President Trump weighed in on the Maine Senate race this week, declining to endorse Graham Platner and instead offering a colorful characterization of him as a pig, adding that he would be supporting Susan Collins because she is a sane person who has cast more than ten thousand votes without missing one. That endorsement of Collins puts Trump in an uncomfortable position given that Platner just set a record in the Democratic primary, exceeding the seventy-one percent that Sara Gideon received in her 2020 campaign against Collins, a race Collins won comfortably.
Juan Williams, senior political analyst for Fox News and author of the new book New Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess the midterm landscape and weigh in on the Carmelo Anthony verdict reaction from Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett.
Williams said he personally cannot wrap his arms around Platner, citing everything from the Nazi tattoo to the sexting revelations to his fabrications about his biography and his attacks on the late Chris Kyle and Marcus Luttrell. But he said the voters of Maine have spoken, loudly, and in the game of politics you have to respect that. He noted that Platner explicitly rejected Chuck Schumer’s authority in his primary victory speech, positioning himself as separate from the Democratic establishment at a moment when that posture has significant appeal to voters across the ideological spectrum. He compared it to Ken Paxton in Texas, another candidate that most observers find deeply problematic but who prevailed because the voters chose him knowing the full record.
On the broader midterm picture, Williams acknowledged that some analysts have Republicans with a slight edge to hold the House, which he called remarkable given historical patterns of midterm elections going against the party in power and given the president’s sub-forty approval ratings. He said the redistricting push and the Supreme Court’s Callus ruling have reshaped the congressional map in ways that added districts to the Republican column and tightened the overall race. He said his own read is that prediction markets still favor Democrats in the House and that the Senate landscape has become slightly less favorable to Democrats than some analysts were projecting. His broader observation about the political environment is that everything is locked into tribal alignment, with red districts and blue districts largely predetermined, leaving very little space for the kind of candidate-to-voter persuasion that used to define competitive politics.
On Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett’s response to the Carmelo Anthony verdict in Collin County, Texas, Williams said he agrees with Proft that she does not know the facts of the case. Her description of the victim Austin Metcalf as a three-hundred-pound man who was on top of Anthony beating him down did not match the evidence presented at trial, which established no such facts. Her uncertainty about whether the murder weapon was a multi-tool with little scissors, which she suggested was probably not even a deadly weapon, he noted was in reference to the weapon that was in fact used to kill a human being. Williams said the final comment Crockett made, that Black mothers of Black sons live in fear and agony in ways that the Metcalf family never has, was not a general statement about racial anxiety but a direct comparison drawn at the moment that Austin Metcalf’s mother is grieving a murdered child. He said there is no analogy to be made between a mother who just lost her son to a killing and concerns about racial targeting, and that making that comparison in that context is explosive, an appeal to racial anger on every side, and something he thinks Crockett should apologize for. Proft noted it was a satisfying point of agreement between the two.