John Porter (@maletero.mas.to.ap.brid.gy)

What Job Is A Guy With A Nazi Tattoo Qualified For? The man that my wife and I found ourselves talking to at the bar of a restaurant in Rockland, Maine in the summer of 2019 had arrived in town as your fancier visitors do, which is by boat. He told us that he worked in Democratic politics, and because my wife and I care about both politics and the state where she grew up, it was both intriguing and a bit strange to learn from this man that a candidate had already been chosen to run against Maine's reliably Deeply Concerned and long-tenured Republican Sen. Susan Collins in the fall of 2020. A good candidate, he seemed to think: the speaker of the state's House of Representatives, whom a quick web search later revealed to be a woman named Sara Gideon. The Democratic Senate Campaign Committee endorsed Gideon before what wound up being a walkover of a primary, and oversaw her general election campaign against Collins. It didn't go well. Gideon raised and spent many millions of dollars, much of it from out of state; the campaign was still sending fundraising emails on Election Day, and Mainers talked about Gideon campaign mailers arriving in their inboxes daily, in duplicate or triplicate. In the end, Gideon spent $62.9 million, more than twice what Collins spent, and lost the election by nearly 9 percentage points. After the end, Gideon's campaign still had $14.8 million on hand. It was the sort of experience that does not so much lead to recriminations as demand them; duffing what had seemed like a winnable election, and one in which Gideon led in most reputable public polls for much of the way, fit into a long, broader story of abstracted, consultant-scented, one-size-fits-all national-level Democratic campaign incompetence. Amanda Litman, co-founder of the progressive organization Run For Something, told The 19th News after Gideon's loss that the DSCC's tendency to run qualified and cautious races built around national issues and argued almost entirely through advertising was indicative of the party's longstanding disregard for state political cultures and the realities of retail politics. "A sustained campaign of year-round contact is far more effective than $100 million spent on ads,” Litman said. “You don’t believe an ad; you believe a person." https://defector.com/what-job-is-a-guy-with-a-nazi-tattoo-qualified-for