General Discussion

As I wrote yesterday I still believe a solid, strong generic Democrat can beat Susan Collins this November. Harris won Maine by 7 points. Our candidate for Governor Hannah Pingree leads by 15. The generic ballot is 53%-42% Dem right now. This is the most favorable environment of any battleground state right now. But it is going to be essential, vital for whomever we pick to be able to put distance between them and Platner. For not only is he a despicable figure now, his political project was never as successful as his reckless gaslighters led us to believe; and this matters for the broader conversation about the future of our party...

We are going to spend some time with data now.

Over the last several months prior to the June primary Platner led Collins by an average of 7 points over Susan Collins. This is exactly the margin Harris won Maine by in 2024, 4 points below the +11 generic ballot the NYT published last week, and at least 8 points below our gubernatorial candidate, Hannah Pingree. I will once again share that recent chart of how our battleground Senate candidates are doing relative to Harris. This uses the NYT results for Platner from last week:



The Fox News poll last week had Platner trailing Susan Collins by 3. What this all means is that Platner has had the worst polling of any of our battleground candidates in the country this summer in what is by far and away the most Democratic state we are competing in this year.
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The +15 is where Hannah Pingree, a well-established Democrat in Maine, is right now. Last week Platner was +2 in the NYT poll, and -3 in the Fox News poll.

G. Elliott Morris published an analysis last night that makes some of these same points...

Let’s now look at a bit more data from this new analysis from Morris. The number on the right column is the number of percentage points our candidates are over/underperforming against expectations right now in their nowcast model:

Talarico 5.4
Cooper 4.5
Brown 4.2
Turek 3.7
Michigan -5.9 (both El-Sayed and Haley Stevens)
Platner - 9.9

While Ossoff and Peltola are not included in Morris’ analysis they would fall into the overperformance camp, not the underperformance camp based on publicly available polling data of late.
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