The Maine Senate race is tightening, and desperate Democrats are importing Bernie Sanders to manufacture enthusiasm. But I'm just asking the questions no one else will: why do we keep coddling this childish electorate?
Last week, over a dry martini with a senior aide on Capitol Hill, I was told that the Troy Jackson campaign is panicking. Three months after party leadership heroically executed a jarring summer candidate switch to install Jackson as their nominee, internal polling shows that the Democratic base in Maine is suffering from a catastrophic lack of vibes. To remedy this, they are bringing in Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to deliver a jolt to the electorate. I find this deeply insulting. We spent millions of dollars carefully sanitizing this campaign, stripping away any controversial policies or distinct personality traits that might offend a hypothetical swing voter in Bangor, and the voters' response is to complain that they are bored.
Say what you will, but voter enthusiasm is a crutch for the weak. A functional, mature democracy should not require a rally, a vision, or a pulse. The ideal voter should walk into the polling booth in a state of clinical depression, pull the lever for the name we have focus-grouped into existence, and quietly return to their car. By begging Sanders to swoop in and wave his arms about healthcare and minimum wages, the party is implicitly validating the dangerous populist fantasy that a candidate owes their base a reason to vote for them.
Before the summer switch, I sat in on a closed-door meeting on K Street where the Jackson rollout was finalized. It was a masterclass in political science. We watched behind a two-way mirror as a focus group of undecided suburbanites was shown a picture of Jackson standing near a pine tree, saying nothing. Their heart rates remained completely flat. No spikes in anger, no spikes in joy. Just a serene, unbothered flatline. It was the Holy Grail of modern electability. The consultants wept openly. To ruin that perfectly orchestrated apathy with a Sanders rally is like pouring hot sauce on a communion wafer.
We handed the people of Maine a perfectly frictionless, ideologically neutral political unit, and they have the absolute audacity to ask for a reason to leave their houses on a Tuesday.
I actually spent ten minutes on the phone with Jackson's messaging team last month, and I was blown away by their discipline. They have successfully engineered a platform so devoid of friction that it is scientifically impossible to disagree with it, primarily because it does not technically contain any verbs. When you have achieved that level of rhetorical perfection, you shouldn't have to apologize just because the base isn't foaming at the mouth. You don't need a jolt. You need the electorate to grow up and eat their unseasoned oatmeal.
Furthermore, let's consider the donor class, the people who actually keep this democracy afloat. Do you know how hard it is to convince a private equity executive to fund a candidate who might accidentally promise to do something? It takes months of careful dinners to assure them that the candidate's public speeches are completely meaningless. Bringing in Sanders sends a chilling message to our most vulnerable billionaires: that the party might actually start listening to the people who attend the rallies, rather than the people who pay for the microphones.
If we allow Sanders to rile up these people, we risk catastrophic structural damage to the optics of the entire cycle. Enthusiastic voters are dangerous. They start harboring expectations. They start believing that their vote might actually result in a material change to their living conditions, which is exactly the kind of toxic extremism we swapped candidates to avoid in the first place.
The true heroes of this cycle aren't the progressives demanding a reason to cheer. The true heroes are the strategists who understand that the highest form of civic duty is settling for whoever we put in front of you.