There's not a person on this planet who hasn't said or done something in their lives that they later regretted. Sometimes their regret may have come years later, or maybe a few hours or days later.
We (well, most of us) also do this thing called "evolving" over time. An opinion we once had about a person, place, thing, idea, or political topic might have softened or hardened over the years based on experiences, circumstances, and/or just a genuine change in the thought process.
When it comes to politics, I've certainly evolved. I started as a leftist feminist but eventually saw the light and never looked back. Personally, I've also evolved and grown in the way I process, consider, and express myself and present my arguments. It's not a perfect system, but it's worked pretty well over the years.
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But evolutions in political thought and behavior in the context of running for public office can oftentimes come across as phony or contrived because, well, the shoe fits. We saw it with disgraced now-former Maine Democrat Senate nominee Graham Platner, who, after allegations of domestic abuse and stalker-like behavior emerged, denied them while also adding that he was a "changed" person from the one he says he became after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Except the "I've changed" argument regarding his (alleged) mistreatment of women didn't quite square with another story out there about Platner cheating on his wife by way of sexting up to a dozen women after he was married in November of 2023. It was an admission his wife, Amy Gertner, made to his campaign staff early on in the summer of 2025 when they were vetting him. But she made sure to note that the sexting had purportedly stopped before he declared his Senate candidacy.
Sure.
We're seeing something similar play out with Michigan Democrat Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, whose campaign, in response to fresh reports of things he said as recently as 2024 on issues like getting rid of the 2nd Amendment, is now claiming his words are being "cherry-picked" but stated that he doesn't hold those beliefs today:
His campaign accused CNN of having “cherry-picked comments from old podcasts” that “don’t reflect his beliefs today,” pointing to a 2025 social media post in which he told followers to enjoy Fourth of July fireworks and insisting El-Sayed respects the Second Amendment, but also supports gun control.
Right.
And as we reported Monday, members of the DSA, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14) and frontrunner Democrat Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong, are now trying to downplay woke positions they've taken on issues like defunding the police, with AOC proclaiming that the "Woke One" era "was crazy" (and that we should just move on from questioning them on it), and Hong asserting some of the things she said were when she was in her "peak woke" phase when she was trying to run a restaurant.
Except Hong tweeted a lot of that stuff after she was elected as a state representative in 2020, and up until quite recently, many of those woke views were ones she was still touting ahead of the primary.
I get that in politics, how a candidate runs in the primary can be different from how they run in the general, but sometimes that has more to do with which issues they choose to emphasize more so than flip-flopping on them.
But these DSAers are trying to memory hole extremist positions that they still hold. Fortunately, the campaigns of Mike Rogers (MI) and Tom Tiffany (WI) were prepared and are well aware of what's happening and have been dropping receipts to counter the tone and issues shift in the campaigns of their respective opponents, but it's still maddening all the same that these anti-American candidates try to pull the wool over people's eyes in the way they do.
Editor’s Note: The 2026 Midterms will determine the fate of President Trump’s America First agenda. Republicans must maintain control of both chambers of Congress.
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