Janet Mills Quits (Finally): Voters Sigh In Relief (And Tell Chuck To Butt Out): UPDATED (7/6/26)

<This image says it all...
Victoria Sunday/The Daily Beast/Getty Images)>

Suggested Soundtracks:
"Nowhere Man" (The Beatles); "Don't Dictate" (Pentration)

<i.>

Last month, Maine's Democratic Governor Janet Mills finally bowed to the inevitable, and ended her sputtering vanity campaign for the seat held by her Republican counterpart, Susan Collins. Sticking to the script that politicos have been crafting since the 2000s, Mills announced she was "suspending" her campaign -- rather than quitting -- a distinction that won't impress 

The only noteworthy aspect is why Mills -- who blamed lack of financial resources -- stuck it out as long as she did, amid polls giving insurgent oyster farmer Graham Platner opening a 33-point lead in their forthcoming Democratic primary. Perhaps, like most of her fellow Boomer-era voters, Mills was praying for the Beatles to return -- with their dead counterparts, in Ed Sullivan-era black and white -- with a sprightly ode to slay the demons of rap, metal, or any new song recorded after 1980. 

I can almost hear the campaign theme ringing in my head, powered by those bouncy, yet raw, untrained, Please Please Me-era guitars: "Ooh, ooh, Janet, baby, you're the one for me/Vote for Janet, 'cause she always aims to please/Janet's my top choice, she always knows best/She stands heads and shoulders above all of the rest!"

Instead, Governor Mills will have settle for exiting on her shield to the strains of "Nowhere Man," the one who's always "making all his nowhere plans, for nobody," although she chalked up her decision to lack of resources. Even there, she lagged far behind, with a modest $2.6 million, versus the $4.0, 4.1, $4.6 or 4.8 million reported for Platner, depending on which source you believe (WBUR/Boston, Open Secrets, The New Republic, or Ken Klippenstein, respectively).

The news leaves Platner on a glide path towards nomination, though he obviously has much work to do between now and November. However, he seems up for the challenge, in contrast to Democratic party elders -- who remain stuck in a different era, and often give the appearance of being readier to die, than change. But we'll get to that point momentarily.

<A tad premature, as results bore out...

Janet Mills For Maine/YouTube capture>

<ii.>

So what qualified Janet Mills's campaign as a vanity effort? Simply put, the vanity of the man who recruited her (Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer), in defiance of common sense realities, starting with her age (78). While Ms. Mills showed noteworthy spine in standing up to Trump -- and, by most accounts, proved herself an effective and popular governor -- it's hard to reach any other conclusion.

After all, had Mills somehow gotten past Platner, and Collins, she would have become the oldest freshman Senator in our history. Is that the sort of history the Democratic Party should make? It would have cast her as yet another member of an entrenched American gerontocracy whose 79-year-old President, Donald Trump, is practically a spring chicken alongside Senators Charles Grassley (92), or Kentucky's dark gremlin, Mitch McConnell (84), who stepped down as Republican majority leader, but doggedly clings to his office, regardless. 

Actually, let's take that back. At 75, Schumer is probably the spring chicken of this particular story, but the basic point still stands. In any event, the only problem for Schumer -- and the donor class that he actually represents -- was Platner's ability to whip up a significant cyclone of energy around his candidacy, as Ken Klippenstein's brutal takedown of Mills's withdrawal announcement (see below) suggests.

If Platner amassed a 4-1 financial edge over Mills, it's because "people wanted him," Klippenstein asserts. End of story. Buying into Mills's "lack of funds" alibi amounts to "a verbal sleight of hand that makes it sound like a budgeting problem, like her campaign manager overdrew her checking account," he adds.

Not that Mills didn't try to find a workaround for her problems, though. When her initial attempts to take down Platner didn't work -- he's inexperienced, he's unelectable, he's weird, and so on -- Mills hit on a novel idea. If elected, she promised to serve only one term, hopefully easing concerns about sending yet another septuagenarian to a Congress that's bursting at the seams with them.

Which begs the question of why she was running at all, considering how long it will take America to recover from two Trump eras -- as even voters who expressed admiration for Mills, like baker Bev Chapman, told the New York Times (see link below): "'She’s been a great governor for Maine,' Ms. Chapman said, 'but new blood is needed and we need more progressives running who are not afraid to stand up to the current administration.'"

Of course, another (unspoken) reason for Mills's workaround not working any miracles is that it sounded just like the sort of pandering from veteran politicos, once they're cornered -- and don't see an obvious way out of the box canyon. But all the workarounds in the world can't save a candidacy that voters won't support, as Klippenstein notes:

"She would have been 86 at the end of her first term. Think about that. At a moment when even mainstream Democrats are beginning for generational change, the party's solution to flipping a must-win seat was a 78-year-old whose pitch was essentially 'I have been around a long time.'"

<"Oh, it's your treat this time?
Fine, I'll take you up on it. 

Just don't order me any oysters, thanks!"
(YouTube capture)>

<iii.>

In fairness to Schumer, not all of his Senate seat picks seem like total busts, as the Politico story (see link below) points out. Democrats seem reasonably happy so far with how Sherrod Brown, Roy Cooper and Mary Peltola are running in Ohio, North Carolina, and Alaska, respectively -- red states that must flip for the Democrats to retake the Senate this fall. Brown, in particular, is a marquee progressive -- something that Schumer's defenders cite as proof that he cares less about ideology than winning.

Michigan voters see something else afoot, however, in the Democratic establishment throwing its weight behind Haley Stevens -- a perennially chirpy, pantsuit-clad, ardent AIPAC disciple -- over progressives Abdul El-Sayed and Mallory McMorrow, in the Wolverine State's Senate primary (August 4). The situation has strong echoes of the Mills debacle, to the point of McMorrow warning that she won't support Schumer keeping his job if the Democrats retake the Senate:

“Let it play out,” McMorrow told POLITICO on Thursday evening. “This is a moment for Democrats, and I mean Democratic voters on the ground, to decide what party we want next. It is our turn. It is not the party’s turn anymore."

Other Democratic newcomers, like Illinois Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton -- the presumptive successor for its retiring incumbent Senator, Dick Durbin -- have voiced similar feelings; so did Platner, when he launched his upstart campaign to unseat Collins last summer. As Robert Reich notes on his Facebook page, voters remain angry and unforgiving with a system that's left so many so much worse off than ever: 

"That rebellion continues to this day. Yet much of Washington’s Democratic elite is still in denial. They prefer to attribute the rise of Trump and, more broadly, Trumpism — its political paranoia, xenophobia, white Christian nationalism, misogyny, homophobia, and cultural populism — solely to racism. Well, racism is certainly a part of it. But hardly all.

"In 2024, Democrats didn’t even get to choose their nominee from the primary process, since Biden dropped out after a dreadful debate performance and was replaced by Kamala Harris — leaving some Democrats feeling like higher powers were picking their nominee.

"The anti-establishment groundswell has by now spread to independent voters — who are now a whopping 45 percent of the electorate and have moved sharply against Trump. It’s one of the most dramatic shifts in recent political history."

To put it another way, whoever reads the room -- starting with those angry, disaffected independent voters -- will walk away with the keys to the kingdom, as Trump did, when he first got elected, in 2016. Bernie Sanders might have walked away with them, too, had the establishment not wrenched the nomination away from him -- a steal fueled by the mistaken impression of being able to coexist with wolves in sheep's clothing. Rest assured, it's not a mistake that progressives will -- nor should -- make in 2028.

<The attack ad that never ran: 
A preview of what awaits Platner this fall? 
Time will tell...
(National Senate Republican Committee,
YouTube capture>

<iv.>

The efforts to sink Platner share parallels with the campaign to take down Zohrani Mamdani, who became mayor of New York. Both races featured recycled faces (Andrew Cuomo, Janet Mills) caught flatfooted by insurgents who outworked and outhustled them. Both challengers attracted an avalanche of attack ads and negative press coverage, much of it generated by pundits who ignored or simply misread what was happening on the ground.

Much of that negative messaging focused on making Mamdani -- and now, Platner, or any progressive daring to follow in their footsteps -- seem like the offspring of Hitler, Manson, and Satan. The attack ad prepared for Mills (above) is a small sampling of just how far Republicans will go, since it's impossible to imagine such a mild-mannered figure as Mills causing nightmares for anyone (other than the donors who wrote her checks, and now experiencing a major case of buyer's remorse).

The whiff of Mills's desperation seemed obvious from the beginning, when her campaign unearthed ancient online posts as grist for attack ads against Platner -- specifically, "regarding his use of a slur for people with disabilities, and his comments on Reddit from more than a decade ago about Black people not tipping at restaurants and about sexual assault," as The Independent reports (see link below).

Yet Platner has weathered those storms, perhaps because people are weary of giving incumbents a free pass -- while their challengers must come across as lifetime Boy Scouts who only hang out with the likes of Donny Osmond, as they while away their days drinking milk, and listening to the Jungle Book soundtrack. 

The upstart generation has its flaws, "but I think there's an expectation by voters today that if you seem perfect, you're probably hiding something," as an anonymously quoted Democratic consultant mused to Politico. All that pearl clutching over a decade-old post seems downright absurd, when we look at the tramping of democracy, nonstop grifting, and maximalist power abuses that characterize the Trump regime.

Obviously, Platner won't enjoy the same commanding financial advantage against the overstuffed Collins, who -- unlike Mills -- can count on an avalanche of dark money to bail her out of a jam. All the same, she offers a perfectly doable pickoff -- if Platner does his job correctly, by demolishing her artfully woven facade of "concerned" moderation.

It's an act that Status Quo Susan, as we'll call her, has honed to perfection over her five-term Senate career. We know the routine well, which typically kick-starts with some tricky issue or other. Status Quo Susan will furrow her brow, purse her lips, hemming and hawing through her latest non-answer -- amid noises of however "alarmed," "concerned," "disturbed," or "troubled" she claims to feel about it -- before she finally votes as her tribe expects, and demands.

It's a routine that sometimes stretches to Hamlet-style proportions, as Collins demonstrated during the Brett Kavanaugh debacle -- where commentators made much of her studious note-taking during the explosive confirmation hearings, amid allegations of serious sexual predation against him. In the end, Status Quo Susan joined Vichy Democrat Joe Manchin to ease Kavanaugh over the finish line, 50-48 -- a spectacle that caused some wags to question the scrupulousness of her note-taking.

Again, which of these capsule summaries feels more worrying? A decade-old Reddit post that may or may not reflect its author's current mindset, or the latest chameleonic shift of a career politician who hasn't held a traditional town hall meeting with her constituents since the Clinton era -- over 25 years ago? (Platner, in contrast, has already 61 town halls.) If that isn't entrenched arrogance, what is?

It's the reason, presumably, why Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run For Something, tells the Independent: “People are hungry for change — the institutions that got us to this point cannot be the ones to get us out of it.” Indeed, and so noted.

This, more than anything, is the type of circle that voters -- particularly Democratic ones -- are beyond tired of squaring, as Klippenstein asserts: "People are fed up with an establishment that doesn't listen, that tells them everything is under control, even as it drives the country into a ditch. So they're taking the keys away."

Democrats would do well to consider taking those same keys away from Schumer -- and his equally tepid passive-aggressive counterpart, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries -- if they retake one or both houses of Congress this fall. It may not the outcome that either of them prefers, but it's what their base demands, and their party deserves -- to say nothing of a country that's crying out, loudly and clearly, for something else. --The Reckoner 

Links To Go (Hurry, Hurry, Herd
Those Gerontocrats Right To The Exits):
Ken Klippenstein:
Voters Take Keys Away From Elderly Politician:

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/voters-take-keys-away-from-elder

New York Times:
For Many In Maine, No Tears Over Mills's Exit...:
https://archive.ph/r1MfD

Politico:
Schumer Faces Renewed Scrutiny After Mills Meltdown:
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/30/chuck-schumer-janet-mills-meltdown-2026-00902217

The Independent: Step Off, Chuck!:
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/schumer-senate-democratic-primaries-mills-b2969045.html

UPDATE (7/5/26): This race has turned upside down yet again, in light of shocking rape allegations against Platner by Jenny Racicot, a 41-year-old Mainer who dated him five years ago. She accuses him of sexual assault, a charge that the Democratic vehemently denies, of course.

The resulting fallout has led to a freefall in Platner's poll numbers (see link below), and prompted him to "pause" his campaign, so he can "reflect on the best way forward," he said.

Right now, that seems hard to imagine, as prominent backers like Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) and California Congressman Ro Khanna have yanked their endorsements, along one of Platner's major progressive backers, Elizabeth Warren. 

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the face of Presidential progressivism in 2016 and 2024 -- whose words may prove decisive, if he joins them -- has yet to weigh in.

All our sympathies go out to Ms. Racicot, whose allegations stand in a league of their own, from other accusations of unsavory behavior made against Platner. (Still, all our sympathies to them, too.)

Time will how these developments play out, though it's difficult to imagine how a replacement candidate can regain the ground of unseating one of the Senate's most notorious shape-shifters -- and that point still stands, along with our concerns that we've raised about the Democratic establishment's selection process.

We believe that Democratic gubernatorial nominee Hannah Pingree -- who's also called for Platner to quit the race, in a statement cited by the New York Times, has it just about right: "Platner tapped into something real — voters hungry for change showed up with real passion and energy. That energy doesn’t have to go away. It needs a new candidate to carry it forward.”

We'll just have to see who gets another bite at that particular apple:

Axios: Schumer Joins Calls For Platner's Withdrawal:
https://www.axios.com/2026/07/06/graham-platner-maine-senate-democrats

MSN: Whopping Majority Of Maine Voters
Said They'd Ditch Graham Platner Over Another Scandal...:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/whopping-majority-of-maine-voters-said-they-d-ditch-graham-platner-over-another-scandal-right-before-another-scandal-broke/ar-AA27lsnv?ocid=msedgntp&pc=LCTS&cvid=6a4c3561a1124924b69d16ce50748ca6&ei=93

Massachusetts Primary Fallout: Two Races, Two Object Lessons For Progressives

<"Puppet On A String"

The Reckoner>

<i.>

Last week, Massachusetts voters hit the polls for their party's primary elections. In the most closely-watched races, Democratic Congressman Richard Neal and Senator Ed Markey romped to renomination, for different reasons. Both races offer object lessons for progressives willing to take notes, as they work on broadening their reach nationally.

For progressives, Neal seems like the perfect poster child for everything that's wrong with the current system, starting with his entrenched status (31 years), and readiness to act as a corporate water carrier. Not surprisingly, the House Ways & Means Committee's chairman stood out in 2019 as Congress's top collector of corporate PAC (Political Action Committee) donations, The American Prospect notes.

All told, Neal hoovered up $1.4 million from familiar suspects like AT&T, Comcast, Facebook, General Motors, Google, Lockheed Martin -- just read the list below for yourself. It's enlightening, to say the least, especially you consider issues like Neal's successful crusade against a proposal to limit surprise medical bills.

Surprise billing occurs when patients use services outside their network, often resulting in thousands and thousands of dollars in sticker shock. It can happen despite your best efforts, as Sonji Wilkes discovered, when she racked up a $50,000 bill for her son's hemophilia treatment.

Although the Wilkeses had chosen a hospital in their network, they didn't realize it had outsourced their son's intensive care treatment to a physicians' group that didn't accept any insurance, Washington Monthly reported. Their insurer also refused to pay, shoving the family down a dark financial rabbit hole. Eventually, their bill got dismissed as part of a class-action lawsuit, but by then, the damage had been done.

Such horror stories had seemingly generated sufficient late last year to pass the Lower Health Care Costs Act, until Neal -- and his ranking Republican counterpart, Kevin Brady, another corporate PAC money collector -- went to work. The language gradually changed from limiting surprise costs (subject to appeal), and requiring insurers to pay, to a mixture of voluntary negotiations and arbitration as the preferred solution.

Corporate interests love arbitration for the reasons progressives loathe it. Arbitrators typically hail from the industries they oversee, which means their buddies' interests are more likely to prevail. Arbitration allows companies to hide their misdeeds, since it's a private process, with no public review to determine if the arbitrator got it right. For consumers caught in this bear trip, there are no juries, no appeals, and no legal recourse, once the gavel bangs down. Small wonder that critics like Zach Cooper, a professor of health policy and economics at Yale, harshly denounced the final product: "It's a plague on both our houses."

<"Party Of Lowered Expectations"

The Reckoner>

<ii.>

No matter. Despite a spirited challenge from Holyoke, MA Mayor Alex Morse -- who focused on Neal's corporate ties, and support for ideas his opponent deemed impractical, like the Green New Deal, and Medicare For All -- voters apparently had no second thoughts. Neal took 83,457 votes (58.8%) to 58,390 (41.2%) for Morse, who even lost his hometown (4,366-3,940). 

That had to hurt, I'm sure, when you consider that Neal showed no remorse for his practices, as he made clear during a debate between them: "If you contribute to my campaign, you're buying into my agenda. I'm not buying into yours." So much for money as a medium of exchange, I suppose. 

Presumably, then, we might take this statement from Neal's victory speech with a barrel of salt: "We will put legislative action behind the powerful words of the recognition of racial and economic disparities that still confront America. We must address concentrated wealth in this country and level the playing field for everyone."

Markey also won decisively, with 766,134 votes (55.44%), to 617,961 for Joe Kennedy III (44.6%). Much of the drama centered on whether Joe III, as Camelot's latest acolyte, had offered a convincing rationale for his candidacy beyond, "It's the next step up the ladder," and "I'm a Kennedy, you owe it to me, what other reason do you need?"

Ironically, given the mainstream media's penchant for "horse race" style coverage ("Who won, who lost? Who's ahead, who's behind?"), it wrongly identified Joe III as the first Kennedy to lose an election. That milestone actually belongs to Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who fell short in a 1986 Congressional race. So rest easy, Joe III fans. He's out of politics for now, but at least he's not the punchline of a trivia question...yet.

Markey's victory seems all the more surprising, since he's taken stands that leave him out of step with today's Democratic Party. That includes voting with Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden for the infamously draconian crime bill of 1994, and the 2016 nominee, Hillary Clinton, for the Iraq War, in 2003. Not exactly a good place to sit these days.

Yet Markey's full-throated support for the Green New Deal enabled him to decisively outflank Kennedy, overtake him in polls, and generate the excitement among young voters, in particular, to lift him across the finish line. He also benefited from Joe III's inability to explain why voters should elevate him from the U.S. House, where he'd carved out a low-key, yet undistinguished career, to the hallowed halls of the Senate. 

Joe III's failure to frame a winning rationale naturally prompted lots of sour grapes and raspberries from the usual anonymous suspects, like the consultant who claimed: "The Markey campaign did a masterful job convincing voters Ed is someone is not."  Maybe so, maybe not. But I have a simpler response. If you can't really explain why you should get the job....maybe you shouldn't get the job. 

<Self-Explanatory...
The Reckoner>

<iii.>

So what are the big takeaways here? Start with the obvious: timidity doesn't always equal success. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said as much in 2019, when she gave Markey a crucial endorsement credited with boosting his viability in the race. She cited Markey as one of the few established figures to show any interest in her ideas, after her election to Congress. 

In AOC's eyes, Markey is "not just resting on his record of the past, but he's aggressively pursuing an agenda for the future." That, she argued, "is what a progressive is, and that's what progressivism is all about." Markey summed it up in his own distinct fashion after winning his primary race: 

 “March in the streets, protest, run for school committee or the city council or the state legislature—and win. But don’t just challenge the status quo, dismantle it. Take things over. When they say ‘slow down,’ go faster. When they say ‘not now,’ start that day. When they say ‘not that way,’ redraw the map. When they say you’re too young, show up with your friends. Every reason the critics and cynics offer to give up or give in is proof positive that you should push forward—and hard."

Think about the long game. It's never only about one campaign, or one election. If nothing else, Richard Neal's win shows how tough it is to topple an entrenched incumbent. Unlike recent peers who lost their primaries (like Elliot Engel in New York), Neal didn't bring a knife to his particular gunfight, having amassed a $4 million war chest. Clearly, he came prepared, and ready to play; so should we. In practice, it can take two, three or four tries to pick off someone so well-situated Any strategy for change should take this reality into account.

We should expect the neoliberal establishment will fight dirty to keep control, and plan accordingly. Morse learned this lesson the hard way, when the University of Massachusetts Amherst's College Democrats dis-invited him to future events in a letter that hinted darkly of him making improper sexual advances on students. It's a classic homophobic trope, but one that quickly gained ground after the college paper published the letter. The timing certainly proved convenient, as Morse's internal numbers showed Neal polling at 45 percent (see link below).

The situation rapidly escalated into all-out attacks, including a $1 million ad blitz by a pro-Neal Super PAC that claimed Morse had sex with college students. The shadow group apologized, claiming the ads had "accidentally" gone out to radio stations, even as they "accidentally" continued airing right through Election Day. In the end, no victims ever surfaced, because they never existed.

Innuendo-laden as they were, the ads served their purpose by weaponizing Morse's sexuality, throwing less discerning voters off the scent of Neal's dark money fixations (as well as turning thoughtful people off politics for good -- the kind we need to challenge creeps like him). It's one of the ugliest examples of this gambit that I can remember, and shouldn't go unnoticed in a future campaign. After all, if this is what Neal does when he wins decisively, what'll he actually do in a close race? And what does that say about his character, or lack of it? 

We should also continue pressing for accountability from the institutions that let Neal slip off the hook for this surgically orchestrated smear campaign. That includes the state party officials who solemnly vowed to investigate the students' conduct, even as it advised them to delete emails showing links between the two sides, and the media, whose "he-said, she-said" coverage failed to convey what was really going on.

We should continue creating alternatives to get the results we're after. Staying tethered to the Democratic Party isn't the only viable option, nor is it the only option, as progressives have realized, as they elect more candidates like AOC, and Jamaal Bowman, who knocked off Engel. AOC recognized as much by withholding her dues to the DCCC (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee), which notoriously requires anyone it helps to use only its consultants and staff, thereby ensuring that the dependence remains permanent. The appearance of issue-driven progressive groups like Indivisible, Justice Democrats, and the Sunrise Movement is one of the most exciting and positive developments in recent years, for three reasons. 

First, such groups offer an alternative to sticking with a Democratic Party structure that talks the talk, but doesn't walk the walk. Second, they provide resources that insurgent candidates often struggle to muster on their own. Third, they offer a rallying point for supporters, as the Sunrise Movement showed, by making 350,000 calls for Morse at the height of the smear campaign against him. And, while those efforts weren't enough to tip the balance, without them, Morse's challenge would have been snuffed out before it started, along with his public life.

Groups like Justice Democrats can also serve as a pressure point, by raising questions that established parties and politicians often prefer to duck: How does your embrace of PAC money square with the rhetoric you're dishing out? If your record is really in sync with our ideas, what examples can you give? What have you done for us lately? What will you do tomorrow, and how do we know you'll actually follow through? '

Even if we don't win this race, or that one, knowing that the uncomfortable questions won't stop coming will put a spoke in the "don't ask, don't tell" game that both major parties often like to play. Raising them also puts the media on notice that we want more beyond the "he said, she said"/"horse race" coverage that leaves the larger issues safely untouched, and allow the "don't ask, don't tell" merry-go-round to keep on spinning.

Above all else, we should continue to working to put more people in power that will actually do what we want, at the federal, state and local levels. Scoring policy is more likely when you're working with people who seem genuinely committed to making them happen, and not settling for anything less, as Ed Markey stated in his election night victory speech:

"The time to be timid is past. The age of incrementalism is over. Now is our moment to think big, to build big, to be big. This is what this election is all about. This is what this moment demands.” 

I couldn't have said it better. -- The Reckoner

Links To Go Go (Hurry, Hurry,

Hoover Up All That Dark Money):

American Prospect

Richard Neal Is Number One

In Corporate PAC Donations:

https://prospect.org/power/richard-neal-number-one-in-corporate-pac-donations/

Jacobin

Alex Morse: "I Would Be 

One Of The Few Democrats

To Stand Up To The Democratic Party":

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/08/alex-morse-richard-neal-congress-massachusetts

Politico: Why Joe Kennedy's Senate Campaign Flopped:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-joe-kennedy-senate-campaign-005621788.html

Sludge: Richard Neal Took Big Bucks...

https://readsludge.com/2020/05/05/neal-took-big-bucks-from-lobbyists-while-killing-a-surprise-medical-bills-fix/

The Intercept
Massachusetts Hopeful Alex Morse
Couldn't Overcome Homophobic Smear:
https://theintercept.com/2020/09/02/alex-morse-primary-result-richard-neal/

The Nation
Ed Markey Has A Message For Democrats...
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/ed-markey-progressive-aoc/

Washington Monthly

Why Congress Can't Stop Surprise Medical Bills

https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/april-may-june-2020/why-congress-cant-stop-surprise-medical-bills/