The ‘Jaws’ Scene That’s Playing Out In American Politics

Here is the lesson — and it cuts both ways.

In 2022, a chunk of the Republican Party convinced itself of something untrue: that all you had to do to win was imitate Donald Trump. The premise was that Trump wasn’t something unique. You could take some Trump-adjacent magic and pour it into a bunch of weird bottles and then win a bunch of Senate seats.

Republicans decided to endorse and then run Herschel Walker for the Senate in Georgia, a man who, it turns out, was genetically related to half the state. And they lost that Senate seat. In Pennsylvania, they ran Doug Mastriano, someone far too extreme for Pennsylvanians. They lost. They lost again by nominating Doctor Oz. Republicans ran Kari Lake for Arizona governor that same year, despite her being a conspiracy theorist with some wild mannerisms. They lost. They ran Blake Masters, a tech pro who ran weird drone commercials in Arizona, and they lost that seat. They ran Don Bolduc in New Hampshire and lost.

Republicans lost at least four Senate seats and at least one gubernatorial seat. Republicans got high on the Trump supply.

The lesson is that there is only one Donald Trump, and he cannot be copied. He cannot be cloned. He cannot be emulated. The magic isn’t some sort of brand; it’s not a platform. It is the candidate, because candidate quality matters.

Democrats don’t seem to have learned that lesson at all. They watched Zohran Mamdani win in New York — a city that has 11 Democrats for every 10 voters — and they drew precisely the wrong conclusion.

They decided that the Democratic Socialist pixie dust was actually the transferable part. You simply take that stuff and pour it into a bunch of weird bottles the same way the Republicans did back in 2022.

Thus, they ran a guy in Maine with multiple rape allegations and a swastika issue, and a man in Michigan who is so sympathetic to terrorism that he wouldn’t celebrate Ayatollah Khamenei’s death because many of his supporters admired him.

They’re running a dude in Texas who hates traditional Christianity.

That’s some wild overconfidence, and it’s curdling into stupidity. The exact same disease that cost Republicans the Senate in 2022 could cost Democrats the Senate in 2026.

That’s the warning, forever and always. When you get high on your own supply, when your ideological silo tells you you can’t lose, and candidate quality doesn’t matter, you nominate people who lose. Republicans learned it the hard way in 2022, and Democrats seem about to learn it the hard way in 2026.

All of which brings us to Graham Platner. He’s suspending his Maine Senate campaign after a sexual assault claim.

The real reason the Democrats decided to abandon Platner is that he was losing in the polls.

Members of the Maine Democratic Party voted on Wednesday night and told the nominating convention to select a replacement for Graham Platner. He started losing in the polls, and suddenly, all these scandals were taken seriously by Democrats just to get rid of him.

Platner decided that he was going to cut a video from the woods of Maine in which he paints himself as the victim, claiming, “This is all false. The things that have been claimed did not happen … Amy and I are regular people. We were not looking for this experience. We were not looking to get into politics. We had no desire to run for office. I just want you to think about, like, what you would do as a regular person in a position where a much larger world, large forces were working against you personally to accuse you of the worst thing that a person could do and it was not remotely true.”

He’s the victim. Imagine if it happened to you. If you ran for office, surely there would be bevies of women emerging with claims that you raped them, wouldn’t there?

Running for office is tough. It is true that in today’s social media-driven landscape, everything about you will come to the fore. Every single thing, which is something you have to think about when you decide to run for office. Unfortunately, people respond by not running if they have any sense of shame, and only running if they are shameless.

Graham Platner is totally shameless. This is a dude who would get drunk in bars, take off his shirt, and show off his Nazi tattoo. We’re not talking about someone who is driven by any sense of internal guilt or shame over his sins.

At the moment, political office tends to draw people who are somewhat sociopathic because most people don’t want to go through this. But most people, if they did go through this, would have things uncovered about them that might not be a Nazi tattoo or a lot of rape.

I don’t think that he’s the biggest victim. Was he shocked when he woke up and looked in the mirror and discovered that he had a Nazi tattoo? Was he shocked to wake up one morning and discover that there were many allegations about him being rapey?

If he actually believes this is false, he has a moral obligation to stay in the race and fight it. If somebody makes a false rape allegation about you, you have a moral obligation to fight the allegations and not to destroy your candidacy on the shoals of that.

But nobody believes that all of the weight of these allegations is nonsense. No one believes that.

The entire Democratic Party is swiveling into DSA land — which is filled with crazy people — at a rapid pace. If they welcome the DSA, which is a bunch of revolutionary psychopaths, they will end up with some revolutionary psychopaths as candidates.

The Democrats are trying to have it both ways. They want the jet fuel of DSA energy, but they want to claim that the DSA is not actually painting them into a corner.

The DSA is going to eat the Democrats’ lunch. It’s funny to watch the old-school Democrats try to convince themselves that this is all okay.

They’re like Quint in “Jaws,” with their lower body half-eaten by the shark while maintaining that their legs have not been eaten.