Losing 101
Mayor Zohran Mamdani hadn’t hung up his coat in Gracie Mansion before the commentariat felt obligated to report that rents were still high and New York still unaffordable.
The commentariat is always the first to the party and last to leave. They trade on telling anyone who will listen why a Mamdani can’t win and then when he wins, they trade on telling us how he is failing.
This pundit class occupies the green rooms of CNN and MSNOW. They blurt their unelected expertise on podcasts, Substacks and Sunday talk shows. They are accountable to no one. They have no stake in the outcome beyond their next appearance fee — or a million-dollar consulting contract.
Ken Martin arrived at the DNC in February 2025 promising to be different. He was going to conduct a rigorous autopsy of the 2024 election. He was going to name names. He was not, he explicitly said, coming to Washington to placate the political consultant class. The political consultant class had other ideas. Ken’s autopsy was hijacked by powerful consultants determined to keep their names out of the report. When the report was completed, Martin dragged his feet. Then his feet stopped moving. The report was shelved, then leaked, then released — just now in 2026. Then he said:
“I don’t endorse what’s in this report, or what’s left out of it.”
Gaza was left out. Biden was left out. Powerful consultants’ names were left out. And then the invoice came. Win or lose, consultants get paid.
Martin’s launch began with a messy divorce. In an inspired choice, David Hogg — the Marjory Stoneman Douglas senior who rose to national prominence after the 2018 Parkland shooting — was elected vice chairman of the DNC. Hogg wanted to do what Martin had promised: clear out the deadwood and put new candidates in play across the country. Martin found a procedural problem with Hogg’s election. Hogg was gone within four months. Martin is still there. The DNC is $18 million in debt.
In 2021, Virginia Democrats lost the state legislature and governor’s race to Republicans. Then-congresswoman Abigail Spanberger had a simple explanation. It wasn’t the Republican strategy. Or voter suppression. Or the structural advantages of one-party rule. It was the ambitions of her own party’s president, Joe Biden.
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“Nobody elected him to be F.D.R. They elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”
Was that really necessary? Spanberger has already vetoed more than two dozen bills passed by Virginia’s Democratic-majority legislature. This is a state supposedly unified under Democratic party control. The moderate incumbent has become a saboteur wielding a veto pen.
Incumbent Democrats needn’t worry about the opposition. They are their own opposition. They police their coalition’s ambitions preemptively. They call it pragmatism. They call it reading the room. What they are reading is their own donor lists and their own reelection math. Neither are helpful.
Meanwhile, in Maine, Graham Platner is one candidate positioned to actually improve people’s lives. His progressive campaign has the whiff of FDR. Besides incumbent efforts to belittle his campaign ambitions, he has spent the campaign answering for a tattoo. Most recently, the press has speculated with a former campaign staffer about the extent of private sext message exchanges. The purity brigade has teamed up with the virtue signalers. Platner and his wife, Amy, claim to be working things out and will be just fine. Mainers may not be if the noise level overcomes the value of a campaign bent on making lives better. Platner needs votes — not noisy pearl clutching over what is nobody’s business but his and his wife’s own.
The Republican party runs on toxic fumes. The stink of securities fraud, accepting bribes, and whistleblower retaliation didn’t stop Ken Paxton from beating incumbent John Cornyn by nearly 30 points in the senate primary in Texas. None of this mattered to the voters. Trump wanted Paxton in and Cornyn out. He got what he wanted.
Maine voted Tuesday. I trust you gathered Maine chose Platner.
Martin Luther King Jr. endured endless speculation about his philandering. Once LBJ unleashed J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI used surveillance leaks to smear King and turn his private life into ammunition to destroy him. They succeeded. Within one year, King was assassinated.
Now historians are unearthing questions about King’s origin story. About whether there was a 6-year-old white boy whose parents forbade him to play with King and sent him off to a segregated school in Jim Crow Georgia. What does this serve? It serves no living purpose. It helps no candidate, moves no voter, addresses no policy question pending before any legislature. What it does — what it is designed to do, consciously or not — is sow doubt. Was it all a myth? Were we wrong to believe?
Was there an Eden? Was there a serpent? Was it an apple tree or a fig tree? What do revisionists say? Do we care?
Democrats have perfected the circular firing squad. Pundits traffic in electability. Consultants profit from victory or defeat. Incumbents do the opposition’s work for free. Historians relitigate the stories we tell ourselves. For what?
Had the self-appointed chattering classes shown restraint — I don’t know, maybe Al Franken would still be in the Senate.
