The Democratic Clown Car Arrives in Maine

Now that Graham Platner has exited the Senate race in Maine, you might have forgotten that there’s even a race left to run in November — and Democrats still have to fill the slot. Since Platner withdrew after already winning a largely uncontested primary, that means the clock is ticking and Maine Democrats have been forced to schedule a hasty convention to decide on their nominee.

It will be a quintessential “insider” operation, as in truth it had to be given the time crunch: 601 Maine Democrats will meet in Bangor next weekend — 101 Democratic state committee members, plus 500 more “delegates” that will be selected this weekend in county party meetings held across the state. And they have to choose the most appetizing option from a veritable dog’s breakfast.

That means that we had our first and only candidate debate for who would replace Platner on the ballot last night. They were nominally speaking to the voters of Maine’s Democratic Party, but rather obviously were hoping that one of those 601 delegates might be watching. And it was quite the revelation for all those who were wondering how a spoiled brat phony like Platner ever took off in the first place: Well, have you seen the rest of the competition?

Now I have, and while I’m still concerned about Susan Collins’s race, I cannot help but feel less so. Not being a Mainer myself, I won’t pretend to have any unique insight into local politics. But watching all eight of these clowns gaggle forth from the clown car last night provided me with a fair share of reassurance: Susan can take any one of them, and maybe even the whole gang all at once, as in that old “how many toddlers could you beat in a fight?” meme.

The night was split into two hours, and began with a debate between the four “serious” candidates, three of whom sought the gubernatorial nomination this year and lost: Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson, former Biden-era CDC Acting Director Nirav Shah, and Jordan Wood, a “former staffer and democracy activist” who lost the race for nomination in Maine’s second congressional district.

And boy, did the night ever feel like a gathering of losers. I was most amazed by the inanimate bearing of Shenna Bellows. She has all the warmth and speaking ability of a plank of Formica, and her inability to communicate almost became fascinating for me: She would start and. Stop at. Strange, completely random moments as. She articulated her sentences with the same halting cadence of a computer periodically freezing up from insufficient RAM.

More than that, she was simply unprepared, as all the candidates there were: There was a moment where the moderator straight up called out Bellows on misrepresenting Collins’s record on Venezuela (she voted to limit Trump’s war powers), and her response was one for the ages: “Forgive me, a week ago I was on vacation on a river on the Kennebec, and I’ve been running for governor for a long time . . . I didn’t think I was running for U.S. Senate.”

With preparation like that, how can she fail? It got to the point where I began asking myself how this woman could have ever won a statewide race to become secretary of state in the first place, and then I looked it up: Maine is one of the few states in the Union where that position is an appointed one, not an elected one. Bellows has never won anything statewide in her life, and it shows.

Troy Jackson, as the most Platner-friendly candidate in the race in terms of progressive politics, seemingly holds the inside line for the nominating convention next week. But if he wins, good luck to him in November: He presents less credibly as a serious man than Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, and you must understand how devastating an assessment that is. He vanishes onstage, hemming and hawing his way through folksy mush, and has an alarming habit of rocking on his knees as he speaks, as if he’s doing squats.

As a former CDC director, Nirav Shah had an entirely different presentational problem: He exuded greasy D.C.-tinged language that came across as gratingly glib. He denounced ICE as “masked marauders” as he called for its complete abolition, and indulged in the sort of canned rhetoric that screamed “Beltway creature.” Perhaps the most impressive of four weak performances came from outsider Jordan Wood, who talks far too much like a national politician for his own good — especially while trying to run in the outsider lane. The fact that Wood looks alarmingly like a slightly chubby-cheeked Jeremy Piven does him no favors either. But he probably came off the best of all of them, which says very little.

With the first hour dragging itself to a timid conclusion, it was time for the real fun: the undercard debate! Yes, no matter how inanimate Maine’s likely Democratic nominees may be, there’s always worse! There’s David Costello, a former sacrificial candidate (against Angus King, no less — so you know the Democrats’ hearts were really into the race) who lost again this year to Platner. There’s Lizzie Dickerson, who was elected to two terms in Maine’s state house — until she left to move to Colorado to do “space weather forecasting.” (Moderator: “Of course, she’s back.”) There was also a local brewer named Dan Kleban, and a “political newcomer” by the name of Ashley Webb. Webb is transgender, a budding artist with . . . an unusually intense facial expression. I could make fun of the way (s)he swayed back and forth nervously while mouthing the most banal platitudes imaginable, but in all honesty I can’t really say that her delivery was any worse or less convincing than Troy Jackson’s.

So there’s your Murderer’s Row, Mainers. Over the weekend, state Democrats will select their delegates to the convention. Next week the vote happens, and we open the box to discover the surprise inside. My guess is that it will be Jackson, but regardless of who wins, Collins will not be facing a juggernaut in the fall. If she can’t hold on against mediocrities like these, then nobody ever could.