Opinion | ‘Reddit Posts Are the Median Voter’

I think there’s a theory of the case here — and I’m not saying this is true; I’m just presenting it as a possibility — is that part of the brand problem for the Democrats has been excessive conscientiousness. – Yes. – That this is the party of essentially kind of like, schoolmarm, tsk,-tsking. Now, that’s extremely gendered. I want to be very clear about that. And I think a lot of the conversation about Platner on both sides of the very intense, polarized debate within the Democratic coalition is very gendered. That said, I think there is a kind of post-Covid hangover of the idea that the Democrats are just this, again, this kind of like, quick to cancel, tell you what you can and can’t do, kicking people out who talk a little salty, et cetera. I think there’s something to that. I think there’s particularly something to that with a certain subset of cross-pressured swing voters, and maybe this is a kind of antidote to it. Yeah, maybe none of this is negative for him. Right, like in the sense of the Reddit post, people have joked, the Reddit posts are the median voter, right. That’s the joke people have made. When I saw the Reddit post, I was like, that’s an asset. I don’t have to agree with them or like them to be like, that’s a political asset. I mean, this is a line I say all the time, and at some point need to spin out into an essay. But the personality type of the left is bureaucratic, and the personality type of the right is autocratic. And those are failures, right, that the left is — another version of it that I use is the left is overformed by institutions and the right is underformed by institutions. I think that’s well said. Now, you imagine a world where Platner loses, or doesn’t win by as much as he could have. And the answer is simply you kind of almost got it right with him. You know, you just pick somebody a little too undeformed. You don’t want the straight-A student, and you don’t want the kid smoking pot in the parking lot. You need something sort of in between there. But the question is really, we’re going to see a test of whether or not this works in Maine. And it’s going to be very, very interesting to see how that plays out.