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Can Maine Democrats Beat Susan Collins? · Political Junkie Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm very concerned about the president's comments.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: The peaceful transition of power is a fundamental tenant of a democracy,
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: and the president should not be creating any doubt about whether
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  SPEAKER_00: or not he would accept the results of the election.
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  [music]
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  SPEAKER_02: Hey, Political Junkies.
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  SPEAKER_02: Our opening clip today is from a 2020 interview with Susan Collins,
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  SPEAKER_02: the Republican senator from Maine, up for re-election this November.
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  SPEAKER_02: In the interview...
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  SPEAKER_02: She expresses, quote,
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  SPEAKER_02: concern about then-President Donald Trump's remarks that he would not accept
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  SPEAKER_02: the election results if he lost.
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  SPEAKER_02: People often mock Susan Collins for how often she expresses her concerns and
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  SPEAKER_02: then goes ahead and casts the wrong vote anyway.
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  SPEAKER_02: But she's really popular in Maine.
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  SPEAKER_02: And the recent fracas with Graham Plattner's candidacy,
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  SPEAKER_02: the collapse of that candidacy,
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  SPEAKER_02: and the Need to choose a new candidate is why you're getting this bonus episode of
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  SPEAKER_02: the Political Junkie podcast, Can Maine Democrats Still Beat Susan Collins Edition?
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: I am joined today by Professor Amy Freed.
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  SPEAKER_02: She's the former John Mitchell Nickerson Professor of Political Science at
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  SPEAKER_02: the University of Maine and a former president of
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  SPEAKER_02: the New England Political Science Association.
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  SPEAKER_02: She has served as the policy advocate of the Rising Tide Center,
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  SPEAKER_02: which was funded by
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  SPEAKER_02: a five-year National Science Foundation Advanced Institutional Transformation Grant.
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  SPEAKER_02: She co-wrote that grant and she served as the co-principal investigator on it.
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  SPEAKER_02: She is also a prodigious substacker,
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  SPEAKER_02: an expert on Maine politics,
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  SPEAKER_02: and really the go-to for anyone wanting to know what's going on in Maine.
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  SPEAKER_02: Let me just say,
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  SPEAKER_02: Political Junkies,
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  SPEAKER_02: I think the substacks that focus on the local are crucial to our democracy.
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  SPEAKER_02: And I'm very,
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  SPEAKER_02: very grateful for all of the ways that Amy Freed has helped me understand
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  SPEAKER_02: the current situation in Maine and the chances that Democrats may or may not have
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  SPEAKER_02: of beating Susan Collins, how that can happen.
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  SPEAKER_02: So she's going to be an alternate delegate to the main convention
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  SPEAKER_02: that will pick this new candidate.
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  SPEAKER_02: I'm really excited to hear her reporting from the ground there.
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  SPEAKER_02: So without further ado, Amy Freed of the Political Sightlines Substack.
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  SPEAKER_02: Amy, can you tell our listeners a little bit about your Substack?
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  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
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  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I decided to start this Substack about a year ago,
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  SPEAKER_01: and I always knew I would be writing some about Maine politics,
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  SPEAKER_01: because I've lived in Maine since 1997, a long time ago.
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  SPEAKER_01: But I thought I'd write about other things as well.
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  SPEAKER_01: But somehow with everything that's been going on in Maine,
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  SPEAKER_01: particularly the Senate race,
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  SPEAKER_01: but also this interesting race in Maine's second congressional district,
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  SPEAKER_01: one of the few competitive
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  SPEAKER_03: House races really out there,
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  SPEAKER_03: because we have a Trump district with a Now
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  SPEAKER_03: a very conservative Democrat who's not running again.
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  SPEAKER_03: But anyway,
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  SPEAKER_03: I knew that I would be,
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  SPEAKER_03: I knew that I'd be writing about Maine some, but it seems like Maine has taken over.
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  SPEAKER_02: It certainly has.
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  SPEAKER_02: And last week, Neil Young and I talked about the implosion of the Graham Plattner campaign.
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  SPEAKER_02: Before that,
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  SPEAKER_02: and that was when the sexting scandal had come out,
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  SPEAKER_02: I wrote a post called Who's Afraid of Graham Plattner,
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  SPEAKER_02: in which I sort of talked about whether these sort of small things,
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  SPEAKER_02: the sexting, you know, was that a political issue or not?
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  SPEAKER_02: It turned out it was the tip of the iceberg.
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  SPEAKER_02: It turned out there's a lot more bad stuff out there.
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  SPEAKER_02: Which a number of conservative political consultants told me on X.
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  SPEAKER_02: I mean, they said, you're wrong about this guy.
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  SPEAKER_02: There's more there.
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  SPEAKER_02: Which makes me think that actually some of these stories were more well known
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  SPEAKER_02: and more widely known than Democrats had imagined.
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  SPEAKER_01: Do you think so, Amy?
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  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's certainly possible.
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  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I heard various rumors over time as well.
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  SPEAKER_01: I think...
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  SPEAKER_01: That when this sort of news came out,
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  SPEAKER_01: whatever, the earliest controversies were the tattoo and the Reddit post.
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  SPEAKER_01: And Plattner had a whole narrative about how he had changed.
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  SPEAKER_01: He had worked through a lot of things in his life.
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  SPEAKER_01: He had a lot of anger.
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  SPEAKER_01: The tattoo he just attributed to being drunk in Croatia with a bunch of his buddies.
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  SPEAKER_01: But the posts were,
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  SPEAKER_01: you know,
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  SPEAKER_01: afterwards and He had PTSD,
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  SPEAKER_01: he was angry, but he had changed and really looked at himself.
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  SPEAKER_01: And he really created this whole redemption arc,
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  SPEAKER_01: which, you know, Americans like that sort of thing a lot, I think.
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  SPEAKER_01: Personally,
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  SPEAKER_01: it always seemed to me to have certain kinds of Christian overtones
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  SPEAKER_01: that I didn't necessarily relate to.
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  SPEAKER_01: But whether or not people were Christian or not,
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  SPEAKER_01: I mean, probably not, because Maine's a very secular state.
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  SPEAKER_01: But just it's in the water, right?
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  SPEAKER_01: It's culturally in the water, that view.
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  SPEAKER_01: And so a lot of people were willing to say, that's fine, that was in the past.
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  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, they could believe, you know, because they liked other things about him.
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  SPEAKER_01: They liked his energy, they liked his message.
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  SPEAKER_01: And he certainly was exciting people.
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  SPEAKER_01: Lots of people were going to the town halls,
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  SPEAKER_01: got tons of volunteers,
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  SPEAKER_01: And it fit upon a political moment when people are somewhat anti-establishment.
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  SPEAKER_01: And then also initially, really his major opponent was Janet Mills, who's 78 years old.
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  SPEAKER_01: So people don't want older politicians.
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  SPEAKER_01: So I think people were willing to let it go.
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  SPEAKER_01: I think what changed, and I really think when it started to change was the sexting story.
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  SPEAKER_01: There was the sexting story about these texts between him and his...
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  SPEAKER_01: And various partners after he got married.
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  SPEAKER_01: And then after that was the first story about abuse.
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  SPEAKER_01: But with the sexting story,
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  SPEAKER_01: I did start to see, even with that, some people pulling away from him.
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  SPEAKER_01: And then it got even more people were questioning him with the abuse stories.
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  SPEAKER_01: And then finally, this account of Jenny Rassacott about Her being raped by Plattner.
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  SPEAKER_01: And I think the big difference even before the final one was that we went
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  SPEAKER_01: from things that happened a while ago that were in words primarily, right?
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  SPEAKER_01: They were messages on Reddit and such to behaviors and they were more recent.
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  SPEAKER_01: Like all of those in the last five years.
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  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
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  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I agree with you.
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  SPEAKER_02: And I think it escalated in the ways you're saying.
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  SPEAKER_02: And on a certain level, the early scandals allowed us to become inoculated to later scandals.
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  SPEAKER_02: Like, you know,
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  SPEAKER_02: I thought, well,
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  SPEAKER_02: the Nazi tattoo,
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  SPEAKER_02: I've known a lot of troubled young men who've gone into the Marines.
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  SPEAKER_02: I've known a lot of troubled young men who've gotten weird tattoos when they were drunk.
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  SPEAKER_02: You know, Plattner doesn't have a whole lot of formal education.
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  SPEAKER_02: It seemed plausible to me that he really had thought that was just a tough guy tattoo.
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  SPEAKER_02: And then that level of believing and making excuses takes you to the next level of sexting.
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  SPEAKER_02: Well, you know, is this really something a voter should be concerned about?
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  SPEAKER_02: Isn't this something his wife should be concerned about?
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  SPEAKER_02: Two red flags that I think many people like me missed were One is that apparently
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  SPEAKER_02: in 2024,
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  SPEAKER_02: there was a Facebook post by Jenny Racico on a forum on Facebook where women sort
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  SPEAKER_02: of identify men that might be cheating on them or might be married and dating them
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  SPEAKER_02: and so on.
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  SPEAKER_02: And Jenny saw his picture and wrote the woman and said, this is a problem, PM me.
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  SPEAKER_02: And that was it.
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  SPEAKER_02: But the other red flag I think we missed,
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  SPEAKER_02: and this allows us to turn to your post this week about misogyny on the left,
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  SPEAKER_02: is that very early on, a woman who was very high up in the campaign resigned.
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  SPEAKER_02: Well, not very early on, but it was specifically around the sexting scandal.
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  SPEAKER_02: So while some of us...
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  SPEAKER_01: It was earlier, actually.
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  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
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  SPEAKER_01: All right.
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  SPEAKER_01: Genevieve McDonnell resigned in October after the Reddit post and the tattoo came out.
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  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
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  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
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  SPEAKER_02: So she resigned and that should have been a signal for the rest of us to step back
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  SPEAKER_02: and look a little more coldly at this, right?
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  SPEAKER_01: I think so.
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  SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
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  SPEAKER_01: one thing that's just talking about Maine
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  SPEAKER_01: and Maine politics is sometimes people say Maine is just a big, small town.
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  SPEAKER_01: Now, okay, I don't live super far from Genevieve McDonald.
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  SPEAKER_01: It's probably like an hour and a half away.
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  SPEAKER_01: But, like,
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  SPEAKER_01: I know people who know her,
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  SPEAKER_01: who was their representative, and they said to me, I really trust her.
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  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, things like that, people get these signals internally sometimes.
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  SPEAKER_03: Actually, very oddly, it turns out that someone I know knows Jenny Racicott.
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  SPEAKER_03: Jenny was her massage therapist, you know.
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  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
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  SPEAKER_03: So, I mean, there's just all of these, like, connections.
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  SPEAKER_03: And I think over time,
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  SPEAKER_03: people start kind of picking up on some of those if you are,
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  SPEAKER_03: you know, just a few connections away from folks.
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  SPEAKER_03: But I mean,
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  SPEAKER_03: Genevieve was upset about one of the things she was upset about is that
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  SPEAKER_03: the vetting was so poor.
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  SPEAKER_03: She said, I would have never joined this campaign if I knew they
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  SPEAKER_01: hadn't really checked him out.
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  SPEAKER_00: Right.
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  SPEAKER_01: And she was also upset because of the way she was being treated by the consultants,
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  SPEAKER_01: because even though,
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  SPEAKER_01: you know, they tried to have this flavor of it being very homegrown main campaign.
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  SPEAKER_01: Plattner was recruited from people from out of state and then that's
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  SPEAKER_01: who was really essentially running the campaign.
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  SPEAKER_02: Right.
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  SPEAKER_02: And there's a lot of money in political consulting.
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  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I know some political consultants and there are people who sort
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  SPEAKER_02: of routinely recruit candidates who they actually know aren't going to win because
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  SPEAKER_02: the fundraising,
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  SPEAKER_02: you know,
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  SPEAKER_02: if you raise $10 million, The political consultant gets about 25% off the top.
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  SPEAKER_02: The media people get another 25% and so on.
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  SPEAKER_02: So there's a lot of money passing through political campaigns to consultants.
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  SPEAKER_02: But this political consultant,
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  SPEAKER_02: and maybe you can remind us of his name, had also been close to Bernie Sanders.
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  SPEAKER_02: And he had been part of the Sanders movement since 2015.
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  SPEAKER_02: And we also have a memory of misogyny in the Sanders movement as well.
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  SPEAKER_02: And this guy apparently had been kicked off Summer Lee's campaign for sexually harassing people.
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  SPEAKER_02: So as we were all focused on should we or shouldn't we with Graham Plattner,
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  SPEAKER_02: there was maybe some other evidence we should have been looking at, right?
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there are a couple of people that came to do the recruiting.
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  SPEAKER_01: The one who had this,
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  SPEAKER_01: you know,
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  SPEAKER_01: sexual harassment thing from the other campaign is this guy named Daniel Maroff,
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  SPEAKER_01: and he was one of the two main recruiters.
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  SPEAKER_01: Interestingly,
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  SPEAKER_01: and he had been involved with Sanders and all with Fetterman and a number
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  SPEAKER_01: of other people.
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  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, Plattner wasn't even his first choice.
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  SPEAKER_01: They were first trying to get this guy who is a labor leader in Bath,
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  SPEAKER_01: Maine, where like these, it's a big yard where these naval ships are built.
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  SPEAKER_01: It's one of these things,
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  SPEAKER_01: which is very important kind of local part of the military industrial complex.
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  SPEAKER_01: And Susan Collins is always bragging about getting the contracts for Bath Iron Works.
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  SPEAKER_01: But it's also a place with very strong organized labor.
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  SPEAKER_01: And so they had tried to recruit initially this labor leader there.
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  SPEAKER_01: And they found something in its background.
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  SPEAKER_01: This was reported in Politico in December.
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  SPEAKER_01: They found something in its background they thought could be a problem,
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  SPEAKER_01: which evidently wasn't a real issue,
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  SPEAKER_01: they said, but they didn't want to take the chance.
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  SPEAKER_01: So then they decided to go find someone else and they ended up with Plattner.
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  SPEAKER_01: And they didn't have much time.
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  SPEAKER_01: Now, why didn't they have much time?
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: Because they had a schedule they wanted to follow.
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  SPEAKER_01: They wanted him to launch by Labor Day.
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  SPEAKER_01: So to launch by Labor Day, you then have to have, you know, make the launch video.
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  SPEAKER_01: You have to get some training.
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  SPEAKER_01: You have to get some of the legal stuff set up so they can start taking contributions.
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  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, it meant that they were kind of pushed up against their own self-imposed deadline.
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  SPEAKER_01: And they went ahead with him.
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  SPEAKER_01: And also, Moroff,
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  SPEAKER_01: who was part of this team,
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  SPEAKER_01: ended up,
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  SPEAKER_01: when he had his first conversation,
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  SPEAKER_01: after his first conversation with Plattner,
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  SPEAKER_01: called Mo Katz,
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  SPEAKER_01: who's another one of these consultants who's very involved in the Mondami campaign.
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  SPEAKER_01: And actually,
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  SPEAKER_01: the Democratic Socialists recently came out with a statement saying,
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: maybe this isn't a good guy to work with.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: Because he doesn't.
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  SPEAKER_01: He doesn't do things very well because they didn't really vet him.
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  SPEAKER_01: And maybe not all of this would come out,
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: but they did this super cheapo job where normally it takes at least
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_03: a month to do
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  SPEAKER_03: a full vetting.
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  SPEAKER_03: They create this whole big book of hundreds of pages.
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  SPEAKER_03: Your own campaign, vetting your own candidate.
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  SPEAKER_03: So you know what's in there.
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  SPEAKER_03: So you don't have any surprises.
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  SPEAKER_03: Or you could even decide not to run after that, I guess.
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  SPEAKER_03: But at least you know what's in the person's background.
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  SPEAKER_03: And instead of doing a month-long one that would cost at least $20,000,
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_03: they did a cheaper one that took three days and it cost about,
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_03: I don't remember, $4,500, something like that.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_03: So, I mean, that shows kind of an arrogance in a way and a lack of seriousness.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_02: Let's talk a little bit also about this fictional outsider who's supposed to be the magic man.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't remember this infatuation with outsider candidates really
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_02: until Donald Trump was so successful.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe there were some in the Tea Party in 2009, 2010, around that.
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  SPEAKER_02: But there is a kind of flip side
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  SPEAKER_02: The political consultant being sort of sketchy,
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  SPEAKER_02: which is when the candidate is not very experienced,
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  SPEAKER_02: people who have run other campaigns actually know what a good campaign looks like
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  SPEAKER_02: or what a good campaign doesn't look like.
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  SPEAKER_02: People who have worked in other people's campaigns, people who have been Senate aides.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_02: So there's that piece of it,
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_02: that Plattner himself may have had And he's clearly in denial about a lot of things.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_02: So there's that piece of it that we can just set aside.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_02: But he might have actually thought in all of his inexperience
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: that this didn't really matter,
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_02: that none of these things were really that important.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_02: He might have remembered them as not very important and sort of been very willing
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_02: to take the political consultant's Opinion that he had something special
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_02: that would override any other thing.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, do you think the political consultant even knew about these things?
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think there was a lot they didn't know,
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: but they should have known more because they should have done a serious job
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: in looking at his background and asking him questions.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: one thing that struck me about the sex thing story was that It was a few days after
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: the campaign launched when Graham Platner's wife,
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: Amy Gertner, told Genevieve McDonald about it.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, first of all,
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: they shouldn't have waited until after the campaign started to tell people.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: And it shouldn't have been up to the candidate and the wife to just volunteer.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: That should be something that someone running a campaign You know,
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: would ask about,
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: do you have a history of XYZ and go through a whole list and then have them tell you
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_01: about it and then you can decide what to do about it.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_02: And then,
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_02: the flip side of this is we have someone in the White House who has been convicted
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_02: by a civil jury.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_02: We have Ken Paxton.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_02: We have, you know, Matt Gaetz.
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  SPEAKER_02: We have any number of people about whom various ugly, sexual,
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_02: some of them illegal shenanigans,
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_02: certainly some of them immoral, have been revealed.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_02: One of the things I remember hearing from people is this phrase, HR lady politics.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_02: Like, you know,
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_02: Democrats are just too sensitive and Republicans let men get out there and be men
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_02: and the voters love it and the Democrats need to sort of adopt some of that.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_02: But in fact,
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_02: it looks like Plattner was leaking support even as he was winning that primary
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_02: by such big numbers, right?
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: These numbers did start going down in the matchups with Collins.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_01: Like he started out being often ahead by 8, 10, maybe even more points.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then by the time the primary came and then immediately after the primary,
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: it was much closer and there was even a poll with Collins ahead.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that really made a difference.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I heard a lot during the campaign,
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: people saying, well, there's Trump out there, so we shouldn't care about that.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: But I think There is actually a different ethic among at least a lot of Democrats
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_01: where it's not going to be acceptable to do this sort of thing.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: And people didn't know him that much.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I think a lot of people were worried about what was going to happen next.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: You know, what was going to come out next?
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: Because Plattner kept saying there's nothing more.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: There's nothing more than something new would happen.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: And people just really lost faith in him.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: I'd also say about that big primary win that
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: in some ways I think it's being misinterpreted because by the time
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: the primary happened, it was essentially an uncontested race.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: Janet Mills had suspended her campaign and there was one more person on the ballot,
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: David Costello, who was really not doing much of anything.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: You know, he really had almost no events.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: He didn't have much money.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_03: You know, like nobody, very few people knew about him.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_03: And then there was a write-in candidate who was trying to get, you know, some purchase.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_03: But how do you do that, really, when, you know, your name isn't even on the ballot?
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_03: And I saw news reports, both interviews on
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: video, you know, in print, and in print that...
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: From some voters who said, well,
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: I do have concerns,
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: but he's going to be the nominee and I'm going to, you know, vote for him.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: So some portion of the people who voted for him weren't necessarily hardcore Platinerites.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: And just putting my little political science head on,
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: there's some interesting research on what's called mandate construction,
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: which is like after an election,
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_01: The person who wins tries to make this whole case for why they win that's going
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_01: to be politically helpful for them.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: So like Reagan said, I won because people wanted tax cuts.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: So that's cut taxes.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: But in fact,
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: a lot of people voted for him because they were upset with the high energy prices
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: and inflation.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: It really, it wasn't like a really a big anti-tax movement.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: And in the same way,
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: Platt and his supporters have been like, Well,
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: he won because everybody supported everything he had to say,
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: and they supported him, some of them.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't think that's really quite right.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_02: Well, there is the charisma argument.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_02: And I remember listening to an interview that Plattner did with Lulu Garcia Navarro,
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_02: and I hadn't been that impressed with him.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_02: And I'd sort of thought,
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: well, fine, and this is Maine, and I don't have to be impressed with him.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_02: Then I listened to this interview and it was deeply and profoundly moving.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_02: And so he had something that...
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_02: Really got through to people.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_02: They got through to people like me.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_02: I remember him talking about his friends being blown up in Iraq and that particular moment.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_02: And he sort of started to cry and was very emotional.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_02: The video in which he dropped out of the race was extremely emotional.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_02: It was a little scary, but also extremely emotional.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_02: So he has something that a lot of male candidates don't,
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_02: which is the capacity of To really at least appear to be projecting
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_02: an authentic self.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_02: But there was also a problem with that, right?
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_02: In that he was being talked about as authentically working class when in fact
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_02: that wasn't really true, right?
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean there was a lot of discussion about that because...
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: And part of it got into what does it mean to be working class?
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_02: Which was sort of- Which Americans are very confused about,
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: I think.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely, absolutely.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: But I mean, yeah, I mean, he didn't come from a working class family, that's for sure.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: his father's an attorney,
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: his mother had been very involved in democratic politics and owns
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: a pretty upscale restaurant.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and then they tried to get him
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: In a way that we,
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: certainly all parents would want to, the best education they could for him.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: You know, first they sent him to fancy boarding school away.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: And then he came back and he went to this prep school in Bangor.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: But I will say the prep school in Bangor,
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: I think people sometimes overstate because a lot of people go to it
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: who aren't fancy people at all.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: Because a lot of people go to it for free.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you're in Maine and you don't have a local high school
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: in your school district, the state won't pay for you to go.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I remember that.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: Wasn't there a big court case about it at some point?
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: There was something, yeah,
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: because this always had to do with this
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_03: Christian school that didn't want
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_03: to hire gay people, basically.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_03: Right, right.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so there's that little bit of confusion.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_02: Nothing is adding up.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_02: And then let's sort of pivot back to your piece about misogyny on the left.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_02: Plattner,
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_02: in fact,
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_02: stayed alive as long as he did,
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_02: in part because so many People,
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_02: perhaps outside the state of Maine, were willing to tolerate Bad behavior from men.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know,
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_02: I remember at one point this phrase sort of popped up about Graham Plattner being
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_02: a bad boyfriend.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_02: And that was after the Lindsay Fiefeld revelations.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_02: And I thought, you know, that's actually not being a bad boyfriend.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_02: That's being a really screwed up and violent and scary person.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_02: So why are we saying he was a bad boyfriend?
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_02: So can you talk about this question of misogyny on the left a little bit?
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know,
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: as men in some ways,
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: young men moved towards the Republican Party a lot in the last election,
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: the last presidential election.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: Especially since then,
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_01: there's been a lot of interest in trying to figure out how to recapture them.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_01: Now,
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_01: one thing I can say to someone who follows polls is there's not that much you have
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: to do right now in some ways because those same young men who moved
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: towards Trump now can't stand Trump.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they've totally flipped.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_01: They've seen what he's done since he was reelected.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: But I think there still is an interest in trying to bring those folks into or back to the party
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: Although,
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: on the other hand,
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: it's like women have been kind of the Democratic base for a long time.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: Women moved to become more Democratic than men in 1980.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's how long ago it was, you know, when Reagan...
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_02: The gender gap.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's when we really got the gender gap.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: And it's this year that the Republican Party for the first time
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: in its platform Opposed Roe,
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: and also opposed
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_03: the Equal Rights Amendment,
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_03: which they had supported when it was first introduced in the early
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_01: 20th century.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: In any case,
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: there's been this sort of interest,
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: and I think some of it has been,
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_01: let's get someone with a particular kind of style,
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: with a certain kind of swagger, and that's going to be who's appealing.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_01: But I think it does go really over a certain line at points.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I did write a piece with that after that abuse story because Plattner went on
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: the Chris Hayes show and he gave that line about, I was a bad boyfriend.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_03: And I thought this is, he is just totally misunderstanding this.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_03: He needed to take like Women's Studies 101 or something
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_03: because He doesn't understand gendered violence and abuse,
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_03: and he doesn't understand how it affects women's lives.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_03: You know,
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_03: it's like,
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_03: which in a way,
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_03: I'm thinking of writing something about this,
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_03: by the way,
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_03: which is that,
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_03: you know, I feel like feminists used to talk a lot about what our experiences were.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_03: This is when I was like growing up as this young second wave feminist,
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_03: you know, whether it was consciousness raising groups or whatever.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_03: People talked about,
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: what it meant to live in a female body and how they got treated either,
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: you know, as a teenager, young woman, older woman by men.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: And that experience has included a lot of,
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: you know, sexual harassment and often too often some sexual assault.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: we women feminists founded Organizations like Rape Crisis Centers and Hotlines
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: and Bad Women's Children.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: Now a lot of that has become very institutionalized.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: I think a lot of the feminist movement is this kind
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_01: of professional institutionalized kind of movement.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: We focus either on policies or these other things are run by organizations.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: And somehow we've stopped talking so much.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: About the day-to-day experiences of women.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I think, you know, in a way, there's a lesson there for feminists about the plot.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think if it had been somewhat different,
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_01: if we had been,
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: if that had been a big part of the overall conversation and discourse,
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: maybe he would have been hearing that more and maybe it would have been
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: a little different.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: And we can't really say, but I do think about that.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_01: Because,
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_01: his campaign was,
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: Platner's campaign was so focused on class,
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: class inequality, the oligarchy, and then related policies to that.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: With some concentration on war and peace kinds of things.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: But mostly it had to do with,
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: like oligarchy,
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: Medicare for all,
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: things that we could be The population could be getting
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_03: if people would raise taxes
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_03: on the rich and decide to care about ordinary people.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_03: But he didn't he talked maybe once in a while a little bit about race
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_03: and really did not talk about women.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, when the anniversary of when there was the anniversary of Dobbs,
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_03: you know, the decision that overturned Roe came out, he did talk about abortion.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_03: And he was endorsed by Planned Parenthood Action.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_03: And so there was a little bit of time spent on reproductive rights.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_03: But overall, it started feeling very one note to me, to tell you the truth.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_02: And then,
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_02: of course,
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_02: it turns out that he's the guy who's also been accused of taking his condom off in
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_02: the middle of intercourse and thinking that that was really funny,
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_02: which, frankly, maybe it's because I'm gay.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_02: I've never heard of that before.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_02: It's just an awful and cruel and dangerous and disrespectful thing to do.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_02: But let me add some other cross-cutting themes here.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_02: One of the things I read was,
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_02: and you know,
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_02: we've got all of these great candidates who are popping to the top to do
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_02: the Kamala Harris thing, you know, six months and go.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_02: Including,
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_02: I get a lot of text messages from Troy Jackson,
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_02: so I assume he's sort of close to the top of the heap.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_02: But a lot of those people were stepped on by Chuck Schumer because he wanted Janet Mills.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_02: And so one of the cross-cutting themes here is age versus youth.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_02: And I am a great admirer of Janet Mills.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_02: I really am.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_02: I think how she stood up for trans kids to Trump and won is a lesson for all of us.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_02: She's obviously smart and a great fighter.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_02: She is 78.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I have very strong feelings about how old the Senate is.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_02: And we're seeing the Republicans are kind of suffering from that now,
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_02: having lost two of their most senior members to illness and death.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_02: But It never seemed to me like Janet Mills really wanted it, I have to tell you.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_02: And for a woman who had one statewide office,
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_02: who was obviously very popular with a range of Mainers,
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't feel like she had that campaign in her.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_02: Was that wrong?
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_02: Was it just an out-of-state kind of thing?
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, having watched her in two other campaigns, I do think she was different.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_01: You know, she got a late start.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_01: She could have declared much earlier and actually could have declared
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: before Plattner and created perhaps a different dynamic.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_01: She had declared a month after that whole confrontation with Trump to see you in court.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: She could have probably been like way, way ahead with everything.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_01: But she didn't do that.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: And then she took her time.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_01: And definitely there were a lot of people who were thinking of running.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure if the ones that are in it now are
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_03: those people.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_03: They claim they always wanted to be governor and not senator, but who knows?
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_03: But I know there were other people who were interested in running who didn't
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_03: because they were waiting for Janet.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_03: And then all of a sudden,
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_03: Plattner bursts upon the scene and it just kind of takes away everything.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_01: And then she didn't.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: Campaign terribly hard.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: She did a lot of very small events.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: And just, yeah,
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: she really didn't,
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_01: she really didn't push very much and she didn't push and she didn't remind people
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: of things that she had done, which I thought was kind of a problem.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: You can't expect these days for people to know.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: And there were some things that people on the left were unhappy with her about.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_02: Such as?
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_02: What were people unhappy about?
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, they were unhappy with her on labor issues where she had vetoed some bills.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_01: And also a really big issue in Maine is tribal sovereignty.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_01: And she had taken a lot of steps towards tribal sovereignty so
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: that there's more tribal sovereignty now than there was before she was governor.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_01: But The push was for full tribal sovereignty, and she didn't support that.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: And she had a kind of more legalistic reason about how there had been this agreement
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: that had been,
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_01: you know, signed years ago, really decades ago, and that we were acting within that.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_01: But that upset people a lot.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_01: And there were a lot of people on the left who called her racist because of it.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_01: So those two things really threw the entire campaign.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_01: But she also signed a really sweeping reproductive rights bill.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it had been pro-choice,
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_01: but this protected really up till when any doctor would say it's acceptable to have
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: an abortion, which meant that women who had situations where they had like...
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: Really dangerous pregnancies or pregnancies with non-viable
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_03: fetuses that were late
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_03: in a pregnancy could have abortions in Maine.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_01: So that was a big step.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_01: And then definitely on trans rights, very good overall, which
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_03: was very controversial.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_03: And the Maine Christian Civic League was like,
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_03: based on those two things,
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_03: was talking about Going out and getting signatures for referents to overturn them,
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_03: which they didn't end up doing.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_03: But it's not like those were like necessarily easy things to do.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_03: But even though she had done a lot of things like that
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_03: and sign like first Family Medical Leave Act into law,
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_03: state, you know, obviously state level.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_03: She had these other sorts of things.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_03: And a lot of unions were unhappy.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that is really part of how Platner came to be
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_03: because union people were interested in finding someone to run against her,
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_03: you know, if she was going to declare.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_02: So that's another fault line that actually explains the elevation of Platner in
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_02: a way that maybe people who aren't from Maine wouldn't understand very well.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_01: Let me just say something that I think ties that together
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: with something we've talked about before,
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: which is that obviously a lot of unions have women in the unions,
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: but with a base in a place like Bath Ironworks, it's a very male union.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_01: You have all these electricians and pipe fitters and such, you know, welders.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_01: Which tend to be men,
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_01: men more than like women in the,
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_01: let's say the main education association, another big union.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I think those people, maybe not, I don't know, I don't know them directly.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe I shouldn't say this,
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_01: but I don't think they really had women's issues on their mind as much.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: And when all of this started coming out,
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_01: like that bad,
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_01: when he said the thing about being a bad boyfriend,
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_01: I wrote a piece about how,
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_01: as I said,
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_01: he had to,
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_01: he should learn more about gendered abuse and harassment in women's lives.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: And there were some people who tried to get that to his campaign to get them to listen.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I had someone in the campaign who told me that she thought women in
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_01: the campaign felt the same way.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_01: But there just was no response to that.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_01: And somehow they were just coming from this perspective
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_01: where they didn't really think about those kinds of issues because they were
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_01: so focused on class.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I think labor rights was part of that.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_02: And also the phrase bad boyfriend is so trivializing.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's very different from saying I was a bad man.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_02: Saying you're a bad boyfriend kind of means, well, I was late to the restaurant all the time.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't open doors.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_02: I forgot the flowers.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_02: It really does trivialize the nature of these charges.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_02: I think what you're saying about labor is very interesting, too,
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_02: because,
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_02: of course,
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_02: one of the big struggles nationally over working class votes is
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_02: when Both parties say we're here for the working class.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_02: They really do mean white men.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_02: They don't mean Hispanic people.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_02: They don't mean black people.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_02: They don't mean women.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know,
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_02: there is one whole part of the labor movement of,
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_02: you know, Alan Berube wrote about this that was actually very pro-gay.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_02: And so we've seen a lot of really good queer politics coming up out of labor unions
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_02: so that if,
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_02: in fact,
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_02: you're saying this archetypical working class voter is really a white man or
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_02: a young white man who can't get the training to be a pipe fitter or something like
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_02: that.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_02: You're really not dealing with the history and in many ways, the present of labor, right?
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_03: So, so I want to, you know, Frances Perkins is from Maine.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_03: Right, right.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and Maine is a really interesting state in that regard
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_02: because they're different kinds of workers.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_02: There's the big maritime trade.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_02: There is the interior.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_02: There's the seasonal trade.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_02: There's,
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_02: that these workers,
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_02: and that's what I want to get to,
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_02: is a lot of people who I've been talking to about this race,
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_02: I think,
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_02: fundamentally misapprehend what Maine is and the political culture of Maine.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_02: Maine is not Connecticut.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_02: It's not even Massachusetts.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_02: Maine is a place that,
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_02: in my understanding and in my experience campaigning there for Sarah Gideon,
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_02: cares about Itself as a kind of state culture,
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_02: as a set of values that are organized as a state.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_02: And Susan Collins has been expert at mobilizing that.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I guess you would have to say is, I mean,
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_02: I know somebody who used to work with Susan Collins in the Senate who said,
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_02: you know, she's a really nice person and she's a really good person.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_02: And she's a really moral person.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I sort of thought if the worst thing they could think of to say
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_02: about Susan Collins was she started dating her husband before he had freed himself
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_02: from his previous wife,
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_02: you know, that really doesn't hold a candle to a Nazi tattoo.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_01: Sure, sure.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, when I moved to Maine,
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_01: which now is almost 30 years ago,
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_01: what people told me about Maine and
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_03: Maine political culture was
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_03: that it had this big emphasis on civility,
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_03: bipartisanship,
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_03: and that people like to be able to talk to each other and be kind of reasonable
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_03: with each other.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_03: And they liked people who would be respected nationally.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_03: And somewhat independent.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_03: People love that idea.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_03: So 1950s, Margaret J. Smith, a Republican, made a speech questioning McCarthyism.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_03: And she has all these things named after her.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_03: The federal courthouse in my town, Bangor, is the Margaret J. Smith administration.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_03: Courthouse and you walk in and there's a quote from her speech,
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_03: which they call the Declaration of Conscience speech,
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_03: which has to do with,
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_03: standing up for certain values and,
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_03: not giving way to,
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_03: fake scandals and calumnies and,
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_03: attacking people for no reason,
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_03: whatever, you know, it's like, it's, it's, it's,
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: that was a part of it.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_01: And then also,
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_01: Other Republicans in that vein,
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_01: Bill Cohn,
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_01: Olympia Snowe,
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_01: and Democrats or independents who caucus with Democrats kind of in the same vein.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's just kind of like calm, even-handed.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_01: You may not agree with them on everything, but they're willing to talk.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_01: And in a way,
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_01: I thought when Platt first came along that that might be a little bit of a problem,
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_01: that it was too hot for me.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_01: And Janet Mills actually fit that earlier model.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_02: Well, and it's interesting, this sort of misapprehension of Maine as a political culture.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_02: I remember when Plattner,
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_02: you know, when it was clear that Plattner had to drop out and he hadn't done it yet.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_02: But the New York Times wrote a piece in which they had three or four politicians
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_02: who they thought might be interested in this.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_02: And then there were a couple of businessmen.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_02: And then they had Patrick Dempsey and Heather Cox Richardson.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_02: And Heather's a doll,
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_02: but I knew pretty much, no, Heather Cox Richardson is not running for Senate.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_02: And then she put out a video explaining why she wouldn't.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_02: But I thought,
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_02: Only in New York would they think that the name recognition of a Patrick Dempsey or
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_02: a Heather Cox Richardson would be the thing that Maine voters were actually looking
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_02: for.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_02: So what do Maine voters want in the Senate candidate who is going to be picked by convention?
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_01: I think that there are some things they want that Plattner had.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_01: They want someone who's going to be aggressive.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_01: And is going to challenge the Trump administration.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_01: And they want somebody who will,
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_01: you know, again,
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_01: in the policy vein,
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_01: they want people who are going to stand up for policies like,
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_01: you know, try to get universal coverage.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, that's not something easy to do, but Medicare for all, something like that.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_01: You want to raise taxes on the rich.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_01: They want to preserve Social Security.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_01: They want to oppose lots of foreign wars.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_01: They want to do a lot of the same things that he said, without a doubt.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I think they also want somebody who,
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_01: in some ways, is going to run a campaign like Plattner, with lots of town halls.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_01: Because it is true,
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_01: the kind of thing that he did in terms of always getting out there,
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_01: talking to voters, we really had not seen anything like that.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's also very rare nationally,
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_01: because really the only person I can think of who at least I knew something
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_01: about doing that was
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_03: Beto O'Rourke in Texas when he ran,
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_03: I think for Senate it was also,
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_03: because he did a lot
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_01: of big events, rallies, but with Q&As.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_01: So they want someone who's going to be accessible,
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_01: come off as strong,
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_01: but it also may be that being less intense,
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_03: And also having a little more,
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_03: experience and knowledge would be helpful because that is something I think
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_03: that tends to be good for like really the swing voter in Maine,
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_03: which instead of being the young man who's disaffected by politics is
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_03: an older woman,
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_03: either working class or even if they get paid well for a job,
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_03: it's like, you know, like they're nurses, something like that.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like a very like practical day-to-day job.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone knows what that job is.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_01: And they want,
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_01: they have tended in the past folks like that to like Susan Collins,
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_01: to know Susan Collins.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_01: And they realized that they would be losing some seniority if she's replaced.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_01: On the other hand, her popularity has gone down.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I think someone has an opportunity If they can both keep the strength
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_01: that Plattner had in terms of energy, but also get some of those voters.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_01: By the way,
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_01: the last New York Times-Siena poll before Plattner dropped out,
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_01: which had him ahead only by two points, he was only winning 4% of Trump voters.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not like he was really doing what he said he could do.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_01: While Collins was winning 10% of Kamala Harris voters.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_01: So like if someone could do as
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_03: well as Plattner,
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_03: but pick away at more of those Harris voters, they really can win.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_02: Well, and that was my experience when I was campaigning for Sarah Gideon six years ago.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_02: Is that I would talk to voters who would say,
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_02: oh, of course I'm voting for Joe Biden and I'm voting for Susan Collins.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_02: So there were all of these ticket splitters.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_02: And actually they didn't dislike Sarah Gideon.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_02: They were nice about her.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_02: But the big line was she's not from Maine.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_02: She just moved here 20 years ago and she's not from Maine.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_02: And Susan Collins is really from Maine and she really gets us.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_02: But so I guess I want to end on this question.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_02: I can't imagine what the attack line is on Susan Collins.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, we've hung Brett Kavanaugh around her neck.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think that really grabs people anymore.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_02: What is the attack line on Susan Collins?
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think it's got to be that she's not the Susan Collins you liked before,
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_01: that she's done good things.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_01: But she's not the same person,
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_01: which is a very different tone than Susan Collins is a bad person,
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_01: which I think is kind of the Plattner line.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's more like in sadness than in anger.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_01: She's not the same person.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_01: She's voting with Trump 95% of the time.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_01: She said she would have so much power when she was chair of
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_01: the Senate Appropriations Committee,
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_01: and yet she doesn't because she let, you know, Let them run roughshod.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_01: She put this guy into power at the OMB who didn't really believe
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_01: that Congress has any power and that President should run everything.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_01: She voted for him.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_01: She voted for all these terrible people.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_01: So she's not really using her power the way she said she would.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so even though, yeah,
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_01: you can keep running all these ads about how Susan Collins got money for
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_01: a firehouse here and there, did this little thing.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_01: But in the big picture, she's not doing what she should.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, and the truth is like she did like with the one big,
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_01: but it's complicated because she does so many different things simultaneously.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_01: So she voted for the one big, beautiful bill to proceed, but then she voted against it.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_01: But before she voted against it,
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_01: she got a little bit of money in it for this rural hospital fund,
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_03: which is much less.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_03: Than what they're losing under the bill.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_03: But then she runs ads about how she got all this money for rural hospitals.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_03: And then when people say, well, but she's responsible for the one big, beautiful bill passing.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_03: One of the fact checkers came out and said, no, she's not because she voted against it.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_03: But she did vote for it to proceed.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_03: So it's very hard sometimes.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_03: She can be very, very slippery.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I think when debates happen, she will pull that sort of thing.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I think with Kavanaugh, it is an old story.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_01: On the other hand,
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think the way to frame that is about that she either completely misjudged him,
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_01: so she has poor judgment, or she was not honest about what she thought.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_01: Neither of them are not good.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_01: You know?
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_02: All right, Amy.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_02: Well, we're going to see how this one turns out.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_02: It's very exciting to have a Maine race nationalized in this way.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's, I'm not sure it's ever happened.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_02: But Amy, I hope you'll come back on the show sometime.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_02: It's always a pleasure to talk to you.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_03: Great to be here.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_03: Take care, Claire.
• 50:37
  Thank you.
• 50:48
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• 50:52
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• 52:14
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, Susie Q. Oh, Susie Q. Oh, Susie Q. Oh, I love you, my Susie Q. Susie Q. Susie Q.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_00: I was born in destruction, born to survive, born in a place that you don't make it out alive.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_00: They thought it was over,
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_00: thought I was dead, but you can't kill a man that was born to be born again.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_00: We'll be right back.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_00: Get the best of me, you see.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'll be damned if I ever left the end to me.
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_00: Get the best of me, you see.
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_00: I was born in a struggle, born to survive, born in a place that you don't make it out alive.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_00: They thought it was old,
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_00: thought I was dead, but you can't kill a man that was born to be born again.
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_00: Can't kill a man,
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_00: can't kill a man that was Born to be born again Can't kill a man,
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_00: can't kill a man that was Born to be born again Can't kill a man,
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_00: can't kill a man that was Born to be born again