This Is How You Got Graham Platner

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, June 29, 2026

 

I pay special attention to polls about pride in America, mostly as a matter of narcissism.

 

I’m keen to know how many people have had their patriotism shattered by the relentless demoralizing scumbaggery of the MAGA era, as I have. Am I the exception or the rule?

 

A little of both, it seems. Gallup’s new data strongly suggests a “Trump effect” on deteriorating American pride, in case the pitiful attendance at the Great American State Fair this past weekend didn’t already clue you in. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.

 

For instance, ousting Donald Trump in 2020 and regaining control of the White House did boost patriotism among the left—but only modestly and temporarily. The highest share of Democrats who said they were “extremely proud” to be American in recent years was 34 percent in 2024. By comparison, the lowest share that said so during the hated George W. Bush administration was 46 percent.

 

Independents followed a similar arc. Extreme pride in being an American dipped within that group after the first year of the first Trump administration; then Joe Biden became president and … it kept falling, recovering slightly in 2024 before dropping further during Trump 2.0. Public dispiritedness at the abiding popularity of a corrupt, demagogic postliberal buffoon can’t explain all of that.

 

But it explains a lot, I think. Between the depths of the Bush years in 2006 all the way through the end of Barack Obama’s administration, the share of adults who claimed they were extremely or very proud to be American barely budged. Then you-know-who took office and the numbers began to plummet, from 81 percent in 2016 to 75 percent the following year to 63 percent in 2020 to 53 percent today, the lowest mark this century.

 

Among independents, extreme pride in being American has gone from 55 percent in 2006 to 28 percent in 2026. Among Democrats, it’s all but vanished. The 46 percent who felt extremely proud 20 years ago has collapsed to 14 percent now.

 

Seeing that this morning, I thought, “This is how you got Graham Platner.”

 

It stands to reason that a party whose sense of patriotism has collapsed will be more willing to send burn-it-all-down socialists into the government, even personally obnoxious ones like the chud from Maine or the anti-miscegenation woke muppet who clinched a House seat last week in New York City. Another member of the Democratic Socialists of America is poised to oust 30-year Democratic incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado tomorrow night. And far-left Abdul El-Sayed has become the frontrunner for his party’s Senate nomination in Michigan, one of the country’s traditional bellwethers.

 

Socialists have even begun to perform well in favorability surveys. New data from pollster G. Elliott Morris finds that the six most popular (or least unpopular) politicians in America are Democrats; those seven include Sen. Bernie Sanders, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all of whom have been associated with the left’s radical DSA wing at one time or another.

 

What might explain it?

 

Washington Examiner editor Peter Laffin has a theory. “Trump had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to delegitimize the opposition after 2024 through effective conservative governance and honorable comportment,” he wrote this morning. “But he couldn’t escape his impulsiveness, and he could very well go down as the figure who ushered in socialism in the U.S.”

 

Is that the answer?

 

As I noted last week, the president’s right-wing apologists love to credit his continued political viability to a popular backlash to progressivism. “This is how you got Trump,” they’ll snort, alluding to how the elite left’s condescension and cultural excesses alienate the working class. But that logic works, or should work, both ways: If socialists sweep into federal office this fall, presumably that too would be driven by some sort of backlash among hoi polloi—to the right this time, not the left.

 

What will the nature of the backlash be, according to Republicans? When they ask themselves “What did we do wrong to make a creep like Graham Platner electable?” what conclusion will they reach?

 

The wrong answers.

 

We can start with a conclusion they won’t reach. They won’t embrace Laffin’s theory.

 

Admitting that Trump cocked things up so badly as to make socialism attractive by comparison would require right-wingers to admit they erred catastrophically in reelecting him. They’ll never do it. They spent 10 years being warned by “elites” that the president is an embarrassing civic blight on America who’s as incompetent as he is crooked. They’d sooner pay $12 per gallon for gas before they acknowledge that those elites were correct.

 

Laffin himself isn’t correct either, of course. There’s a germ of truth in what he said: Had Trump’s second term looked more like his first, focused on the economy and less sidetracked by self-indulgent nonsense like foolish wars or putting his image on U.S. passports, he’d be more popular than he is.

 

But there was no universe in which he might have delivered “effective conservative governance and honorable comportment,” and to pretend otherwise is to stoop to self-indulgent nonsense yourself. Trump warned everyone what the point of his second term would be and what caliber of person it would employ; Republican voters who now feign surprise and dismay that he’s governed as he has are transparently making excuses for their own knowing dereliction of civic duty. They knew he was a snake when they took him in.

 

A more popular answer on the right to the question of “How did we get Graham Platner?” will be: We didn’t! The election in Maine was rigged.

 

That will be the president’s answer to defeats across the country, certainly, and so it will also be the answer mindlessly adopted by many right-wingers—but not all of them, and possibly not most. The 2020 reprise we’re headed for is destined to be less popular among Republicans than the original.

 

Trump himself won’t be on the ballot this time, reducing his supporters’ emotional investment in the midterms and their urgency to find excuses for defeat. And his victory in 2024 will inadvertently undercut some of the conspiracy theories that might be used to rationalize a November disaster. If, as we’ll be told, socialist victories are due to America having imported a third-world electorate, how do we explain the president and his party having done so well with nonwhite voters two years ago?

 

How believable will it be that Graham Platner won on the strength of illegal immigrants voting en masse in … Maine?

 

The real problem for “Stop the Steal” this time around, though, is that influential right-wing factions will be incentivized by their respective policy hobby horses to call b.s. on it. That wasn’t a problem in 2020, when every stripe of populism was foursquare behind the coup attempt, but this fall will be different. Iran doves like Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Megyn Kelly will look to blame a GOP defeat on Trump’s war, not on Democratic vote-rigging. And Iran hawks like Mark Levin will look to blame it on J.D. Vance’s (i.e., Trump’s) peace-deal capitulation to end that war.

 

The lines of battle for control of the post-Trump party in 2028 are being drawn. Successfully scapegoating a rival faction for a Republican midterm wipeout will matter more to right-wing populists than advancing the latest face-saving excuse for a major presidential failure. And circumstances might make it easy: If the economy tanks or gas prices climb again, the idea that Democrats had to cheat to win won’t pass the laugh test.

 

So “How did we get Graham Platner?” is likely to become a battle royal of narratives. The “rigged!” cranks will struggle with the Tuckerites who insist that Republican warmongering and obeisance to Israel seeded a popular appetite for a radical socialist alternative. And the Levinites will allege that dejected hawks stayed home rather than turn out for a right-wing party whose foreign policy has become a pale imitation of Jew-hating leftism.

 

There are more persuasive answers to the Platner question, though.

 

The cost of living.

 

The obvious reason socialists are getting a hearing from voters is that the cost of living has bedeviled the last two presidents.

 

That probably explains why patriotism didn’t rebound among Democrats and independents during the Biden era. Pride in being American is tied up in the idea of the American dream; when the American dream feels out of reach, that pride lags. (Especially among the young.) And when it feels out of reach across two separate administrations, one left-wing and right-wing, voters might plausibly deduce that the problem may not be solvable with traditional politics and policies.

 

America needs to try something different to make life affordable again. Socialism sure is different.

 

It’s not just inflation, though. For many years, across many administrations, leaders of both parties have agreed that the United States needs to break certain bad habits—and then haven’t broken them. Middle Eastern wars, enormous annual federal deficits, uncertainty about what to do with the millions of illegal immigrants who have been here for years: No matter whom one elects, including a gonzo outsider like Trump, the problems recur, deepen, or simply never get addressed.

 

The less Americans feel they have to lose by giving someone like Darializa Avila Chevalier a crack at power, the more likely they’ll be to do so.

 

The president’s failures have been especially helpful to socialists, I think, because the promise of his 2016 campaign has proven fraudulent twice over. The implied warranty of Trumpism is that bureaucracy makes big problems unfixable; if you want real change in the United States, you need a strongman who’ll bulldoze laws and rules to impose his will on “the swamp.” Americans took him up on that offer—and, apart from controlling the border, it’s been a disaster. Life is still expensive. The annual deficit is grotesque. Even the U.S. military seems less formidable than it used to be.

 

To make matters worse, the president got elected and reelected by insisting that he’d champion a working class that had been forgotten by Republicans and Democrats, with special emphasis on bringing down costs in 2024. Americans believed him, only to find that he cares less about affordability than he does about the amount of algae in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

 

If you’re the sort of person who was intrigued by the potential of postliberal authoritarianism to solve previously unsolvable problems, Trumpism has been a bust. So maybe it’s time to roll the dice on the left’s version, in which power is less concentrated and redistributing wealth is a higher priority.

 

Republican voters will find it hard to concede that Trump’s failure on affordability is how we got Graham Platner. For one thing, they won’t want to admit that the president’s blue-collar credentials are almost entirely cultural, not economic. But I think the right is also instinctively allergic to interpreting politics through the lens of class and redistribution. They associate such things with the Marxist left, and I think on some level they resist the idea that control of the government should depend on which side is delivering tangible improvements for voters.

 

To the modern right-wing tribalist, politics isn’t a contest to see who can deliver more. (Except with respect to deportations.) It’s an existential struggle to keep the left out of power so that they don’t destroy the country. Concede that socialists are benefiting from Trump’s failure to bring down the cost of living and you’re conceding that, in some circumstances, the public might reasonably prefer socialist leaders. Unthinkable.

 

The Trump factor.

 

The other correct answer to the question “How did we get Graham Platner?” is related to the decline in Democratic and independent patriotism. The ceaseless humiliations that the president continues to inflict on the United States aren’t the only reason that pride in being an American is down, but it certainly is a reason to anyone outside the MAGA cult.

 

It’s not just a matter of him behaving badly or “impulsively,” to borrow Laffin’s excruciating euphemism. It’s the squalor of it all. Trumpism is an experiment in what would happen if America were run like a third-world country—sidelining the legislature, installing cranks and imbeciles in high positions, using the police to harass enemies, abusing state power in all sorts of ways to enrich friends and family, delegitimizing every political development that doesn’t go your way as a product of cheating or criminal activity. (Including algae.) Tinpot dictators don’t debase themselves in their daily pronouncements as reliably as our president does.

 

We dwell on those subjects a lot in this newsletter, so I won’t belabor the point. But if you grew up, as I did, with “American exceptionalism” as the engine of your patriotic pride, the last 10 years have been a sustained exercise in having your face ground in a pile of s--t. (If you grew up during the Trump era, you never had that engine to begin with.) Americans might once have been an exception to the grubby manner in which most other populations on Earth governed their countries, but no more. If we’re exceptional now, it’s only insofar as we gave a second chance at leadership to a man any respectable people would have thrown in prison or exiled after his first term ended the way it did.

 

Patriotism will recover somewhat once Trump is gone, but I’ll be surprised if it ever rebounds completely. Having seen what other Americans are willing to elect and indulge, the disillusionment about exceptionalism can never be undone.

 

And that partly explains how you get Graham Platner. When you lose respect for your country, electing unfit, unrespectable people to office can only feel less objectionable. That’s basically what populists say when asked why they excuse Trump’s poor character, no? I came to hate the system, so I was willing to overlook a dishonorable candidate’s flaws to shake it up.

 

Well, a lot of people hate “the system” that Trump and MAGA have created. If there’s a guy out there willing to tear it down, who cares if he once had a Nazi tattoo? The branch of government he’s running for functionally doesn’t even exist anymore! Political squalor is like any other good: If you make it profitable, as the right did by twice electing the president, you’ll get more of it.

 

Needless to say, I don’t expect any soul-searching on this point from Republicans in November if Platner and the other socialists win. The market among the grassroots right for less squalor and more dignity is, shall we say, not robust.

 

If anything, I imagine many will seize on a swell of support for “godless communism” as an excuse to become more radically squalid in their politics. That’s another impediment to Trump’s “Stop the Steal” plans, in fact: Postliberals will want mainstream Republicans to believe that the socialist threat is real and rising, not an artifact of election chicanery. It can’t be defeated by banning mail-in ballots or tightening voting procedures. It can only be defeated by—you guessed it—the GOP becoming even more fascist.

 

In addition to the self-serving explanations by the Carlsons and Levins that I mentioned earlier, my guess is that many right-wingers will explain a rising socialist tide at the polls as a mysterious organic outgrowth of the left’s supposedly fundamental radicalism. Trump didn’t cause anyone to support Platner, you see, nor did the remorseless cost of living. What caused it is that Democrats are America-hating Marxists at heart and many of them are simply being more honest with themselves about it, for whatever reason.

 

Maybe so. It’s true that Democrats’ pride in America has consistently lagged behind Republicans’ throughout this century per the Gallup poll I flagged above. There’s something in leftist ideology that’s less comfortable with patriotism—possibly the transnational ambitions of class war, possibly its preoccupation with “progress” disposing it to dwell on the nation’s sins. But it’s also true that electing a boorish demagogue like Trump who wraps himself in the flag for cynical reasons is influencing how Americans view that flag.

 

Nationalism and patriotism are distinct things. But when the president treats authentic American patriotism as a tribal totem of postliberals, go figure that some Democrats and independents might become polarized around feeling pride in America, coming to view it as an expression of MAGA-style nationalist chauvinism. And inevitably finding themselves more tolerant of anti-Americanism in leaders than they should be.

 

That’s how you get Darializa Avila Chevalier, and we will get her in November. If we get Graham Platner too, don’t be surprised.