In Maine, Democrat Senate candidate Graham Platner is mired in scandal as evidence of his horrible judgment keeps oozing into the public eye. In Texas, Democrat Senate candidate James Talarico seems like a space alien who’s trying to play a human on television.
The Democrats have elevated terrible candidates in a critical election year.
It’s not a surprise. To understand Platner and Talarico, understand Machaela Cavanaugh and Haley Stevens.
Cavanaugh, a Democrat state senator in Nebraska’s unicameral legislature, famously shut down much of a legislative session in 2023 by filibustering every bill over her opposition to a bill to end transgender child mutilation procedures. Finally allowing trans-focused legislation on puberty blockers and youth sports to reach the floor, she warned that the votes would be preserved in the legislative record: “I want the bloody hands recorded. This is a genocide.”
Stevens is currently running for Senate in Michigan, which is…interesting to watch.
Cavanaugh is departing, termed out of the Nebraska legislature. She gave her final speech as a state senator last month, which is sadly only available on Facebook. You can watch it here. To save you some time, here are a couple of screenshots that capture the flavor:
She thanks the therapist for keeping her “semi-sane,” which is generous.
A growing gender gap in American politics increasingly feminizes the partisan divide: men are more generally right, women more generally left. While political identity becomes more likely to split by sex, a second attribute in party choice becomes more interesting.
A 2020 Pew Research survey question looking at women between the ages of 18 and 29 “found that 56.3% of white liberal women in that age group answered yes when asked if a doctor had ever diagnosed them with a mental health condition.” Meanwhile:
The other groups disappear in that screenshot because they’re so much lower on the chart.
Christopher Rufo and Joshua Slocum have described the emergence of a “Cluster B society,” centered on a cluster of personality disorders that lead to “frenzy, moral theatrics, emotional volatility, self-indulgence, and outbursts of violence.” Helen Andrews has described the “Great Feminization,” in which the things we think of as wokeness are just the transition from male-run to female-dominated institutions.
They’re fishing in the same pond. We increasingly have a competition between a “making arguments” politics and a culturally feminized “displaying feelings” politics, with an undercurrent of status signaling in the latter category. Democrats are just AWFUL. And they know it.
So they went looking for someone in Maine who could seem “working-class dude,” and in Texas put out a casting call for someone who could seem sort of religiousy and reassuringly pastorish, doing some God-sounding stuff for the cameras. Here’s the Bangor Daily News on the work to find the Democrat to challenge Republican Sen. Susan Collins in Maine: “It was part of a union effort to find a Democrat who can appeal to working-class voters the party has shed over the past decade.”
They went appeal-shopping. What do working-class voters find appealing? Uh…forearm tattoos and a hooded sweatshirt? We found one! (The press is here, can we have it drink a beer?)
The crazy lady party went looking for bodies that could seem to occupy the category of “normal man,” which is like asking a halibut to pick the most ordinary grizzly bear. The one category doesn’t know the other category, more or less by definition.
Democrats are trying to find men who can seem the most: seem like a pastor, seem like a working man. This is how you end up with a “seminarian” standing in front of an altar and making the faith-based argument that trannies need lots of abortions.
Being is easier than seeming, but they can’t. They have no ability to make the most basic judgments in this category. The party that thinks masculinity is toxic isn’t able to choose normal men as candidates, because they have no idea what that is.
So they’re stuck with whatever this is, which is just fine.
