candidate Tom Steyer and make it to the general election against top vote-getter, Democrat Xavier Becerra. If Democrats were brazenly skewing the results in California, wouldn’t they also be helping Steyer?
This conspiratorial nonsense is a direct result of Donald Trump’s incessant and made-up claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Indeed, yesterday on “Meet the Press,” Trump not only falsely claimed that Democrats are stealing votes in California, he again tried to relitigate the 2020 election — before storming off the set.
And I know we’re all basically inured to Trump’s lunacy, but it’s honestly worth watching this clip to get a full sense of how dangerously divorced from reality Trump has become.
But what’s made the situation so much worse is that many Republicans, for fear of upsetting Trump, have also refused to acknowledge the reality of what happened in 2020. Trump’s constant lying about 2020 — and the refusal of Republicans to point out that Trump is not telling the truth — has created a permission structure within the party and among conservatives, in general, to make the same sort of false claims about election outcomes they don’t like.
I’m deeply skeptical that you would see so many Republican elected officials making these kinds of arguments if not for the fact that Trump opened the door. Now, it’s just taken for granted that Republicans will allege voter fraud in the absence of any actual evidence.
Maine Democrats Are Walking Into A Buzzsaw
Meanwhile in Maine, Democrats appear poised to throw away the party’s chances of flipping a very flippable Senate seat.
Let me state at the outset that the GOP’s conspiracy theories about the California election results are not in the same realm as the bizarre devotion that Democrats are showing to Platner. But the way Democrats are twisting themselves in pretzels to defend him is a daily story of moral degradation and poor political thinking.
Take, for example, this argument from California Rep. Ro Khanna.
The problem with Khanna’s assertion is that Platner has not taken accountability for his actions, at least regarding the latest allegations of bad behavior toward former girlfriends. He said the allegations of violence and inappropriate conduct are false, politically motivated, and have been weaponized against him. Moreover, according to the New York Times piece that appeared late last week, Platner referred to women as “hatchet wounds,” which is a particularly disgusting and misogynistic way to speak about women.
But honestly, how are these kinds of Platner defenses qualitatively different from the explanations that Republicans used to justify their support for Trump? I know that Platner is not as bad an actor as Trump. Still, the willingness of so many of his supporters to rationalize deeply repellent personal behavior is eerily similar — and does not bode well for our future politics.
But let’s put aside the morality of supporting Platner. From a political perspective, it simply doesn’t make sense.
Here’s what I wrote over the weekend in my MSNOW column.
Recent polling suggests Platner has a narrow lead over Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
In a political environment that heavily favors Democrats and in a state that has voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in each of the past three presidential elections, Democrats should be well-positioned to flip the Maine seat from red to blue. And this is the polling situation today, before Maine voters have fully digested the latest Platner scandals. Where will Platner’s numbers be in November after five months of GOP ads hammering him? That’s not even taking into account the very real possibility that more scandals will emerge. Quite simply, even if one thinks that Platner is a unique political talent — and there isn’t much evidence that he is — why take the risk?
This is the part of the Platner story that is the most difficult to understand: Maine is a blue state. Kamala Harris won it in 2024 by nearly 7 points. It’s the only state in the country with a Republican senator that voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in the last three presidential elections. Quite simply, it should be the one race where Democrats have the best chance of flipping a seat from red to blue. In a political environment where Trump is deeply unpopular, and Democrats have a significant lead in the generic congressional ballot, the most basic credo for Maine Democrats should be “do no harm.”
Pick a milquetoast candidate who won’t offend independent voters and disaffected Republicans, has previously been vetted, and is not controversial. In other words, don’t take a risk here. An average, middle-of-the-road candidate should be able to defeat Collins. Instead, Maine Democrats appear poised to nominate someone who is the exact opposite.
It bears noting that in nearly every other competitive Senate primary, Democratic voters are rejecting Platner-style nominees in favor of more pragmatic, electable candidates — James Talarico in Texas and Josh Turek in Iowa are the two most obvious examples. But in Ohio, Alaska, and North Carolina, the left stood down and ceded the nomination to establishment-endorsed candidates well-poised to win in November.
Yet, the constant refrain one hears from Platner’s supporters is that it’s absolutely imperative to beat Susan Collins, which is a completely reasonable political argument. But if they really believed that the number one goal was beating Collins, then it simply makes no sense to put all their chips on perhaps the one Maine Democrat who could lose to her. My beef is less with the voters in Maine than with national Democrats who are refusing to step in here and urge Platner to drop out of the race. Maybe they are biding their time until the next shoe drops (Democrats have until mid-July to replace Platner on the ticket), but the refusal to speak up risks blowing a chance to win a very winnable race.
And even if Platner prevails, is this really the guy they want in the Senate Democratic caucus — a guy who had a Nazi tattoo for 20 years, lies incessantly, and has, to put it mildly, a problematic relationship with women?
To be clear, national Democrats should have pushed for Platner to drop out months ago, when the revelations about his Nazi tattoo first appeared, but many, it seems, were afraid of upsetting his liberal supporters — and now they are likely stuck with him.
Actually, getting stuck with him is the best-case scenario. There’s a very real possibility that nominating Platner means giving Collins six more years in the Senate.
The Platner blame game is already underway. I don’tthink folks on the left realize how much damage it will do to them if Platner blows the Democrats’ chances of winning back the Senate.
What’s Going On
I wholeheartedly recommend this NYT interview with Scott Pelley about his departure from “60 Minutes.”
Zohran Mamdani endorsed 32-year-old DSA member, Darializa Avila Chevalier, in a contested primary against Rep. Adriano Espaillat, and it seems he didn’t do much vetting beforehand because it seems like every day there’s a new scandal about her past actions and tweets.
In the process, Mamdani has made a whole host of political enemies among elected Democrats.
Donors who financially supported Trump’s ballroom have won $50 billion worth of government contracts. What a coincidence!
Musical Interlude
Trump's nonstop sowing of distrust in electoral outcomes is so corrosive to a democracy. California needs to dedicate more resources to speeding up their vote count, but if they produced full results fifteen minutes after the polls closed, Trump and the right would still question the outcome, saying "there's no way to be able to determine the winner that quickly".
An under-discussed aspect of the unique awfulness of Platner's candidacy is that he's hardly the everyman he portrays himself to be, and the Collins camp will tee off on that, along with all the other red flags. He comes from privilege. He attended Hotchkiss prep. His parents bought him a home. His income from oyster fishing is de minimis, and appears to largely be derived from sales to his parents' restaurant. He's spent much of the last decade mingling in progressive circles in D.C. He's inauthentic and inorganic, and no matter how much facial scruff he's got, or how deep his voice is, it's unlikely he'll be able to outrun the facts.
I'm more troubled by the reactions of some "progressive" Democrats to Platner's candidacy than I am to him actually. They are ripping the mask off the misogyny on the left, the dismissive attitudes toward women, making hay out of the fact that the woman with the most incendiary (but far from only) claims about Platner has been a Republican operative. Sure, if that were the ONLY thing against him that might hold some water but it isn't. And I'm having flashbacks to when Bernie Sanders suggested it might be worth trading away some of women's reproductive rights to get Medicare for "all." Another reason so many women don't trust the Bernie Bros.
And with the amount of stuff that has come out against Platner, it's almost assured that more would come out once he was elected. What then? Al Franken was cut loose and pushed out of office for far less than a whole bunch of what Platner has been accused of (and as you said, has NOT taken accountability for). It really troubles me how dismissive these "progressive" firebrands are about people's (usually women's) qualms about Platner.
The Espaillet thing is head-scratching too. I assume there's one little thing they're hanging their attack on (did AIPAC spend money in his campaign? This seems to bother them excessively, even though AIPAC's spending is independent of the candidate). Espaillet is ranked one of the most progressive members of the House with progressive scores of 97%-more than 98% according to Progressive Punch, higher than Ilhan Omar or Ayanna Pressley, of the sainted "Squad." (He's tied with Valerie Foushee whom some "progressive"groups are also trying to defeat in her primary, but white male progressives are notorious for disrespecting Black women.)