Editor’s Notes: Somehow, We Had This Article All Ready to Go

In posting this morning’s article “Three Potential Replacements for Graham Platner,” I had a momentary vision of how a certain kind of person, enamored of rough-hewn outsider candidates, might react to its header image of three leading Maine politicians:

In part, the reaction I envisioned was merely “No! No!!” in the style of Naomi Wolf.

But another part of the imagined reaction involved conspiratorial thinking—that a reader enamored of outsider candidates might also find it incredible that, Somehow, They Just Had These Guys And This Article All Ready To Go by this morning.

The readiness of These Guys should be explicable enough. Maine politics is an existing thing. Whoever is a prominent Democrat in Maine politics and might be available is going to be talked about as a candidate for one of the state’s two Senate seats.

But what about This Article? How could it come together so quickly? And why does it only talk about these three candidates? The answers to those questions should be explicable enough, too, but maybe it is useful for me to spell them out here.