David M. Shribman: The electorate sends mixed messages in democratic primaries

OGUNQUIT, Maine ― As Maine goes, so goes the nation?

Maybe. But maybe not.

That phrase, from the faded past, once was a sturdy political guideline. For decades, beginning when it joined the Union as part of the 1820 Missouri Compromise, Maine's state and congressional elections ― befitting a place where the rays from the sun hit its shores before landing farther inland ― occurred earlier than those in the rest of the country. Often, its election results signaled national trends; Maine's Republican wave of 1888, for example, foreshadowed the later triumph of GOP presidential nominee Benjamin Harrison.

And so the question the political class has been pondering this hectic political season is whether the nomination of Troy Jackson as Maine's Democratic senatorial nominee would stand as a symbolic trigger for a broader party lurch to the left.

The message from midsummer primaries in two Midwestern states is that there are limits to a sharp left turn in Democratic politics.

Both Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive Senate candidate in Michigan, and Francesca Hong, the Democratic socialist gubernatorial candidate, held huge leads as their primaries approached. Ms. Hong suffered a stunning defeat Tuesday. Dr. El-Sayed barely squeaked by a week earlier.

Where have all those primary voters who propelled the two to prominence gone? Their second thoughts prompted them to flee to more moderate establishment candidates. That drift catapulted Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, the very model of a mainstream Democrat, to a general-election battle with Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany in a swing state Mr. Trump took each time he won the presidency.

And Dr. El-Sayed's triumph merely transformed him into joining Mr. Jackson as the principal targets of Republican attacks in crucial midterm Senate races.

At the same time, Peggy Flanigan's emergence as the Democrats' Senate nominee in Minnesota demonstrates an unforeseen but undeniably significant trend in summertime primaries. She's a progressive, to be sure. But she's not a socialist, nor even a progressive like Dr. El-Sayed, who steers clear of the socialist label but whose views have a tinge of the sort of socialism that Republicans already are gearing up to pulverize.

The last two weeks' results follow the victory last November of Zohran Mamdani in the New York mayoral race and the growing impatience in Democratic circles with the leadership of party insiders such as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York.

But the results thus far only amplify a mystery that won't be fully resolved for years: Is the party leadership, with trace elements of the New Deal and the Great Society, out of step as the Donald Trump era in American politics slouches into eclipse? Or are the new-wave Democrats, many of them identifying as democratic socialists, the ones who are out of sync with the times and at variance with American political customs?

Here in Maine, the emergence of oyster farmer Graham Platner as an alternative to party stalwart Gov. Janet Mills ― for whom the Schumer endorsement was an albatross around her 78-year-old neck ― signaled a major change in the state's political fashions, which for decades tended toward men who were educated at elite, small New England colleges, favored button-down Oxford-cloth shirts and appeared in public with buttoned-up lips.

The campaign of Mr. Platner, who has no college degree and possesses neither that customary fashion impulse nor that trademark personal reticence, imploded after several character issues, including a series of charges of sexual aggressiveness, rendered him an implausible nominee. A chest tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol didn't help.

But that didn't end Maine's romance with the political equivalent of the country and contra dances that have long been popular in this state. Mr. Jackson, with nearly identical views and colorful personal aspects of his own, was swiftly chosen in a series of county do-si-do caucuses as the party's challenger to Republican Sen. Susan Collins, reviled by Democrats but beloved by Republicans and possessed of a hardy instinct for electoral survival.

In recent years, strong conservative movements have grown in both Wisconsin (led by Scott Walker, who was governor between 2011 and 2019) and Minnesota (with long-simmering antagonisms growing out of social issues, especially abortion). There's no assurance the Democratic candidates can prevail there in the November elections.

The same can be said for Dr. El-Sayed in Michigan ― and, of course, for Mr. Jackson in Maine, where Sen. Collins has staved off several well-funded efforts to send her into Down East retirement.

Yet the move leftward is not a coastal phenomenon. It is alive, even thriving, in the upper Midwest, where on Tuesday former State Sen. Matt Little won an important congressional primary in a district that ranges southwest of Minneapolis. He espoused a liberal but not socialist message. That formula is congruent with political history in the state ― one far different from the "as-Maine-goes ..." axiom, which almost always foreshadowed big Republican victories.

Overall, the second thoughts Democratic voters have displayed demonstrate the perils of socialism's siren call. Ms. Hong was unable to prevail in a state where three socialists served as mayors of Milwaukee between 1910 and 1960. "The Socialists' pragmatism coalesced with Wisconsin's broader political atmosphere after World War I to create a 'golden age' for Wisconsin Socialists," the Marshall University historian Joshua Kluever wrote in a 2023 article in The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. "Wisconsin Socialists took a pragmatic approach to legislative debates and allied with progressive Republicans to defeat conservative opposition." The result: The state legislature passed 295 measures written by socialists between 1919 and 1931.

Chilling reminder for Maine Democrats: Though Donald Trump lost Maine all three times he ran for president, he prevailed all three times in the 2nd congressional district (with a 10-percentage-point victory margin in 2024), giving him a single electoral vote in Maine's unusual practice of distributing results in presidential elections.

Indeed, for those who regard Mr. Jackson as a rescue buoy after the catastrophic end to the Platner campaign, consider a particularly troubling piece of news that emerged in the last several days and may provide symbolic hope for Republicans.

Greg Wilfert, the park manager at Scarborough Beach State Park, a popular bathing spot just seven miles south of Portland, was pulled underwater when a great white shark attached itself to his rescue buoy and dragged him five or six feet underwater. As events in Maine go, so might the prospects of the Democratic Party, where their hopes may be dragged underwater. Danger lurks beneath.

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David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.