Cottle: Like, when Janet Mills suspended her campaign, everybody was like, “Oh my God, this proves that Chuck Schumer was hideous in his recruiting!” I’m sorry, Janet Mills is 78 years old and would have been the oldest freshman senator ever. That enough was a problem for her, beyond whatever kind of issues. But if you look at who else Schumer has recruited, you’ve got Mary Peltola in Alaska and Sherrod Brown in Ohio, and Roy Cooper in North Carolina — and Josh Turek just won in Iowa, which was a race that was, basically internally, heavily about whether or not you supported Chuck Schumer. Not that Chuck is the greatest thing since sliced cheese. Nobody’s going to go there. And my position is that it may be time for him to publicly come up with a succession plan. But just the overlearning from one race makes me mental on these things.
Maine is not the only show in town. With this primary season, we’re seeing this whole range of options for new leadership in the party. Jamelle, give us your basic take on how the party should be trying to expand its tent. I mean, you can break it down any way you like, but are we talking about more moderates? How much should we be paying attention to anti-establishment disruptors? That sort of thing.
Bouie: I mean, when you look at the landscape of candidates this cycle, I’m not sure you can draw an actual through line between any of them since Trump got into office. So, obviously, last year you had Abigail Spanberger, a centrist Democrat; Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, who is a center-left Democrat; Zohran Mamdani identifies with the democratic socialists. When you look at Talarico, he seems to be a standard Texas liberal, in terms of his views.
We’re not looking at a situation where it’s like, oh, look, the moderates are doing so much better than the progressives, or the progressives are doing so much better than the moderates. A lot of it, again, as I said earlier, is shaped by the overall national environment. Trump is very unpopular, and if you seem like a basically capable, reasonable person, voters are going to give you a hearing right now.
My sense of, when you’re thinking about how to stitch together a large political coalition, a majority coalition, you have to have something that your party believes in, and it has to be broad enough that it can include a lot of people, and specific enough that it’s distinctive. So I think the classic example of American political history is the Republican Party in the 1850s, which was antislavery. That’s what it was. Now, there was no particular litmus test centered around this.
