The meltdown of Graham Platner’s campaign for Maine’s U.S. Senate seat now held by Susan Collins, in combination with the Supreme Court ruling, which “rolled back a longstanding restriction on the use of party funds to directly benefit candidates,” makes winning a Democratic majority of the U.S. Senate highly problematic at best and highly unlikely at worst. As Fredreka Schouten and John Fritze report in “How the Supreme Court’s campaign finance ruling gives Republicans a major midterm boost” at CNN Politics,”The Republican National Committee, for instance, entered June with more than $125 million in available cash and no unpaid bills. By contrast, the Democratic National Committee had a negative balance, with nearly $15 million remaining in its coffers but more than $18 million in debt…“The DNC is in an atrocious fundraising position,” Sean Cooksey, a former Federal Election Commission chairman who previously served as Vance’s chief legal adviser in the White House, told CNN. In a social media post earlier this month, Cooksey predicted a favorable ruling would leave Republicans “with nuclear weapons” and the DNC with “one of those Wile E. Coyote guns with a flag that says Bang!” Platner’s meltdown was just the icing on the cake. Even before he decided to pull out of the race, the Supreme Court ruling alone may have doomed Democratic hopes for a Sente majority. Still it’s not impossible that Dems can pull it off. But they have to run the best possible substitute for Platner.

At Axios, Josephine Walker reports “These Democrats could replace Platner in Maine’s Senate race,” and writes: “Former State Senate President Troy Jackson was the third-place finisher in Maine’s Democratic gubernatorial primary and is widely viewed as progressives’ preferred candidate…Jackson’s blue-collar background and existing statewide campaign infrastructure could ease a transition to a Senate campaign…Outgoing Gov. Janet Mills sought the Senate nomination before suspending her campaign as Platner surged in the polls.” However, “Mills has not committed to reentering the race. She is 78 and has said she would serve only one term if elected.”…Former gubernatorial candidate Nirav Shah is best known for leading Maine through the COVID-19 pandemic as director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention from 2019 to 2023…Jordan Wood is a former congressional aide who worked in Washington and later served as executive director of a pro-democracy organization focused on election integrity…Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows is coming off a failed gubernatorial bid, giving her an existing campaign organization, donor network and statewide name recognition…She was previously the Democratic Senate nominee in 2014, losing to Collins by over 30 percentage points…Dan Kleban is a political newcomer and the co-founder of Maine Beer Company…He says he relates to voters because of his working-class roots, student loan debt and describes himself as a pragmatic, “get-shit-done Democrat.” There was some buzz about actor Patrick Dempsey or political commentator Heather Cox Richardson entering the race, but both of them have said it isn’t going to happen.

In “Graham Platner and the Working-Class Fetish. This bloc won’t be wooed by cosplay and pandering,” Matthew Cooper writes at Washington Monthly: “One lesson: Do not fetishize working-class voters. Court them, of course. Obviously, this bloc has befuddled Democrats in recent years. But the idea that nominating a working-class Democrat would sway working-class voters was always reductionist and absurd. Democratic Brahmins like Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy did just fine with working-class voters. Sherrod Brown grew up in a comfortable home and went to Yale. He was elected to the U.S. Senate from Ohio three times in part because of his connection with working-class voters, and today he faces good odds of returning to the Senate from a Buckeye State that’s gotten tougher for Democrats. Working-class voters have supported Republican billionaires like the president and candidates such as Jim Justice, the U.S. senator and former governor from West Virginia who ran an inherited coal empire, for gosh sakes. The notion that they need to see someone like themselves in higher office is condescending…I don’t know the best way for Democrats to win enough working-class voters to take back the U.S. Senate and the presidency, but Platneresque pandering surely isn’t it. This magazine has presented a series of ideas as both good policy and good politics to woo these voters—vigorous antitrust enforcement, widespread broadband access, Medicare prices for all, outreach to rural voters, and avoiding cultural pitfalls such as the ungainly phrase “LatinX,” among many others. But there’s no panacea. This huge and heterogeneous bloc will need to be wooed because there is no such thing as a white knight with a gravelly voice perfect for truck ad voiceovers. “Identity politics” is often a cheap and meaningless charge aimed at minorities or liberals. But in Platner’s case, identity really was everything. Biography was destiny. The personal was political.” More here.

You want some good news? Try Emily Singer’s “Here’s another sign that Democrats are building a blue wave” at Daily Kos, which includes these observations: “Historic trends and current polling have shown that November’s midterm elections are very likely to be a blue wave, with Democrats favored to win control of the U.S. House, flip multiple gubernatorial mansions and state legislatures, and possibly even take back the Senate…For the third month in a row, Democrats gained more new voter registrants than Republicans, according to pollster John Couvillon, who has been tracking party registration data for years…Couvillon found that Democrats added 83,000 new registrants in June, while Republicans added 64,000…Democrats out-registering Republicans reverses what had been a bad trend for the party, as the Democratic Party had seen membership dwindle since 2020…In fact, the Democratic voter registration slide was one of the early signs that the 2024 election was not going to go Democrats’ way. That year, according to Gallup, more people identified with Republicans than Democrats…But now that trend is flipping… Even more promising for Democrats is that new Democratic registrants are popping up in places that have competitive statewide contests…For example in Nevada—where Democrats are trying to win back the governor’s mansion this fall—Democrats added 5,020 new voters in June while Republicans added 1,820…In Iowa—where Democrats are looking to flip the governor’s mansion, a U.S. Senate seat, and as many as three U.S. House districts—Democrats added 25,245 new registrants in June while Republicans added 14,781…And in Nebraska—home to a sleeper Senate race and multiple competitive House contests—Democrats gained 559 voters in June while Republicans lost 126 registrants.” More here.