Elections between two contestants in America, especially national elections, tend to be very close. This wasn’t always the case (Reagan beat Mondale 58-41), but the modern-day presidential election result is expected to be something like 52-48. And while one of the parties will sometimes have “control” of multiple branches of the fedgov, it tends to be by a similarly narrow margin lately; the last time the Senate saw something like a 60-40 split was in 1977.

Many people have noticed this and think they have an explanation. Many of these explanations are cynical and therefore appeal to me, but I’m not sure which of them are closest to the truth; the most prevalent throughline, though, is that the elections keep being close because the people running and influencing them want them to be.

For the 2026 midterms, therefore, the Democrats have a problem. Donald Trump is an egotistical tyrant, shameless crook, blithering idiot, incessant bullshitter, and probable pederast;¹ a lot of people are sick to the teeth of him, his enablers, and the white-nationalist base they’re trying to cultivate; and the Republican party in general is so fucking worthless that the Dems will have to work at getting a close result.

…or they would have had to, if they weren’t also completely fucking worthless. Case in point: they’re framing the elections as an existential struggle against resurgent Nazism… and running their own Nazis.

 

“My” senator is Susan Collins, a lifelong pol who got a college degree in government in 1975, became a government staffer the same year, and has never left.² The rap on Collins is that she’s pure moderate Establishment, more inclined to “go along to get along” with whoever’s in power than to advocate strongly for anything.

She’s up for reelection again next year, and there are currently two Dems in the running to be her opponent. One of them is Janet Mills, who made the news a time or two telling Trump to stick it… but she’s older than Collins and, after a brief stint as a CNA, has been in government about as long. She’s also a career-long moderate. And much of the Dem Establishment, still puzzled over how it lost to Trump twice,³ is being advised by professionals that today’s voter wants someone younger, hipper, more relatable…

Meet Graham Platner, He’s younger than I am and has at least a little working-class cred, and he got into the race before Mills stopped waffling about it, so he had at least a little energy.

He also had a series of “unfortunate” social-media posts, like calling rural white people (AKA the overwhelming majority of Mainers) “racist and stupid” and also some things about black people not tipping and rape victims just being too drunk to say no. He deleted the posts and explained that it was a long time ago, when he was a young whippersnapper with PTSD and a taste for trolling. (Some of those posts were from 2021. What’s changed?)

But that wasn’t the big scandal. No, that came when he admitted to some podcasters that he had a Totenkopf tattoo on his chest. Combined with the more bigoted parts of the previous scandal, a lot of people took that to mean Platner was a card-carrying Nazi.⁴

His explanation for that one was that noooo, of course he wasn’t a Nazi; he got drunk once in 2007, decided to get a tat, and picked one off the tattoo parlor’s display wall that he thought looked cool without knowing what connotations this particular skull and crossbones had. And anyway, now that he knew, he’d had it covered up…

…with a wolf that’s just swallowed the world. What is it with these people and Norse mythology?

The Dem Establishment, exemplified by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, is reportedly still for him. And at least some members of the lefty base are falling over themselves trying to handwave this all away as “in the past” (as opposed to the tattoo he’ll get in the future?⁵), “it’s a Celtic wolf” (because of whatever that half-finished mixture of a pentagram and a Trinity knot on Fenrir’s belly is supposed to be, I guess), and whining about “purity tests” (because in an existential struggle against resurgent Nazism, we should be eager to vote for their Nazi).

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1. That’s a mouthful; I often shorten it to “assclown.”
2. I was tempted to make a wisecrack here about how Collins used to be a senator for Massachusetts because Maine wasn’t a state yet, but at time of writing, I’m not really in the mood for jokes.
3. My theory is: they ran bad candidates. Hillary Clinton had maybe 80% of Bill Clinton’s corruption and 1% of his charisma. Biden was the incumbent, sure, but his brain was also starting to liquefy. And not only could Harris not be bothered with campaigning, some of her more energetic supporters (Wolz comes to mind) were restrained from campaigning on her behalf. It’s like she felt getting votes was beneath her… or she knew she wouldn’t withstand close scrutiny and hoped “I’m not Trump” would be enough.
4. Believers in the horseshoe theory will not be surprised at all that Platner used to call himself a communist.
5. A double lightning bolt, perhaps?