This edition of PN is made possible by paid subscribers. Become one ⬇️
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.
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.
It was clear as Platner staggered from repulsive revelation to repulsive revelation that he was going to have serious trouble defeating perpetually concerned Republican incumbent Susan Collins. But even when Platner was finally forced out of the race, pundits continued to insist Democrats would not be able to unite around a replacement.
On the left, David Dayen at the American Prospect claimed that the 600-person nominating convention for Platner’s replacement was insufficiently representative and “could easily torch whatever remaining goodwill exists between the party and supporters brought into Platner’s campaign.” After progressive and former Maine Senate Majority Leader Troy Jackson looked on his way to win the nomination, The Hill’s right-wing opinion goons popped up to declare he was “a controversial populist with a checkered and divisive past rather than a moderate who could draw broad support.”
Maine Democrats had alienated the left; they had alienated the center. The party was doomed in Maine! Alas!
Or, you know, maybe that was all nonsense.
Jackson strolled to an easy win at the convention, and then basically every Democrat and labor union in the state lined up to endorse him. Former vice president and 2024 presidential candidate Kamala Harris endorsed him and left-wing Sen. Bernie Sanders praised him. It sure seems like both the left and the mainstream Democratic Party are happy to have jettisoned the mess that was Platner and are pleased with his replacement.
Voters are happy too. Jackson has never trailed in a poll against Collins since he became the candidate. FiftyPlusOne currently rates the race as Lean Democrat and gives Jackson a 69 percent chance to win. [Editor’s note: Polling numbers cited in this piece are current as of August 31.] The outcome is still far from certain and it’s worth remembering that Collins won in 2020 despite bad polling heading into Election Day. But the more likely outcome at the moment is the one you’d expect in a blueish state in a blue wave year.
After stepping in it with the Platner nomination, the Democratic Party found a better candidate and just quietly united behind him — because everyone wants to crush Susan Collins and win the Senate.
Michigan
Now that Maine is no longer providing juicy disarray for Dems, the punditocracy has moved on to Michigan.
The Senate primary there was bitter. One of the major divisions in the Democratic Party currently is over Israel. Abdul El-Sayed, a former Wayne County health director, has called Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide (in line with the scholarly consensus) and has said he wants to end US military aid. His opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens, is an enthusiastic Zionist and received $32 million from AIPAC, a pro-Israel lobbying group. There was much breathless speculation that whoever became the nominee, the party would struggle to unify for the general election.
But after El-Sayed narrowly won, Stevens immediately and enthusiastically endorsed him, pointing out that his Republican opponent, former congressman and current election denier Mike Rogers, “is going to continue to rubber-stamp Donald Trump’s chaotic agenda.”
Former president Barack Obama — one of the most popular figures in the Democratic party — reached out to El-Sayed to offer support. James Carville, a former Bill Clinton advisor associated with the party’s center-right, criticized El-Sayed during the campaign but swiftly endorsed him after his victory, calling Mike Rogers a “clown.” Kamala Harris endorsed El-Sayed too. So did Bernie Sanders and other left leaders. So did dozens of state electeds, along with the UAW, the Michigan AFL/CIO, and Planned Parenthood.
It’s true that pundits and to some extent pro-Israel Zionists have continued to argue that El-Sayed can’t win, and/or to try to undermine him in order to weaken him. Many have focused on Hasan Piker, a left-wing streamer who endorsed El-Sayed in the primary. Piker often says inflammatory things (as streamers do) and his critics also take him out of context. Most recently, a conversation in which he argued that Zionist propaganda can increase antisemitism has been presented (duplicitously) as an antisemitic diatribe, though this is a point also made made by many progressive Jews (including me).
El-Sayed is understandably not interested in parsing the ins and outs of the comments of a streamer without much of a national profile as part of his campaign, and he’s distanced himself from Piker. Other Democrats, like House leader Jeffries, have rebuked Piker as well.
But pundits like Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic have not been assuaged. Chait claims that El-Sayed’s association with Piker presents Democrats with a “grim choice” in November — as if Piker, who is notably not running for office, is as much of a threat to the country as Donald Trump, a raging authoritarian fascist who says grotesquely antisemitic garbage all the time. A small group of Jewish Democrats have declared their support for Mike Rogers — though the Israeli government is now so unpopular with the Michigan electorate that they have largely avoided explaining that Rogers’s support for military funding for Israel is the main reason they endorse him.
Given all of this smoke, you’d think that El-Sayed’s campaign was on fire. But it’s not. On the contrary, he, like Troy Jackson, is polling fine. FiftyPlusOne rates the race currently as Lean Democrat, giving El-Sayed a 65 percent chance of winning. A big part of the reason for El-Sayed’s lead is a factor that national media hardly ever mentions: Mike Rogers is a Trump lackey who is very unpopular. A recent poll puts his favorability at 11 points underwater, while El-Sayed’s favorability is at plus 1.
National media is trying to convince the public that El-Sayed is a scandalous unqualified candidate like Platner, and/or that his party is as divided about his candidacy as Democrats were about President Biden the month before he decided not to seek reelection in 2024. But neither of those things is true. El-Sayed has solid support among elected Democrats and Democratic-aligned groups in Michigan and beyond. Based on the polling, most voters do not care about Hasan Piker, probably because most of them don’t know who he is.
“This is about Donald Trump’s disastrous policies in Michigan. That’s what I’m focused on right now,” El-Sayed said recently. The vast majority of Democrats, and what looks like a majority of people in Michigan, agree with him. That doesn’t fit the disarray narrative. But it nevertheless appears to be true.
And everywhere else
Other states aren’t getting as much attention, but that’s mostly because if you’re looking for Democratic disarray, there’s precious little of it around.
In Wisconsin, after a divisive and chaotic gubernatorial primary, mainstream Democrat David Crowley defeated left challenger Francesca Hong, who quickly endorsed him. Crowley has led in every poll since he got the nomination.
In Florida, Nixon scored a surprising electoral upset against establishment candidate Alex Vindman. Vindman immediately endorsed her and shared most of his massive campaign fundraising haul to help Democratic candidates in Florida and nationwide.
In Texas, Jasmine Crockett, who lost the nomination to James Talarico, has been an embarrassingly sore loser and has said she won’t campaign with him. But Kamala Harris, who initially supported Crockett, has endorsed him. Talarico is blowing the doors off in fundraising, tripling his Republican opponent Ken Paxton’s haul in the second quarter. He’s also polling better than even in perennially red Texas, with a 55 percent chance to win according to FiftyPlusOne.
Meanwhile, Republicans are a mess. The clearest example is in Texas, where Trump endorsed the stunningly corrupt Paxton over incumbent John Cornyn because he had a grudge against Cornyn for occasionally displaying a smidgen of independence. Because of petty grievances, Trump put the seat, and the Senate, within the reach of Democrats.
Meanwhile, in Ohio, Sen. Bernie Moreno has denounced Rep. Max Miller, his former son-in-law, who has been accused of abusing Moreno’s daughter and granddaughter. But Miller refused to drop out of the race in a red seat that it looks like he’s going to lose, and now Republicans across the state and country are being asked if they plan to keep his campaign donations.
By all rights, Jonathan Chait and Gayle King and Michelle Cottle should be writing about Republicans being in disarray. Again, though, the mainstream media loves to talk about Democratic division. In some cases that’s because they dislike Democrats and would prefer that Republicans win. More often it’s because they want to do both sides coverage, and “Dems in disarray” is an easy way to talk about something other than the horrors Republicans are inflicting on the country.
But just because the media has gotten a narrative in its craw doesn’t mean it has any relationship to reality. In Maine, in Michigan, in Texas, in Wisconsin, in Texas, in Florida, and across the country, Democrats are determined to hand Trump and fascism a massive defeat in November.
Winning is never guaranteed, and the election is not over till it’s over. But right now, Democrats are overwhelmingly favored to win the House. They have a better than even chance to win the Senate where victory seemed all but impossible only a year ago. Given all that, it sure doesn’t look like it’s Democrats who are in disarray.
That’s it for today
We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.
Thanks for reading, and for your support.
Thank you for the upbeat reality check and helping to keep me focused. Eyes on the prize... CRUSH MAGA and ignore those so-called pundits!
Thank you for the clear-headed run down on these races.