From the beginning of Graham Platner’s rise to prominence in Maine he seemed almost too good to be true, and when that is how things seem that is usually how they are.

A Texas Senate seat has been the white whale of the Democratic Party since at least 2018 when Beto O’Rourke came within a whisper of winning the seat even as Ted Cruz sat at +5% net approval. The margin of victory was 2.6% but the important number is the raw number of votes he lost by: 214,821. We will come back to why that number is important later. In 2024 Ted Cruz was in a much healthier position with a net approval of +12%, despite that Allred raised and spent $99.9 milli