Today on Rural Weekly LIVE, I sat down with John Ray and Joe Sudbay to talk through the flood of news that we’ve been watching over the last seven day.
First, Trump embarrassed himself at NATO, then Mitch McConnell has apparently vanished. And the Maine Senate race blew up in a way that has lessons for everyone who cares about how Democrats pick candidates.
Joe kicked off the conversation with a rundown of everything we’re watching. Trump went to Turkey for a NATO meeting, threatened to end trade with Spain, brought up Greenland again, and made it clear he had no idea what was in his own ceasefire agreement. The Qatar plane story is back because now he actually has the plane. The Secret Service wouldn’t even let him fly home in it.
And then there’s McConnell. An ambulance came to his house a month ago and nobody has seen him since. Scott Jennings says he talked to him. Fine. Get him on the phone. The people of Kentucky are paying his salary and they deserve representation. It feels like a cover up, and an entire political party is pretending there’s nothing to see.
It’s starting to seem like Trump and MAGA Republicans will never actually face consequences for anything. But, John pushed back and reminded us that a year and a half ago, Trump would have gotten away with most of this. When his approval was in the 50s, deploying the Guard read as strength. Injecting himself into the World Cup red card read as standing up for America. Now his numbers are in the 30s, and the same behavior reads as insanity.
John pointed out that today, whenever ICE is in the news, it is losing. Every ICE story for the past year has been bad news for this administration. That’s why they’ve been trying to get ICE off television. Our job is to not let these stories fall through the cracks.
We also discussed what’s happening up in Maine, Joe’s home state. Graham Platner’s campaign collapsed this week after Jenny Racicot described a sexual assault in an interview. His support fell apart, and Maine Democrats will now pick a new nominee through a statewide caucus.
Joe has spent thirty years working to defeat Susan Collins, and he put the blame in two places. First, the DSCC and Schumer’s people, who decided the right candidate was a 78 year old moderate governor. Second, a group of out-of-state consultants who went shopping for a character. They saw a video of a guy on an oyster farm who had donated to Bernie Sanders and decided he fit the bill. They didn’t vet him. One of them literally joked to the Wall Street Journal about how bad their vetting was.
Here’s my problem with the whole thing. I grew up on a hobby farm. I know the difference between a hobby and a living. Working class people and people in agriculture know that difference too. When consultants dress up a wealthy guy with a hobby oyster farm as a working class hero, it’s insulting to the people who do the actual work. People would rather take an authentic outsider, even an authentic asshole, over somebody pretending to be one of them. That’s a big part of why Trump worked and the cosplay doesn’t.
Platner’s numbers were coming down before the scandal broke. And the whole candidate selection process rests on a fantasy about who working class voters are. As John pointed out, the average blue collar worker in Maine is a hairdresser or a nurse. Maine has more childcare workers than loggers. We need to stop inventing a condescending imaginary version of the working class and go talk to actual voters. They support affordable healthcare. They want corruption dealt with. They disapprove of Trump. Campaign on that.
As Joe reminded us, the good news is Maine is full of talent. Shenna Bellows, Troy Jackson, Dan Kleban, and others are stepping up, and the caucus process will be more homegrown than the primary ever was. Joe’s ask was simple: trust Mainers to handle it. Both of us think this is still a very favorable year for Democrats in Maine, and the Senate really is in play. North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, Texas, Alaska, Maine.
The bigger lesson is the one I keep repeating on this show. The vacuum at the top of the Democratic Party isn’t the problem people think it is. Candidates keep overperforming in state and special elections because local people are doing the work. When you trust state parties, county parties, and the folks showing up to the meetings and the parades, things go better. When out-of-state consultants skip over all of them to cast a character for their play, you get this mess.
So if you’re frustrated, don’t just post about it. Show up. Get involved in your county party. Knock on some doors. The party is only as good as the people in it, and right now too many good people are sitting on the sidelines.
We’ll check in with you next Friday.
