Post midterms might feel different. First time they’re really not locked in with him? Plus yeah you know…

When I went on and talked AI in the law Joe nearly choked over saying my Bluesky handle.

That’s fair re 2018 though I think LePage is still underrated. He was the incumbent Governor and he’s going to maybe win ME-02 again this year. And of course Maine had just come off an election where it was right of the country!

But re Mills, one reason her polling is bad in the approval polls is a lot of progressives and socialists all say they don't like her now that there's a primary and they like Platner, honestly kind of similar to Collins's negatives.

"past electoral performance is correlated to future electoral performance but the correlation isn't perfect" doesn't seem like too much of a stretch.

Yeah this is wrong

One of Gideon's problems in 2020 was that a lot of people thought she was too mean to Collins and the swingy voters in Maine have tended to like her over the years (which is how she overperforms).

Yeah and Kevin is the guy saying that the company had no revenues and the stock was worthless and then mocking people for selling too soon.

But yes the vote that will fail will be in every ad next fall and it will work.

All valid! They totally fucked up a shockingly good spot. And chuck is just not a caucus leader but a blame minimizer. Bad bad bad.

I too wish Americans cared as much about obvious authoritarianism than ACA tax credits and increased beef prices but well they don’t. Stop screeching that Dems just need to talk about the bad stuff more and learn the shutdown lessons, raising health care salience is good!

So spare me the claim that the people who complain about Dem leadership constantly are consistent when they won’t acknowledge the success of the shutdown was about pivoting to health care the thing everybody says is lame and boring and dumb. It is and it works and we should do it more.

The whole reason the shutdown worked and they should have kept going was because they did an incredible job making it about our most popular issue and not about democracy or any of the way less popular (very important) things people like Kruse (and most of this site!) were demanding.

I’ve seen a number of people say Kruse was consistent and that’s the issue. He is consistent in believing what Dems asked for was stupid and in believing giving up was stupid. He was just wrong about the first point and there’s no admission that on the substance of the shutdown they nailed it.

Watching a break and nobody running in behind is maddening. Watching a turnover and nobody moving to make space is maddening. Yes too many guys were out of position last year but good lord.