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Comic Strip of the Day Editorial Cartooning

CSotD: Vox Populi and Other Delusions

Published: July 9, 2026 1 minute 17 comments

Nor should we listen to those who say “The voice of the people is the voice of God,” for the
turbulence of the mob is always close to insanity. — Alcuin to Charlemagne, 798 AD

“Friends, I want to remove any cause for contention
between you two fine fellow-Democrats”
Herblock

I missed getting to vote in 1968, because although I was 18, the 26th Amendment wasn’t ratified until 1971, by which time I was 21 anyway.

I suppose I’d have voted for Humphrey because he wasn’t Nixon, but he also wasn’t Gene McCarthy, who had the most primary wins and he sure wasn’t Bobby, murdered just after winning the California Primary and possibly securing the nomination himself.

I’d done a little envelope-stuffing for Gene but my loyalties shifted to Bobby by the time he was killed, and I’ve long suspected that he’d have won the nomination in Chicago, given that Hizzoner had a soft spot for Kennedys.

Bill Mauldin

By the convention, it was clear that anyone who had gone Clean For Gene had wasted the effort, because the party was going to pick the candidate and it sure wasn’t going to be Eugene McCarthy.

That was the last time the Democrats chose their nominee in a smoke-filled room. After that, the primary system went from advisory to definitive, which was how George McGovern gained the nomination in 1972.

And won 17 electoral votes.

Steve Sack

So anyway, Graham Platner dropped out of the Senate race in Maine last night, after leaving the Democrats, as Sack depicts it, disillusioned by what had seemed like a good candidate.

I should offer a disclaimer: When I was an editor in Maine, the first person I met was Janet Mills, who took me to breakfast and filled me in on who was who and what was what in Farmington, then remained a solid contact. And while I greatly admired Olympia Snowe, I only got to spend one afternoon hanging out with her. Susan Collins was the Senator who dropped by regularly and with whom I had a warm relationship.

Journalists don’t have friends, but they do find some sources more cordial than others.

Steve Artley

However, Collins took a strong slitch to the right shortly after I left Maine and I was hoping to see her step down, but Artley encapsulates the result of the Platner nomination and fall from grace. His depiction of Collins as a monument is accurate: She and Platner had been locked in polls that were — given the margin of error — tied.

He also does a nice job of showing the self-destructive result of the Democrats having nominated, and then rejected, Platner. It doesn’t seem likely that Mills will be the replacement on the ticket, given that Platner had trounced her in the primary, and assuming the party chooses their nominee — they’ve hardly got time to ask the voters — it’s likely to be former state Senate President Troy Jackson.

Platner is an oyster farmer, Jackson is a logger, so they’d retain the blue-collar aspect as well as potential support from Bernie Sanders. But given how close the race was anyway, this last-minute switch has a strong whiff of the recent presidential race, and whoever gets the nod will have to hit the ground better than Kamala Harris did.

Jon Ostrove

Ostrove sums things up, because Platner had seemed like a solid, popular nominee. There’s some question over whether his past behavior came to the surface by actual process of former girlfriends spontaneously stepping forward or though a concerted effort by the opposition, but there’s no doubt that he had a lot of skeletons in his closet and he wasn’t transparent in dealing with them.

Which brings us back to Alcuin‘s warning to Charlemagne, because Platner was indeed a bright shiny object that quickly tarnished, and while it sounds good to buck the party system, perhaps you need to start doing so at the state level and let people get to really know you before you swing for the fences and try to capture a seat in the US Senate.

Or, to adopt an old-fashioned technique, let the primary be advisory, but leave the final choice to the pros in their smoke-filled room.

Second disclosure: I was a Muskie fan in ’72 and was horrified when the primary system produced McGovern. In the words of Leo Durocher, nice guys finish last, and McGovern was one helluva nice guy. I don’t think little Donald Segretti would have bothered to jam a stick in Muskie’s wheel if the voice of the people wasn’t going to make the choice.

Not that the smoke-filled room is a flawless system, mind you. Remember that the Republicans made Theodore Roosevelt McKinley’s vice-president because, as governor of New York, he kept introducing reforms and they wanted to bury him in a position where he couldn’t do that anymore, yielding, upon the assassination of McKinley, the immortal phrase “Now look! That damn cowboy is president of the United States.”

And thus the Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era. Sometimes even a flawed system works out for the better.

Juxtaposition of the Day

Paul Duginski
Jimmy Margulies – KFS

However you feel about the value of binding primaries vs advisory primaries, however, it’s important to keep the actual, final decision in the hands of We, the People, and there is a solid and frightening effort being made to undermine that bedrock American tradition.

Having lost in the attempt to cancel validation of the 2020 election by force and violence, Dear Leader is working to get ahead of things by gaining federal control of voting through the Save Act. He’s already persuaded several state governments to submit their voter rolls for approval and is in the midst of getting the US Postal Service to monkey with mail-in ballots and control whose votes are delivered and whose are quietly rejected.

And if you’re unhappy with what the Graham Platner debacle does to the Democrats’ chance of capturing the Senate, picture how the midterms will turn out if the entire state of Ohio, for instance, is brought under Dear Leader’s thumb.

Here’s a terrifying look at what could happen, from Miles Taylor, who is in a position to know things you don’t want to hear about.

But probably should.

Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.

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Comments 17

  1. Democrats will always have a disadvantage at election time: They actually believe that people with severe public moral problems have no business being elected, will not vote for them, and will drive them out of nomination/office – even if the ‘problem’ is only visual (Al Franken).

    Republicans could care less. As long as he can win, they run him. And the voters are enough in lockstep to vote for him, anyhow.

    1. We well know Republicans care little about morals these days. However, the subject was about Democrats, where most still do care about morals.

  2. to vote in ’68, you had to born before 11/47. if 18YOs could have voted in ’68, that date would have been 11/50. were there enough of us left-leaning, idealist boomers to be born in those three years to make a difference at the polls? could we have stopped the reagan to trvmp mudslide before it started?

    1. As long as we didn’t all vote for Dick Gregory, who was my actual favorite.

  3. The Democratic candidate has to be purer than Caesar’s wife.
    Republicans can trot out moral paragons like Trump and Paxson.

  4. True enough, George McGovern did get the nomination, but that was only after Nixon and his henchmen (of which there were many) kneecapped Edmund Muskie, by attacking Ed’s wife.

    I remember Muskie being so outraged at the attack that he shed tears. Of course the Republican response was something like ‘Would you trust a man who cries to have his finger on the nuclear button?’ And Muskie was out and McGovern, a good man, was in.

    I always burn a little every time I see a Republican shed a tear for any reason.

    2. If I recall, there was more to the knee capping than that.

      If I recall, that was the year of Watergate, Nixon’s attempt to fix the outcome of the Democratic nominating convention. That was the whole point of the break-in, to affect whom the Democrats nominated. And whether it was Segretti or Watergate, in the end, Nixon got what he wanted.

      Though others have speculated, he would have beat Muskie, as well.

      Meaning, Watergate was unnecessary. But Nixon wasn’t taking any chances, either. At least, on election outcome.

      The outcome of Watergate was an entirely different matter.

      But also, an entirely different moment in our history.

      When checks and balances actually seemed to work.

      Though, even then, it was belatedly.

    3. Did Muskie actually tear up? They tell us that he was speaking in a light snow/rain.

      1. With the cameras running, it didn’t matter whether they were actual tears or not. The impression the water droplets made was devastating.

  5. This is what pisses me off most about American politics: Republicans can endorse any old POS but the Democrats have to be pure and spotless. I’m not saying the Dems need shitty candidates but the GOP simply has no moral standards.

    I’m also not excusing any of Platner’s wrongdoings, but it seems his real failing is not being more forthright about his past. Granted, if he were he likely would not have been the candidate anyway, but at least then we have replaced him with someone better, sooner.

    It really does have shades of Biden dropping out at the last minute, and for no real reason other than the endless mantra of “He’s too old” and look who just celebrated their 80th while in the White House? This country really just cannot get its shit together, and frankly at this point kind of deserves whatever it gets.

    1. What I haven’t seen brought up is that if Platner had been a Republican his past wouldn’t have been an issue. He might have even been groomed for President.

  6. At this point, politicians, of either party, are mostly greedy hacks. The few that aren’t are vastly outnumbered by people who were elected by K Street aided by the Citizens United decision. It’s the reason why our Founding Fathers wanted a republic instead of a democracy. They believed the country should be run by a wise elite( rich, propertied individuals) rather than the other classes. Democracy was too messy with the “ignorant mob” involved.

    1. That paints with far too broad a brush. It’s true that money has enormous influence in American politics, especially after the Citizens United v. FEC, and many elected officials rely heavily on large donors and corporate interests. But saying politicians are “mostly greedy hacks” ignores the growing Progressive movement, whose best-known leaders have built their careers on rejecting corporate PAC money, relying primarily on small-dollar donations, and advocating reforms designed to reduce the influence of wealthy interests.

      Whatever one thinks of their policies, it’s difficult to argue that figures like Bernie Sanders or other leading Progressives are in politics to enrich themselves when they’ve consistently championed campaign finance reform, ethics rules, and limits on concentrated wealth and corporate power.

      The historical point is also overstated: the Founders held a wide range of views about democracy and republican government, and while many were wary of unchecked majority rule, they also created institutions intended to be accountable to the people. The central problem today isn’t that democracy is “too messy”–it’s that concentrated money has too much influence over it, which is precisely the problem many Progressives are trying to address rather than exploit.

      1. While the Progressive Movement still exists , it’s difficult to see where it has any real influence over the conditions of the poor and working classes. A+ for effort, D+ for actually getting anything done anymore. They are John the Baptist being hounded, prosecuted and primaried by Herod lackies over imagined slights.
        What I’m sure of history is how it’s turned out regardless of individuals attempting to alleviate capitalistic abuses. Do we give up? No, we fight the good fight and go down swinging, hopefully, in a blaze of glory. I just don’t like our chances in a monolithic government almost completely controlled by the MegaCorpAmerika ®.

  7. You say: “given how close the race was anyway, this last-minute switch has a strong whiff of the recent presidential race, and whoever gets the nod will have to hit the ground better than Kamala Harris did.”

    It wasn’t Harris’s form or timing that caused her shameful loss to the worst president in history. Research shows the number one reason Democratic voters stayed home instead of voting for Harris was her refusal to do the right thing that her working majority base demanded – committing to separating from Biden on the partnership with Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and ending all weapons shipments to Israel.

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