Nah, they’ll ignore him once he’s in office.

There's always a handful of Congresscritters who become the fixation of media monstering campaigns. AOC, Cori Bush, and Ilhan Omar have been popular whipping girls for nearly a decade. Ted Cruz and Louise Gohmert were another pair of jokers the DC media loved to clown on. Platner is exactly the kind of guy you'll see written about in some Op-Ed or Style Guide, where the professional Mean Girls Club of pundits plaster catty smears masquerading as serious think pieces.

Ross Douthat will be putting up an article every month about how Jesus Wept over the Maine election process. Maggie Haberman will be doing think pieces titled "Does a Senator Beat His Wife?" the first time Platner and Amy Gertner express diverging views in public. We're going to get an Israeli flag background image behind some WaPo piece about New England anti-semitism, fixating on the worst five Platner voters the paper can find.

If he actually follows through on being progressive and anti war

He'll be in a single-digit minority voting pool most of his career. Which is to his credit. Gotta start somewhere. But the Senate is a naturally reactionary and deeply genocidal institution by design. I hope he wins, but I doubt he'll do more with his time in office than put up a bunch of angry protest votes.

A lot of people have tattoos they don't know the meaning of, and a lot of people aren't familiar with nazi iconography, apart from the swastika.

People accusing him of being a Nazi sympathizer because of his tattoo are incredibly shortsighted.

At this point, I have to assume everything else you say is a lie, because you are all-in on lying about that tattoo over and over and over and over and over.

Are you AIPAC or a Republican candidate? No one else picks one note and lies on it this much.

Dude it's not an obvious Nazi tattoo when 9 out 10 of the people here couldn't pick the fucking tattoo out of a lineup.

You're being wildly ridiculous.

Did you proceed to have an obvious nazi tattoo on your chest for a decade and change?

Nope. Just woke up on the sub with a shiner and a bank account that had been completely drained, neither of which I had an explanation for.

Because that’s a big blind spot and a bad look. Like, he’s better than Collins and he’s saying the right stuff, but I won’t trust him until he’s proven himself. You don’t get a nazi tattoo for years and years and not deserve a lot of extra scrutiny. He’s got a lot of work to do.

Yeah and this is the point I made about giving people space to have changed. Mainers have had that kind of grace, and if you believe in grass-roots democracy, you should trust them at this point. And its funny because I make the point, people seem to nod their heads along, and then always, there is some chirper who wants to pipe in and say "not good enough". And its really a catastrophic sickness in the current leftist populist moment in the US, which we can easily contrast with the rightwing populist moment (both started at the same time).

The rightwing movement has been inclusive, and the leftwing movement has been exclusive; and because of that difference in ideology, the rightwing movement took over for the previous 10 years and enacted their agenda: fascism. And you (and others) are doing it right here. Your trying to find a way to exclude someone from the movement. Rightwing populism has been doing the opposite. When they identify someone who could be an ally, they find a way to make a seat for them at the table. Its a horrible, fascist, disgusting table, but its been able to grow its membership because they'll take all comers and speak to how their movement will address their grievances.

The entire point being made is that the very thing you are doing is a self-destructive, reactionary tendency which has knee-capped our ability to grow a leftist populism which can confront fascism. And I wont' deny there are other factors to surmount in this regard, but this self-sabotaging instinct is fundamental to why things have been so difficult. Thankfully though, as the movement has grown, this voice of yours which is typically online, and very disconnected from lived experience, its volume becomes lost in the crowd.