{"id":111,"date":"2026-05-11T19:04:41","date_gmt":"2026-05-11T19:04:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bostonrelocationinsider.com\/?p=111"},"modified":"2026-05-11T19:04:41","modified_gmt":"2026-05-11T19:04:41","slug":"what-do-new-york-maine-and-indiana-have-in-common-the-ruling-class-was-thrown-out-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bostonrelocationinsider.com\/?p=111","title":{"rendered":"What do New York, Maine, and Indiana have in common? The ruling class was thrown out."},"content":{"rendered":"<article>\n<div>\n<p><span>When Maine Governor Janet Mills dropped out of the Democratic primary in her state\u2019s high-profile US Senate race, there was endless head-scratching and analysis about what exactly had happened.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/bostonrelocationinsider.com\/?p=110\">\u2018SNL\u2019: Matt Damon hosts, returns as Brett Kavanaugh, and Noah Kahan performs. Watch all the best moments.<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span>Here was Mills, a two-term governor and the only Democrat to win statewide in Maine in decades. She was seen as such a force in politics that she had never seriously faced a primary challenge. There was a reason Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer heavily recruited her for the race: he believed she was the only Democrat who could defeat Republican Susan Collins, a nearly 30-year incumbent.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>But Mills was beaten badly in nearly every campaign metric by an upstart oyster farmer named Graham Platner. He outraised her, built a stronger volunteer operation, led in polls, and simply outworked her on the campaign trail. All this despite the fact that his campaign openly acknowledged its own flaws.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div><span>Get Starting Point<\/span><\/div>\n<div><span>A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.<\/span><\/div>\n<div>\n<div><label>Enter Email<\/label><\/p>\n<div><button>Sign Up<\/button><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><span>Predictably, much of the analysis focused on the ideological dimensions of the race. And those factors mattered, as did arguments about generational change and the mechanics of the campaigns themselves. The big tell: Democrats in Maine didn\u2019t care about Platner\u2019s flaws that would have ended a campaign 20 years ago.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>But what got lost in much of the conversation were two enormous dynamics shaping American politics in 2026: first, that the ruling-class establishment is increasingly vulnerable to outsider populists; and second, that politics is no longer local so much as nationalized.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Those dynamics help explain not only what happened in Maine, but also what happened in Indiana\u2019s Republican state Senate primaries this week, how democratic socialist candidates Zohran Mamdani and Katie Wilson were elected mayors of New York City and Seattle last year, and why Donald Trump is sitting in the White House today.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Trump\u2019s election in 2016 shattered the old framework through which American politics had long been viewed. Politics was no longer simply a spectrum running from hard left to centrist to hard right. Instead, it became something closer to four directions: left, right, up and down, with the up-and-down divide often rooted in class and education.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Indeed, one of the biggest drivers of this era of political realignment has been education and, relatedly, income. Democrats were once seen as the party of the working-class voter, the high school graduate trying to make ends meet. Under Trump, many of those voters moved toward Republicans. The educated professional class still dominates the leadership of both parties, as it often has, but the Democratic base increasingly includes voters who once identified as moderate Republicans.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Importantly, this shift is not rooted primarily in ideology. After the Great Recession, both the Tea Party movement on the right and the Occupy Wall Street movement on the left were, at their core, expressing a similar frustration: the American political system was broken.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>The indictment was simple and easy to understand. Millions of ordinary Americans lost homes and jobs during the financial collapse, and virtually no one went to jail for it. Instead, politicians bailed out the banks.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>With Barack Obama in the White House and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and former Florida governor Jeb Bush running campaigns to take his spot in 2016 that largely promised continuity, it is notable which candidates generated genuine movements and grassroots energy: Vermont independent Senator Bernie Sanders and Trump.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/bostonrelocationinsider.com\/?p=108\">Man charged in White House correspondents\u2019 dinner attack pleads not guilty<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span>Republicans found the candidate who best matched the new political environment. Democrats did not.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>While this has hardly been the only force shaping American politics over the last decade, it has been an underappreciated one. It helped propel Mamdani past former New York governor Andrew Cuomo and Wilson past Seattle\u2019s incumbent mayor, who had long been part of the city\u2019s political establishment. And it is likely to remain a powerful force long after Trump leaves the political stage if Americans continue to feel that the system is not improving their lives while the wealthy continue to pull further ahead.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>The second dynamic, the shift from the old adage that \u201call politics is local\u201d toward a fully nationalized political culture, did not arrive with the dramatic force of 2016. Instead, it slowly built over time until moments like this week in Indiana made it impossible to ignore.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Five very conservative Republican state senators lost primaries not because they were out of step with their districts ideologically, but because they failed to play the kind of national political role demanded by a sitting president. Trump wanted them, like many Republican-controlled state legislatures around the country, to pass new congressional district maps to help Republicans maintain control of Congress.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Traditionally, state lawmakers focused on local concerns: schools, crime, roads, taxes, and the administration of health care and social welfare programs.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Now, increasingly, the expectation is that every elected official at every level must constantly participate in the national political battle. And this is not simply a Trump phenomenon. The activist bases of both parties increasingly demand it, from California to Virginia and now even in Tennessee, where new congressional maps are being discussed just months before the midterm elections. Louisiana officials have even delayed congressional primaries amid similar pressures.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>The collapse of local media outlets, and with them sustained coverage of local issues, is a major reason national political narratives now dominate so much of public life.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>To be sure, politics at every level remains messy and complicated. Elections that seem destined to go one way on paper can still turn because of the candidates themselves and the campaigns they run.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>But for much of the past decade, many observers have reacted to major political outcomes as though they emerged from some bizarre and isolated vacuum. In reality, the opposite is true. These outcomes are not disconnected from broader political currents. They are products of them.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/bostonrelocationinsider.com\/?p=107\">Trump says he\u2019ll move to suspend federal gasoline tax. He can\u2019t do it on his own.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What gets lost in much of the conversation are two enormous dynamics shaping American politics in 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>What do New York, Maine, and Indiana have in common? 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