Ds Finally Have A Real Chance To Beat Collins

Platner was always going to lose.

Disgraced Democratic nominee Graham Platner finally dropped out of the Maine Senate race. As I discussed yesterday, he had been credibly accused of multiple sexual assaults and a domestic assault.

The Maine Democratic party now has about three weeks, till July 27, to choose a replacement. They have voted to hold a 600-person nominating convention.

Platner’s (conspiratorial, whiney, absolutely graceless) exit, and the fact that there simply isn’t time or money to hold a full-scale election, has understandably led various party actors and commenters to express concerns about how legitimate the replacement will be, and about whether the new nominee will have the mandate to beat Collins. Policy fights—on military aid to Israel, for example—are also being compressed into an accelerated timeline, without a chance to work them out over a standard election cycle.

There is of course, reason to be concerned. The ugly failures that led to Platner’s nomination—failures by the state party, by the national party, by progressives, by centrists, and by voters too— have left Maine, and Democrats, with a limited range of options. This is not a scenario anyone wanted. This is not how anyone wants to be choosing a candidate.

Having said that, I do not think we should despair. On the contrary, Platner was a terrible loser of a candidate, and we now have a better chance at beating Collins than we’ve had since Bernie Sanders and a bunch of insider bumblefucks decided to elevate the Nazi-tattooed turd.

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The manly magic

This is not exactly the conventional wisdom. Many Democrats believed for many months that Platner—as a mustached, burly, white male veteran with progressive views and an oyster-fishing company—spoke to something primal and ineffable and working-class in the Maine soul, and that he was therefore uniquely suited to defeat Collins. A few good early polls, and his defeat of Janet Mills’ largely inert campaign, solidified the view that he had special Maine magic testosterone that could be duplicated by no one else.

The mystical resonance that a lot of men attribute to their hormones is bullshit, though, and Platner’s self-mythologized goop was already looking to be similarly uninspired. In two polls before the rape allegation destroyed his campaign, he was trailing among working-class voters—supposedly his base—by 37-58 and an even more brutal 41-56.

Platner did well enough with college-educated voters that he was about two points ahead of Collins among the electorate overall. But as analyst G. Elliott Morris points out, based on Maine’s 2024 results and the current electoral shift, we should expect Democrats to be ahead in the Senate race by 15 points. That means Platner was already underperforming by 13 points before the rape allegations.

Of course, Platner had at that point been damaged by domestic violence allegations. And by the Nazi tattoo revelation. And by his sexist, racist, homophobic reddit posts. And by revelations about sexting with other women while he was married. And so forth. I think some Democrats (not least Platner himself) believe that if only the evil journalists and eviler establishment hadn’t subjected Platner to such cruel, unfair scrutiny, he would have cruised to victory and redemption, leaving those pesky tattoos and reddit posts and assault survivors behind in the past where they belonged.

The thing is, though, that there is no Platner without the scandals. There is not some way to separate the Platner policies and the Platner testosterone affect from the actual things that Graham Platner said and did with his life up to the point where he started to run for Senate. People vote on the whole package—and that is as it should be, because if a candidate has shown horrible judgement in the past, if a candidate has hideously abused their power to harm those who trusted them, if a candidate has lied remorselessly throughout a campaign—then that candidate is not someone you want making life and death decisions. It is not someone you should trust with power.

The Platner we always had

This is who Platner is. It is who he has always been. And if you think that there were not more potential revelations—more ugly reddit posts, more sexts, and yes, more accusers—then you are naïve.

Eight months ago, after the first revelations about the tattoo and reddit posts came out, I published a prescient article titled “Graham Platner Is Not Going to Be a Senator.” At the time I said:

You can’t ask marginalized people—Black people, LGBT people, Jews, women—to vote for a guy with a history of saying ugly shit and with a literal Nazi tattoo on his chest. Nor can you expect Susan Collins to ignore these glaring weaknesses in her election opponent. If Platner were to win the primary, Collins would talk about that Nazi tattoo every day in a (probably successful) effort to drive down D turnout.

More, we still don’t know what else is out there in Platner’s past.

This was true eight months ago. And it’s still true! People are going to be put off by bigotry and misogyny. And we still don’t know what other ugly things Platner did in his past. We don’t know what determined GOP opposition could turn up. I have been saying, “there’s probably more out there” for eight months. I have not been wrong once.

Platner was a horrifically unfit candidate from the beginning in extremely flagrant, easy to discover ways that were going to come out in a high-profile Senate race. As I said eight months ago, he was never going to win this race; Collins was going to have him for lunch. The only question was whether Democratic politicians, orgs, and voters would come out of their testosterone-induced trance before they could replace him, or whether they’d realize their horrible fuck up too late.

Thanks to some very brave women and good journalism, the answer is just barely, barely before. We dodged a bullet in the form of an abusive, lying, loser narcissist.

I’m not saying we will win. Collins is a strong candidate, and—while I’m sure she wishes she could run against the walking black hole of scandal that is Platner—she will regroup and probably outperform most of her Republican peers. And obviously we don’t know who is going to be the Democratic contender (though I’d guess not Mills, given that the primary demonstrated that she was not up for a hard fought campaign.)

But while victory is not guaranteed, it is at least possible—which it was not as long as the party was in the grip of its Platner delusion. So, I would urge people who care about this Senate race and about beating fascism to count our collective blessings and prepare to support our no doubt imperfect candidate secure in the knowledge that said candidate, whatever their faults, cannot be worse than the guy who came within a week of losing the seat, and maybe the Senate and our democracy along with it.