A Maine Mess
Graham Platner's past was bound to catch up with him and it did. It doesn't mean the Democratic Party can ignore how many votes he won, though.
No matter how often he texted me, no matter how often he gave a speech that hit my political soft spots, I could not get behind Graham Platner with anything more than, “he’s the nominee now, so let’s make it work.” From the Nazi tattoo imbroglio to the accusations of being a leftist Pete Hegseth, mixing sexual assault with his blackout drinking, it felt like a matter of when, not if, something would come out that had zero ambiguity. Something that Platner could not power through or deny. That something hit this week in the form of Jenny Racicot, an ex-girlfriend who not only recounted her rape at his blackout drunk hands, but also how she withheld telling the full story previously because she didn’t want to hurt his chances of winning on a platform she believed in. Tonight, Platner begrudgingly accepted reality and withdrew from the campaign.
As Matt Bernstein pointed out in an Instagram post yesterday, this was something we saw just a few months ago when Dolores Huerta confirmed that César Chavez, a legendary organizer of the United Farm Workers, venerated as a saint in that community and elsewhere, was a rapist. He repeatedly raped Huerta, getting her pregnant on multiple occasions, and she kept silent about it until she was 96(!) because she didn’t want to harm the good work he’d done. That such a thing happened sixty years ago and happened again this year speaks to a massive failing on the left to take this behavior as consistently and seriously as it does when the fascists do it.
Social media is, of course, a hellhole on this issue right now, and I’ve by and large tried to stay out of it because what good will it do? Leftist women are (rightfully) upset, and blasting the hell out of everyone else over it. Other leftists, like Ryan Grim and Ken Klippenstein (Ken being part of this disappoints the hell out of me—I thought he was better than that), are being unrepentant about supporting Platner, and then you have some who are arguing, well, this:
I’ll preface this by saying that Tim Burke is an outstanding journalist, professor, technical wizard, and someone I deeply respect and like. This is still a bad take.
The last Democratic candidate Burke refers to is David Costello. Costello ran unopposed in the 2024 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate because Senator Angus King, the incumbent, runs as an independent, even though he caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate. Nobody else ran because they knew it was pointless, and it was. Costello got approximately 55,000 votes in the primary, and in the general, was only able to add 33,000 votes to that. He finished a very distant third, with the Republican getting 34% and King getting 51%. Does that sound like someone that was “already vetted” and “whom they’ve already voted [for]?” It sounds like somebody that was there and got the votes he did from the people who choose the straight party line vote.
By the way, Costello got 17,000 votes this year, finishing 24,000 votes behind Governor Janet Mills, who had quit the race weeks before the primary. The guy is a loser whom nobody took seriously. Platner won the primary with 172,000 votes and 72% of the vote, which is more than the total number of votes the last time Collins was on the ballot and the Democrats nominated Sara Gideon, the speaker of the State House of Representatives. Gideon got 71.5% of the vote in her primary in 2020, but the total votes for all three candidates were less than Platner’s turnout this year1, and Gideon was somebody that the Democrats were ecstatic to run against Collins. She raised money hand over fist, in a presidential year to boot, where Joe Biden won the state with 435,072 votes….and Gideon underperformed him by 94,000 votes.
Susan Collins won a majority of the state’s voters, even after her votes for MAGA Supreme Court justices, even on a presidential year ballot, even after having shredded her promise to only run for two terms during her first Senate election, even against a well-funded liberal female that ran a good campaign against her. Collins won 52% despite all of that. For reasons that defy all logic, she is much harder to beat than she has gotten credit for, and it would take a lot to defeat her. Chuck Schumer’s brilliant plan was to recruit the state’s septuagenarian governor, Janet Mills, who reportedly turned him down several times until finally giving in. Mills did win statewide twice, but she’s also slumping in popularity and has backed an unpopular data center. She was not exciting, and she didn’t run a campaign so much as she slow-walked it, which left room for Platner on her left, and boy, did he seize it. So here we are, now, with a massive mess to clean up and a bitter man who thought he’d beat the rap. What now?
It would be an all-time blunder to ignore Platner’s electoral achievement. There was already a lot of red flags out there and he still wiped the floor clear of any opposition. He was muscling through. Voters have made it clear from New York to Colorado that they are as anti-incumbent as they’ve ever been, and that they want people ready to get into the pit to brawl with the fascists (not necessarily a literal meaning, but some electorates might not mind that either). Platner gave them that feeling. He positioned himself as the guy who wasn’t afraid of anyone and would raise hell in the Senate against the MAGA minions who are afraid to utter the mildest criticism of Mango Mussolini. It reminded me of what I consider to be the greatest line Aaron Sorkin ever wrote, in the 1995 film The American President (we miss you, Rob Reiner, this movie doesn’t get enough love). Michael J. Fox, who is the chief policy adviser/pollster for the fictional president portrayed by Michael Douglas, is trying to stiffen Douglas’s spine and make a difficult decision on a bill. Fox said:
“People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they'll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership. They're so thirsty for it they'll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there's no water, they'll drink the sand.”
The Democrats have suffered from a lack of leadership for a couple of years now. Their best and brightest, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are repeatedly denied leadership roles because something something seniority. Hakeem Jeffries is one of the worst House leaders fielded by Democrats in the last century, utterly ineffective and unable to lead a pack of Boy Scouts, let alone the Democratic caucus. He does not inspire, he’s thoroughly bought by AIPAC (who are toxic with the Democratic base), and it seems like Nancy Pelosi anointed him her successor because she’d look brighter in comparison, not because he was any good at this. Chuck Schumer in the Senate long ago lost his fastball, and regularly has to deal with revolts from his own caucus. He is also thoroughly ingratiated with and indebted to AIPAC, calls himself “Israel’s steward in the Senate" and is cozy with Wall Street. Bernie Sanders has done a lot to organize and fire people up, but he’s not officially a Democrat. Other great organizers, like Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, and Kat Abugazaleh, were defeated in large part by AIPAC cash flooding their districts to ensure that they lost because they dared refuse to support Israel as it wages an unholy war against millions of innocents that neighbor it.
In short, there was no genuine leadership in a position of power, so Platner stepped up to the microphone and captivated people. He put forth policies they supported and he presented the persona they wanted. Platner’s fall has not changed the fact that he drew better turnout than Dems have done for a Senate primary ever in Maine’s history. The most votes ever won by a Democrat in a Senate primary. He clearly touched a nerve, and even though it turned out to be a mirage, he got the most voters ever to drink the sand. I do not know the precise who should replace him on the ballot, but by God, they’d better not be an Establishment candidate. The voters made it clear what they wanted, and the state party must take heed. A candidate with the same passion and positions can beat Collins—I don’t think it’s about the who, it’s about authenticity and what they believe—and anyone who can’t deliver on those counts is dead on arrival, and with them, a great opportunity to unseat one of the Senate’s biggest frauds in this century will be lost.
The 2018 Senate Dem primary, another year that voters were fired up because of Trump, saw the winner, Zak Ringelstein, get just under 90,000 voters, while 43,000 voters did not choose a nominee. Angus King won that election as well. Ringelstein, like Costello before him, got 10% of the vote while losing 24,000 votes from the primary. Their 2014 nominee got 65,000 in the primary and 190,000 in the general against Collins, who handily won with over 400,000 votes.
Even in 2008, when Obama easily won Maine, Susan Collins won 23,000 more votes than Obama did. Not even the 2008 Obama landslide could carry a Senate candidate past Susan Collins.