As the old joke has it, if Democrats were to organize a firing squad, they would first form a circle.

With almost everything going their way for the mid-term election and with the possibility of making Donald Trump a one-term president in 2020, Democrats may be circling up again. Their ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory stuns.

What an opportunity they would be wasting. John Boehner, former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, a few weeks ago said, “There is no Republican Party. There’s a Trump Party. The Republican Party is kind of taking a nap somewhere.”

The Trumpians may be ripe for picking. But can Democrats handle their good fortune?

The electorate divides roughly into thirds, Democrats, Republicans, independents. Polls show most are in the middle. So to win, a party must win most of those in the middle.

So what do the Democrats do? In the primary on Tuesday in New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat U.S. Rep. Joseph Crowley, a moderate and possible future Houise speaker. To us who want to see more diversity in Congress (age, gender, skin color), this is a win. To us who want to see the Trumpians lose control of Congress, maybe not. Ocasio-Cortez says she is a “democratic socialist.” Shades of Bernie Sanders.

Another bad sign is a wave of bad behavior by folks at the Democrats’ leftmost flank. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, press secretary to the President, was turned away from the Red Hen Restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, when she took her family there to eat.

Now Sanders’s boss is such a despicable human being that he makes “slick Willie” Clinton look almost saintly. Her defense of Trump’s policies and personal outbursts can be laughable. Can you say lapdog? But should she and her family be shunned when they go out to eat? Lexington is not a Washington suburb full of liberals. It is 191 miles west of D.C., home of Virginia Military Institute, and hardly a hothouse of lefty thinking.

When Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen ate at a Mexican restaurant in Washington, protesters shouted, “If kids don’t eat in peace, you don’t eat in peace.” When Stephen Miller, the White House adviser who is Trump’s top “thinker” on immigration, ate at an upscale Mexican restaurant, a fellow patron yelled, “Hey look guys, whoever thought we’d be in a restaurant with a real-life fascist?” the New York Post reported.

Is it ironic that the faces of Trump’s anti-Mexico immigration policy were accosted in Mexican restaurants?

Lesser lights get hit, too. Pam Bondi, Florida attorney general, called Tampa police when she said she was accosted at a theater showing “Won’t You be My Neighbor?” the new movie about Fred Rogers, the gentle man whom we and millions of other parents hoped our sons would grow up to resemble. Irony noted.

To be sure, the Tampa head of Organize Florida, disputes Bondi’s assertion. He says he tried to engage her in a conversation when he chanced upon her and that Bondi panicked.

Then, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-California, egged on the harassers. “If you see anybody from that Cabinet — in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station — you get out and you create a crowd. You tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

Fortunately, several top Democrats jumped all over Waters for that. Unfortunately, she, like Trump, just doubled down, opening a four-lane opportunity down which Trump drove his Twitter truck. If you Googled Waters’s name on Thursday, you found most of the first page was reports (not all from Fox “News”) about Trump’s responses to Waters.

None of this is new. Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nevada, said that during her campaign in 2010, tea party activists used bullhorns to drown her out at “Congress on the Corner” events, and “spit on some of our members as they walked into the House.” Tea party people are, of course, the base of the Trump Party. “If you embolden this kind of behavior, you shouldn’t be surprised if it comes back to haunt you,” she said.

Maine’s Democrats have a lousy record in recent elections. State Sen. Libby Mitchell, their candidate against Paul LePage in 2010, carried 19 percent, barely half the vote won by Eliot Cutler, who ran a close second to LePage. Mitchell was the spoiler. Had she surrendered just before the election, enough of her votes would have gone to Cutler to defeat LePage. Imagine Maine’s different history had Mitchell recognized reality.

The left flank from Portland’s West End twice made things easy for LePage. In 2010, its followers got a referendum on the ballot to curb some bear-hunting practices. That brought out a big vote to leave bear hunters alone, and you can bet the vast majority of those voters checked off LePage’s name, too. Four years later, they got a gun-control referendum onto the ballot, and LePage slipped in again on the coattails of gun voters.

Will they ever learn? Maybe finally. The Democrats seem to have got it right, moving out of Portland’s west end and acting like a statewide center-left party. In the primary on June 12, Democrats nominated their two most moderate candidates for the governorship (Attorney General Janet Mills of Farmington ) and for the second district representative to the U.S. House (State Rep. Jared Golden of Lewiston).

But, didn’t I see in the Sun Journal that those same lefties have got a referendum item on the ballot to tax the highest-income Mainers to provide home-health care for seniors? Will the votes against this idea hurt Mills and Golden? Nov. 6 will tell us whether Maine’s liberals have smartened up. Don’t bet on it.

Bob Neal was enrolled Republican from 2006 until 2016. He changed to unenrolled when Trump took over the party, enrolled Democrat this year for the primary.

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