Maine just handed Democrats a wake-up call that they’d damn well better actually listen to this time.Governor Janet Mills suspended her Senate campaign Thursday, leaving Marine veteran and oyster farmer Graham Platner as the presumptive Democratic nominee to take on Republican Senator Susan Collins in November.The message Maine voters are frankly shouting is the same one I’ve been hearing from listeners on my radio/TV show for years and the same one that pollsters across the spectrum keep picking up across the country: people are sick and tired of mealy-mouthed corporate Democrats who run on focus-grouped slogans and govern like they’re scared of their own shadow. They want fighters.Mills was Chuck Schumer’s hand-picked candidate, recruited by Democratic Party insiders because they thought the 78-year-old two-term governor would be the safest, most “electable” option against Susan Collins. What Schumer and the “insider Democrats” got instead — and deserved — was a 30-point shellacking.Platner, who launched his campaign last August by naming “the oligarchy” and “the billionaires who pay for it” as the enemy, outraised Mills every single quarter, packed wildly enthusiastic town halls all over the state, and even earned Bernie Sanders’ endorsement along the way. He turned Mills’ establishment alignment into a major liability and thus pushed her out of the race a full five weeks before the primary.That’s what happens when voters finally get a real choice: they want the real thing, not a compromising deal-maker taking money from corporations and billionaires like Republicans do. As then-President Harry Truman said on May 17, 1952:“If it’s a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat, and I don’t want any phony Democratic candidates in this campaign.”And it matters that on roughly the same day Mills bowed out, the Congressional Progressive Caucus — just as fed up with moderate Democrats running the same losing playbook as voters are — rolled out its New Affordability Agenda, a 10-point legislative package aimed straight at the cost-of-living crisis that’s now crushing working families.It would make:— Prescription drugs cheaper by establishing a government program to sell generic drugs at a discount, cutting the price of a vial of insulin from $300 to $50;— Utilities cheaper by cracking down on for-profit utilities overcharging consumers, saving the average family $500 a year;— Gas cheaper by charging big oil companies a tax on extra profits from the war, then refunding that money to consumers. If oil stays at $100 a barrel, most families would get $324 back;— Childcare cheaper by guaranteeing no family pays more than 7% of its income – under $10 a day for most families;— Housing cheaper by building millions of new homes, offering every first-time homeowner $20,000 in downpayment assistance, and expanding rental assistance;— Groceries cheaper by cracking down on big grocers who fix prices and on companies that abuse seed patents to make farming more expensive;— Time off cheaper by guaranteeing every worker two weeks of paid vacation time;— Ban ‘Surveillance Pricing,’ where companies use personal data to raise prices with AI;— Put money in pockets by requiring companies to pay double wages for overtime, as opposed to the current time-and-a-half standard; and— Abolish Super PACs so billionaires can’t buy more policies that make stuff more expensive.New polling from Data for Progress found that every single one of those proposals is supported by close to 60% of Republican voters. Among Democrats it pushes into the 80% range.That’s not a “leftist” agenda. That’s a genuine populist agenda that works for the actual American electorate, and Greg Casar, Ilhan Omar, AOC, Mark Pocan, Ro Khanna, and the rest of the Progressive Caucus deserve real credit for putting it on the table.Some of us have been ringing this bell since the 1990s. Back when Bill Clinton was triangulating his way through welfare reform and NAFTA, I was telling readers that we were watching the Democratic Party gut its own coalition for a handful of cocktail-party invitations from Wall Street.As I laid out in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America and on the air for over two decades, when Clinton embraced Reagan’s neoliberalism in 1992 and Obama maintained it through his eight years in office, the Democratic Party took a fatal turn to the right.“End welfare as we know it.” “The era of big government is over.” NAFTA, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, bailing out the banks and hobnobbing with their CEOs at Davos while throwing the homeowners those banksters had defrauded out on the street, sucking up to Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and Big Defense, defending Netanyahu no matter how many war crimes he commits.Then nominating Hillary Clinton on a...