Dirty tricks aren't exactly new in politics, so I don't want to get on my high horse and act shocked when they occasionally happen.

On the other hand, when your main pitch for office is that you aren't a typical politician — an appealing message that attracts people who may not even agree with you on many issues — it's fair game to point out that you are, and one of the worst. 

Barack Obama, for instance, portrayed the moralist and still does, and millions of Democrats swoon when he speaks of the halcyon days of bipartisanship and moral integrity. But the reality is that he was a remarkably partisan president, began his political career in the living room of an actual terrorist, and only got on the ballot when he first ran for office by cheating an incumbent Democrat off the ballot. 

He ran against Mitt Romney by calling him a dog-torturing Nazi who wanted to put black people in chains, proving his bipartisan bona fides, and his signature accomplishment was pushing through the most radical reshaping of 20 percent of the American economy without a single Republican vote. 

The moralist, in other words, is actually more like Brandon Johnson than George Washington. Unfortunately, that worked for him because he radiates all the class signals that appeal to the cultural elite, and his machine politics drew in the institutional Democrats. 

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The Democrats, this year, have lots of "outsiders" running this year, and their primary tool seems to be scamming people. 

Graham Platner, whose elite pedigree included fancy private schools and who lived off his parents as he trained trans communists in the methods of armed assaults, ran as a working-class guy. He campaigned as an everyman, and the Democrats embraced him because he presented as coded "working class," all while sporting an SS tattoo and a record that embraced literal communism. 

Abdul El-Sayed keeps calling himself a "doctor," when in fact he could go to jail for practicing medicine, and a philosemite when his family is Muslim Brotherhood, leans communist, and his supporters, by his own admission, are pro-Iran and often jihadis. 

Ilhan Omar literally campaigns two different ways in two different languages; in one, she is American as apple pie; in the other, she says she represents Somalia and her loyalties lie there. 

And now, Platner's replacement in the Maine Senate race is running commercials using Susan Collins supporters, implying they are his own supporters, and his advertising firm lied to people in the commercials. 

It's all lies, and coming from the people whose main pitch is cleaning up Washington and returning power to the people. 

It's one thing for Mayor Daley to pull dirty tricks and deploy a political machine to enhance his power. It's another for Democrats who are running to "get money out of politics" to amass huge war chests by arm-twisting donors, commit identity theft by smurfing, and rely on billionaires to help them flood the airwaves. 

In Alaska, Mary Peltola, who runs as the ultimate outsider, was just caught gaming the system in order to deceive her way into the Senate. Her entire pitch was that she was a straight shooter who didn't play the political game, and it turns out she is as bad or worse than every other politician. The New York Times called her out, so it's not a hit job; it's just a fact that she is scummy.  

Sean Trende makes the point about Peltola's scam perfectly:

In the world of campaign scandals, this is a relatively small infraction and something with precedent, as the Times story explains. This is something of the consensus in Election Twitter today: that in the greater scheme of things, this is no big deal.

In most cases I’d agree, but this one might be different. The problem gets back to the distinction I raised above. Something like this wouldn’t dent Bill Clinton or Donald Trump, who people knew were flawed.

Mary Peltola is different. First, she is running in a state with deep red DNA. The state has sent two Democrats to Washington since the 1970s, both under unusual circumstances (Peltola, the state’s member of Congress from 2022 to 2025, is one of those two). For a Democrat to win an election there requires pretty much everything to go right. She really didn’t need to be discussing this the weekend before the election.

Second, the cynical election analyst response—that this is just what politicians do—is probably correct. But that’s exactly the problem: Peltola’s campaign is centered on the idea that she isn’t just another politician. Anti-corruption, “Alaska first, party second,” and not being a career politician are central to her image. The headline on her homepage yells “To Hell with Politics…Put Alaska First.”

For a candidate who is running explicitly on a promise to “unrig the system” (in her X candidate bio) to get accused in the New York Times, with text messages to back it up, of literally trying to game Alaska’s unique RCV system after denying that charge repeatedly (and still denying it) really is a problem. To win as a Democrat in Alaska you almost have to be viewed as a quasi-independent non-politician. Peltola had been executing the type of campaign that builds that image flawlessly.

Democrats' big pitch to voters is that they are morally superior to Republicans, and the fact is that they spend an awful lot of time lying to voters and playing the game far more skillfully than Republicans. That, in itself, is unsurprising, because politics is literally their business, while Republicans are repulsed by government and are less inclined to play the game well. 

For decades, the dominant faction within the Democrat Party infrastructure was the "Organized Crime Democrats," as I call them, who use moralistic arguments and "nonprofits" that pretend to do good to fleece the public. The rising faction is the Bolsheviks, who are even more Machiavellian. 

I won't argue that Republican politicians are, on the whole, more "moral" than Democrats, but on the whole they are obviously less devious. 

What's shocking to me is how tolerant average Democrats are of this dichotomy between rhetoric and reality. Objectively, it's repulsive and would be punished in any other part of society. 

Instead, they embrace the cognitive dissonance and go off to vote for candidates like Jay Jones in order to save America from immoral Republicans. 

Go figure.