If you want to get an idea of how Maine’s Democratic voters can support a guy who wore a Nazi tattoo and engaged in other types of dodgy behavior, look no further than this piece from The Bulwark.
The news site, which is the premier anti-Trump publication founded by the weirdos at The Lincoln Project, published a piece in which author Sarah Longwell explains that they planned to do a full podcast episode on how Maine’s Democrats feel about Gov. Janet Mills and her Democratic primary opponent Graham Platner.
But, since Mills dropped out of the race last week, they decided to hone in on how Democrats in the state could support a guy who wore a Nazi tattoo and has had numerous scandals come to light over the campaign season.
Not only did the candidate sport a Nazi tattoo, he also referred to himself as a “communist” in Reddit forums, called police “bastards,” described rural white people as racist, and argued that women worried about rape should not get so intoxicated that they “wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to.” He also peddled in racial stereotypes about black Americans, which is something that is anathema to self-respecting liberals.
Yet, it appears a wide swath of Democrat voters are willing to overlook what would be cardinal sins if Platner had an “R” next to his name. One voter said she liked Mills, but her age was an issue. Another criticized the governor because she was pushed into running for Senate by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), a key member of the party’s establishment faction.
As for Platner, Democratic voters in Maine are apparently drawn to his “oyster-farmer aesthetic and ‘not a regular politician’ energy,” according to The Bulwark.
The piece suggests that Democratic voters are looking for candidates who are authentic — even if they are authentically trash. “The controversies about the Nazi symbols and the Reddit posts seem very in line with someone from Downeast who’s lived in a small town their whole life, went to the military, never really got exposed to a lot of outside larger worldview thinking,” one voter told The Bulwark. She indicated that she’s “willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that it was a mistake, and I really appreciate that he has been upfront about it.”
Another addressed the tattoo issue by saying, “I’ll take him for his word and just chalk it up to something he truly wasn’t aware of” and that “when people are younger, sometimes they do things that they might…not necessarily regret later in life.”
One voter gave a more honest assessment: “It actually might be good that he’s going to bring in people who don’t believe in political correctness.”
So, in essence, these people don’t care about his past controversies. He’s younger than 70 and has a pugilistic attitude, past scandals be damned.
I could have summed this up without writing a whole piece on it like The Bulwark. Maine’s Democrats are voting for Platner because he’s a Democrat. That’s it. No other reason. As I suggested previously, if he were a Republican, they would be going through thousands of pairs of pearl necklaces from clutching them so hard.
But, as is often the case in politics, people don’t mean what they say. The merely take the position that helps their political tribe.
