In Defense Of Vetting

Some thoughts on why the process of vetting candidates is so important

Jul 15, 2026

This is an excerpt from my daily post from July 12, 2026…..

In Defense Of Vetting - Party committees have one job - to win elections and to win majorities. To do so they work hard each cycle to recruit the very best candidates to run, the ones most likely to win. We’ve seen that in the work the Senate Democrats have done this year to give us a shot at winning the Senate, as they worked hard to get Sherrod Brown, Roy Cooper, and Mary Peltola to run. All three have led in recent polling in very hard to win states.

Part of how we determine what a “good candidate” is through vetting them. Party committee staff and outside research firms get feedback from state and local political and community leaders, look at their electoral track record (yes party committees favor candidates who’ve shown they can win, particularly in tough races), and go through public and financial records, social media posts, past votes and speeches, work history etc to determine whether there are vulnerabilities that be can be exploited by a ruthless and well funded right win campaign and information ecosystem. The idea behind this is simple - the party committee wants to win (that is their only job) and if we are going to ask folks to rally around our candidates we must have confidence in them and their ability to survive the attacks that are going to come. This process is heavily informed by Senators, House Members, and staff who have won competitive battleground races in recent years, and know what it takes to win in hard places.

As we are human these efforts to find the very best candidates and vet them are never perfect. Sometimes there are disagreements in the family about who might be best. Sometimes we make mistakes. Sometimes promising candidates underperform, or lie in the vetting process. But, my friends, there two things that are very clear now:

You’ve met the many candidates the House and Senate Party Committees are backing and any objective and fair assessment is that both have done a very good job at putting talented, admirable people who fit their states and districts out there this cycle. That this cycle Democrats have done a good job at candidate recruitment and vetting. Period.
Not taking this process of vetting seriously is reckless, dangerous, and extraordinarily naive.

Here at Hopium we vet our candidates in two ways: 1) we take the recommendations of the Party Committees very seriously, and seldom endorse candidates they have not vetted and rallied behind 2) we do due diligence by talking to people in the state or city who’ve won competitive races. The only candidate that we’ve endorsed since our founding who has blown up and not made it through to the general election is Graham Platner, and as all of you know I was very, very reticent about getting behind such an obviously flawed candidate, particularly in a year where character and virtue have come to matter so much.

What has become true this year is there are powerful actors in our politics who just simply aren’t taking the vetting process seriously enough, and are rallying behind and promoting objectively high risk candidates. We saw this with Platner. We’ve seen it with Darializa Avila Chevalier, who has seen a series of just bat shit crazy and extreme social media posts get uncovered (some just before the primary, some after). We’ve now seen it with a candidate running in MI-7, William Lawrence, who had just an unbelievably wild set of comments get unearthed yesterday (if these exist, there will be more):

Politico has a new story running this morning about this dynamic:

Here are some excerpts (I encourage everyone to read it):

Progressive Democratic candidates have one thing to say to their establishment amid a wave of primary victories poised to dramatically alter the ideological makeup of their party: Enough with the old posts.
Attacks that dredge up calls to defund the police, full-throated embraces of identity politics and more, born from the leftward lurch Democrats took during President Donald Trump’s first term, won’t be what voters are thinking about come November, they say.
……….
Bill Neidhardt, a Democratic strategist at the progressive consulting firm Middle Seat, said that while it’s not like “there’s never room to apologize,” a candidate refusing to entertain attacks on their progressive past can work remarkably well among voters itching for an outsider candidate.
“Whenever I see an incumbent focusing on tweets and not about the economy, I feel like my campaign is in the place where I want it to be,” said Neidhardt,

I’m sorry but as Graham Platner just showed us that last comment and this idea that crazy and bad stuff people have said and done in the past doesn’t matter is fucking insane!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It needs to be noted there is a vast difference between what is likely to happen with these unvetted candidates in a primary among Democrats versus what happens in a battleground race against Republicans. Democratic voters are far more likely to be forgiving of pass indiscretions, and other Democratic candidate campaigns may be less willing to go there and make this stuff central to the primary discourse. But that is simply not true in battleground districts or states against Republicans - as anyone who has actually been involved in campaigns against Republicans would know. Much of this nascent, DSA-aligned, Bernie descended political world that has emerged in recent months is full of staffers and consultants well versed in winning Democratic primaries. Beating Republicans requires a completely different set of experiences and understandings, including taking the process of vetting a candidate very seriously.

Not taking vetting seriously not only risks us losing races we can and should win, as we’ve learned with Platner, it can do damage to the entire Democratic brand and cost us dearly in terms of time and money. Not taking vetting seriously is risky under any circumstances, but in this election, where have this critical opportunity to flip both the House and Senate and grievously wound MAGA, WTF are we doing here, people?