After both of Donald Trump’s election wins, the election punditry industrial complex decided that Democrats needed to run candidates who “talk like a normal person,” weren’t “grown in vats,” and can relate to voters like real people.
This is in large part a reaction to voters regularly noting that Trump is authentic because “he’s not a regular politician,” while viewing Kamala Harris as phony and inauthentic despite on paper being vastly more qualified than Trump. After all, Trump authentically tried to overturn an election.
The word “authenticity” gets kicked around a lot, including by me. But, like a lot of buzzwords, it’s important to grapple with what we’re really talking about when we say “authenticity.”
Before his downfall, many in the Beltway pundit class (not to mention rank-and-file Democratic voters) thought Graham Platner had the potential to be an electoral superstar because his gruff oysterman persona made him “authentic” and helped him connect with Maine voters.
Many Democratic Maine voters I talked to in focus groups talked about Platner as an authentic Maine candidate. And in fact what many of us saw as potential red flags—the Totenkopf tattoo, the gross Reddit posts, the strange social media activity—voters took as evidence that Platner wasn’t one of those candidates grown in a consultant-approved vat. Voters like a redemption story and they don’t want the national discourse to dictate whom they choose as their candidate.
The problem was, of course, that Graham Platner was, authentically, not a very good person. And ultimately that was his undoing.
So, if authenticity is the coin of the electoral realm, it’s worth digging into what it truly means for a candidate to clear the authenticity bar.
Let’s go.