Dems in array

Maine Democrats have quickly coalesced around Troy Jackson:

A process to choose a new Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine that began as a messy free-for-all has turned into a coronation for Troy Jackson, a progressive in the mold of Graham Platner, who was forced from the race 12 days ago.

Over the weekend Mr. Jackson’s supporters swept the county meetings to select delegates to the state convention, according to the slate released by his campaign, seizing command of the two-week sprint to choose an opponent for Senator Susan Collins, the state’s five-term Republican incumbent.

The gatherings provided quick clarity to a state convention that could have been chaotic and spared Maine Democrats myriad risks inherent with standing up a nomination process in less than three weeks.

Mr. Jackson, a former state lawmaker, built such an imposing advantage on Saturday that he delivered what amounted to a victory speech on Sunday morning before the day’s delegates were selected.

[…]

Such was the scale of Mr. Jackson’s victories at the Saturday meetings that before any Sunday sessions began, his chief progressive rival, Shenna Bellows, the Maine secretary of state, ended her campaign. By dinnertime, the top moderate in the race, Dr. Nirav Shah, the state’s former public health director, also suspended his campaign and endorsed Mr. Jackson, as did Dan Kleban, a local beer magnate, and Jordan Wood, a former congressional aide.

I don’t know how this would work out, but better a consensus than a messy convention producing a raft of DEMS IN DISARRAY. And while Jackson far from a dynamic speaker, the same is true of Susan Collins and Angus King — I would pretend to know what works there.

If you’ll forgive me for being petty, someone on bluesky found this bit of comedy gold from Freddie DeBoer, which is even more hilarious now:

The essence of ratfucking is not that the damaging material is necessarily false. It’s that the sabotage is engineered – sourced, timed, and laundered through credulous media intermediaries to produce an outcome that the saboteurs could never achieve openly. By that definition, the cascade of media revelations now engulfing Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner is as pure and plain a case of ratfucking as I can remember… and almost certainly engineered by the Democratic establishment, which cares more about control of the party than winning the Senate. (The Iron Law of Institutions wins again.)

Note the subtle redefinition of “ratfucking” to include stories that are true — I guess if the term applies to Bob Woodward as much as Donald Segretti than every story about a candidate that a candidate would prefer not to have been published is “ratfucking.” But using the term as everyone else uses it, Graham Platner was not “ratfucked.” The many negative stories about him were just standard journalism. There is no evidence of “coordination.” And it’s disgraceful to accuse Jenny Racicot and Lyndsey Fifield of being part of a dirty tricks campaign without a shred of evidence. This argument is like when defenders of Brett Kavanaugh would say that the charges have to be ignored because “they” say it about “everybody.” Except, of course, that “they” didn’t say it about Sam Alito, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, etc. etc. Similarly, many people with Graham Platner’s policy views have run for office without generating stories about their Nazi tattoos and offensive Reddit posts and mistreatment of women because the stories about Platner are journalism, not “ratfucking,” and they were genuinely damning.

Needless to say, Jackson emerging as the consensus candidate makes this just-so story even more ridiculous. The DEMOCRATIC ESTABLISHMENT did a RATFUCKING of Graham Platner so that they could run — someone with a much more credible commitment to Platner’s nominal policy views. We’re through the looking glass, people! And as for the idea that this is because the “establishment” doesn’t care about beating Republicans but only about factional disputes, leaving aside that Platner was out of money, running a terrible general election campaign, and losing to Collins before the story that finally compelled him to step down, this is a level of projection you rarely see outside of Trump himself.