In the SNL cold open from December 4th, 1999, Darrell Hammond as Bill Clinton addresses the nation about the recent GOP Presidential debate. Most of the sketch is reviewing each candidate and their flaws. ¹ But early on Hammond's Clinton declares, "I do believe that in a presidential race a dead mule could beat their best man." Then he gives a brief space while the audience politely chuckles and continues:

"And since we don't have a dead mule, we'll have to go with Al Gore."

* * *

The Republican Party is wildly unpopular. Its positions are electoral poison. It has one launderer for this era-defining clash with America's people and their values, and that is Donald Trump, who serves as a polarizing figure and who many mostly disengaged voters seem to have treated as the living ideal of their preferred candidate, even if nothing he has said or done has indicated he would carry out their preferred policies. It's unlikely that this will persist after he leaves office or dies. Can anyone truly believe that a charismatic black hole that triangulates like a cellphone looking for reception such as JD Vance will draw Trump's base of low-engagement voters to the polls at the rate he did? Does anyone think someone as juiceless as Marco Rubio, whose previous ambitions for President were dispatched of in a single debate line by Chris Christie going out in a blaze of glory and who would rather perjure himself under oath than admit that the President of the United States gave him clown shoes to wear, will appear as anything other than an empty suit to the American voting public?

And yet.

And yet, even against those candidates, it's possible Democrats might still lose the 2028 election. Because while a dead mule could dispatch any potential candidate the GOP currently possesses with ease, Democrats could easily decide to avoid nominating someone who can match political charm and wisdom of a dead mule.

No race this cycle is more emblematic of that institutional instinct than in the Maine election for US Senator. Now, for obvious reasons, I have to caveat that this is not a defense of Graham Platner, who, in any post-war election cycle prior to the Trump era would have finished the primary with an embarrassingly small portion of the vote. Maine is not different from any other lean Democratic state. It has a surfeit of qualified candidates who could rise to the level of dead mule or higher. But the DSCC and Chuck Schumer in particular, who has been reported as instrumental to how the candidate was chosen, did not want a dead mule. They wanted Janet Mills.

Now, it's worth talking about who Mills is and the circumstances that led to her being governor in the first place, because otherwise you might think that, hey, a sitting governor running for US Senate, that almost always works. I'm sure that's what Schumer and Senate Democrats thought. Mills served in the state legislature for four terms, before being selected by the state legislature for Attorney General of Maine,² under Governor John Baldacci. She'd previously run for Maine's notoriously swing-y 2nd Congressional District. Every office holder of the 2nd from 1964 until 2004 successfully parlayed it either to the US Senate or the Governor's mansion. Mills lost in the primary to Baldacci. There was a brief hiatus as AG when the Maine GOP rode the 2010 Republican wave to control of the legislature, but they were out by the next election and Mills was returned, then kept on in 2014, even with a divided legislature at the time. She was opposed by the then-sitting governor, one Paul LePage.

People may not remember LePage, but he was perhaps a harbinger of Trump. Rude, arrogant, an utter moron, he never once achieved a majority in election for Governor, being helped by spoiler candidates in both his successful elections. This outcome arguably became the impetus for Maine to adopt ranked-choice voting, specifically to prevent LePage or anyone like him from holding office again. As AG, Mills refused to defend the governor in several lawsuits she deemed meritless for the state's interest, causing him to eventually sue her for neglecting her duty. This lawsuit was on-going when Mills herself won the election for governor in 2018.³

The 2018 election was the first to implement Maine's ranked-choice voting scheme. To get this, Maine's voters had to not only vote for it in 2016 by referendum, but then pass a people's veto over the Maine State Supreme Court in the 2018 primary election that was also the first implementation of ranked-choice voting to get it to count for general elections. Mills herself supported RCV, and to her benefit: after four rounds of counting, she eventually triumphed against Maine attorney and an Iraq War veteran, Adam Cote. She went on to win the general, getting 50.9% of the vote in the first round, the first time a governor in Maine had won a first term with a majority of the vote in fifty-two years, and only the third time in that span that any governor of Maine had ever won a majority. Mills improved on this in her second term, when she ran against her (and Mainers' in general) old enemy, Paul LePage, whom she clobbered by 13 points.

Now, again, you can look at this CV and say, "this is a strong candidate." And, up until between 2010-2016, I'd argue you'd have been right. But consider it in light of modern America: Mills makes her name opposing a deeply unpopular Republican governor, then runs against him after he is term-limited, defeating the Republican candidate in a Democratic wave election when Mainers are fatigued at the national and state level by Republicans, after a competitive and crowded primary. She then gets to run for re-election against LePage himself, rather than the recent memory of LePage. Prior to that, her only electoral victories are for state legislature. She is an appointed attorney general, making her a clear creature of the Maine Democratic establishment, and she is non-threatening enough that a Republican Maine Senate decides not to oppose her renomination. Her popularity is waning, as tends to happen when a party holds executive office for eight years, and in particular she makes an enemy of Maine's unions, who recruit Platner⁴ before Mills can even announce for Senate. She alienates Maine's progressives as governor by vetoing progressive legislation—including intervening to keep a juvenile prison open—as well as opposing a millionaire's tax and blocking the legislature from preventing the construction of an AI data center, forcing her reverse herself on some positions immediately after entering the Senate race. Her entry—again, reportedly directly solicited by Schumer, despite her own seeming reluctance—forces possible alternatives out of the race (and most serious potential candidates opting to run for the open governor seat instead), leaving her in a head-to-head with Platner.⁵ 

Against this, a candidate, even a former mercenary, Nazi-tatted,⁷ perpetually unfaithful, scion of a wealthy family, who presented themselves with the salt-of-the-earth DC outsider aesthetics that the political chattering classes trip over themselves to hold up as "real Americans" and spoke the language of the left was almost guaranteed to roll her. Anti-establishment sentiment is perhaps the strongest and most unifying motivating force in American electoral politics right now. And it has been for a while. It should not have caught anyone by surprise. The days when there existed a straight deregulatory line through Carter, Reagan, H.W. Bush, and Clinton are gone. In its place, every president elected in the 21st century has run against the incumbent government. W. Bush ran as a folksy outsider from Texas, Obama positioned himself to oppose Hillary Clinton’s presumed coronation and oppose the bipartisan consensus that had led us into war, Trump got a layup running against Hillary as a continuation of both Obama and her husband, Biden ran against Trump’s chaos, and Trump ran against Biden and then Harris’ tepid governance. As George W. Bush shows, you can be the literal son of a US president and third generation federal politician and still claim the aesthetics of the insurgent, even if your leading opponent in the primary has already cultivated a “maverick” persona.

It’s not surprising, given the GOP’s horror show of a platform, that in head-to-head races, the Generic Democrat is a popular figure. They're not blowing out elections by 10-15 points, but they're generally overperforming their real-world counterparts against specific Republicans. And, honestly, that's a problem. Mills and Platner both polled worse than “the Democratic candidate,” whoever voters imagined that would be. Even the actual avatars of Generic Democrat tend to underperform, because they tend to be rank-and-file establishment Dems who behave like the cardboard cutouts they are. This isn’t just because the dream is always better than the reality, it is also because the Democratic Party as it currently stands is riddled with scores of sub-dead mule quality incumbent politicians. Politicians in blue states who have held their seats for two decades or more without any serious challenger in a primary or general election to keep them honest or force their politics to change, and who are currently not rising to meet the moment, even if they sometimes make noises that suggest that they understand the stakes they're facing. 

There is danger in this. In 2010, the Tea Party, a revolt by the party's own far right-wing institutions, successfully pulled off an insurgent campaign by making the mere concept of incumbency and "establishment" into anathema. In the GOP's case, they had begun a pivot to the hard right in the '90s, with institutional wreckers like John Boehner and anti-welfare extremists like Paul Ryan already representing the consensus positions of the party twenty years later. So the only place to run to their right was to turn to the "wingnut" faction Dick Cheney had identified in 2000. And that has, naturally, been followed by fascists and theocrats. Most of these people are cranks and transparent self-serving seekers of power. Even those who had something like deeply held principles, like Thomas Massie, held deeply terrible principles. And they have been punished for not being ideologically flexible enough for the President.

Democrats can do something to avoid collapsing into the GOP's chaotic morass of clown legislators that cannot pass budgets, elect Speakers, and frequently torpedo themselves—i.e. become legislators that cannot govern. Because the Democratic Party has done a relatively “good”⁶ job since its New Democratic Coalition heyday of keeping true progressives and socialists in a small minority among the elected party, there's a wide array of insurgent, but credible left-wing positions to run from without surrendering the whole party to cosplay Stalinists who cannot be bothered to read their ideology's brief founding Manifesto or opening the door to grifters who know how to slap a coat of paint on a rusted out lemon and sell it as new and exciting. There are truly thoughtful leaders on the left waiting in the wings to deliver true positive change. And much of this change would preserve some, albeit certainly not all, of the moderate wing of the party's current influence while simultaneously empowering their comrades from the left to engage in real sewer socialism.

Nancy Pelosi once declared that if members of her caucus had to run against her to win, she encouraged them to do it. Back then it was Blue Dogs and moderates, but today establishment politicians who would lead the next Democratic Congressional majorities must be willing to work with the DSA and Working Families candidates they have traditionally attempted to cut down at the knees and who will be running against them in the next couple of cycles. They can begin acknowledging the need for radical change to the US’ presumed political order, like Pete Buttigieg did earlier this week when commenting that the Supreme Court was due for reform, and they can elevate strategic minds like AOC and Mamdani who understand the politics of a big tent and can block the lanes that would otherwise be open to wreckers, grifters and cosplayers.

Or they can pursue the policies they employed in Maine: dragooning lackluster, unexciting establishment pols who have been coasting on a veterancy in electioneering no longer suited to the battles currently being fought, and be left holding the bag when they're either runover by flawed, hollow candidates who can speak the language of insurgency in primaries or left with worn, tedious, establishment candidates who squander the opportunity for a sea change in politics and leave voters cold in the general.

Frankly, I do believe a bunch of dead mules could deliver the deep structural reforms required to revitalize Americans’ faith in their government and create systems that would prevent the current hijacking of the government by autocrats, theocrats, and kleptocrats from recurring.

But since we don't have a bunch of dead mules, we'll have to go with the Democratic Party.