And now, on to Platner…

By the time you’re reading this, Graham Platner will have finally abandoned his calamitous campaign for Maine’s open Senate seat. In a selfie video Wednesday evening, Platner announced that he was suspending campaign operations, while still demanding a say in who should replace him on the ballot—even as he faces a serious rape allegation and an endless trail of scandals that might’ve single-handedly derailed Democrats’ chances of taking back the Senate in November. “The arrogance and privilege of this guy,” said Quentin Fulks, the former deputy campaign manager for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

But even before all the controversies—the Nazi tattoo, the drinking, the Reddit racism, the penchant for lying, the accusations of assault and rape—Platner was a pain in the neck for the Democratic Party. His very decision to run for Senate as a combat veteran and self-styled working man—propped up by a group of left-wing political consultants who attended elite private colleges—was an affront to Chuck Schumer and party establishmentarians in Washington who preferred Gov. Janet Mills, a safer choice, for the seat.

But when Platner took off, thrilling Mainers and national fans alike with his cool videos and rugged populism, Mills gave up on the race. That suddenly left Democrats nervous that control of the Senate would now depend on a first-time candidate with a hazy past running against battle-tested Republican Susan Collins. Washington Democrats only grew more frustrated as the long-rumored scandals started to pile up and Platner kept charging ahead.

The Marine Corps vet remained defiant, chalking up his bad decisions to PTSD and excessive boozing that was now in his past—though he was still posting on Reddit in 2021 and sexting with women outside of his relationship as recently as 2023. He apologized for his behavior, but also took messaging cues from his movement leader, Bernie Sanders, claiming that all the bad headlines were really just attacks from “the establishment” and big donors hell-bent on silencing the revolution. Platner kept assuring his credulous fans that there was nothing more to come, even when it got awkward—like when Chris Hayes had to sheepishly ask Platner in June whether there were any dick pics floating around that might surface during the campaign. “I’m not worried about it,” Platner said, his eyes darting off camera.

But even as they were under siege, Platner’s team somehow got cockier. His ambitious young strategist Morris Katz, who helped elect Zohran Mamdani in New York, had already attacked the “assholes in D.C.” who didn’t want Platner to run. In June, after The Wall Street Journal and New York Times published detailed stories of Platner’s sorry behavior with women, Katz reposted a Bulwark piece arguing that “the knives are out” for him and his progressive consulting firm, Fight Agency. “Best not miss,” Katz posted on X. His campaign was basically daring reporters, Gary Hart–style, to chase down more.

Maybe it was his gruff voice or his blue-collar patina, but Platner possessed some kind of special voodoo that made too many progressives stifle their own principles, and even their baseline political instincts. In the end, though, reporters—and more than a few suspicious women in progressive politics and media—viewed him with appropriate skepticism, and they did not miss. The Times, CNN, Politico, the Journal—and yes, conservative muckrakers like the Free Beacon, which revealed that it was Platner’s father, not the V.A., who financed his house with a $200,000 mortgage loan—did their jobs. (Platner has denied allegations of rape and assault.)

Platner’s campaign went kaput this week, after an ex-girlfriend told Politico and CNN that the candidate had drunkenly raped her, without a condom. Platner denied the worst parts, but still began the tortuous process of unwinding his campaign so that Democrats could try to salvage their chances of knocking off Collins. As one frustrated Capitol Hill Democrat told me today, before he dropped out: “He’s holding the race hostage.”

The Democrats who were always leery of Platner are basking in schadenfreude now. Yes, much of that sentiment is coming from centrists who are concerned about winning primaries around the country this year and reining in the Bernie left; Sanders, after all, helped recruit many of those leftist insurgents, including Platner. And he was late to the game in calling for Platner to drop out, offering only a brief statement after the rape allegation surfaced on Monday.

For some, it was a reminder that Sanders and his D.S.A. disciples tend to view personal and private matters as pesky and annoying distractions from the economic crusades that define politics. “Class issues are so much more important to that crowd,” said Herbie Ziskend, the White House deputy communications director under Biden.

Identity politics, race, gender, religion—those currents still pulse through the larger Democratic coalition, as well as the activist groups waging pressure campaigns on issues like abortion, gun control, and immigration. But those aren’t major priorities on the populist left, where Platner was seen as a “working-class prophet,” Ziskend said. “The excuses that Platner’s supporters have made for his behavior during the campaign would be out of bounds in any other political context,” he added. Ziskend pointed to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who avoided getting involved in the Maine race entirely, perhaps wary of Platner’s rumored history with women. Ocasio-Cortez also has a watchful eye on the 2028 presidential race and the need to grow her Democratic support beyond just the class-struggle left. “She has been shrewd,” Ziskend said.

Meanwhile, Platner’s refusal to drop out of the race immediately after the Politico story dropped on Monday, and his attempts to influence the process of choosing his successor, arewere absolutely galling to Democrats who seeaw a scandalized white man demanding grace when no such grace would be afforded to a nonwhite politician, man or woman. Double standards abound. “The Nazi tattoo should have been enough, but no one cared and they just let it go,” Fulks told me.

Maine’s population is almost 94 percent white, with a voting base that’s older and more educated than other states, making it an ideal launchpad for a candidate in the mold of Sanders, who struggled in two presidential campaigns to appeal to voters of color. Bakari Sellers, the CNN analyst and former South Carolina state legislator, rolled his eyes at the notion of Platner winning a race anywhere outside of New England. “There is some level of irony in the purity politics of the Bernie left, or the far left, when it comes to policy points but not necessarily character,” Sellers said. “In Platner’s case, there is this push to appeal to this fetished version of a white male voter above all else. Can you imagine if Raphael Warnock or Wes Moore were facing the same kind of issues? I guarantee you they would not get the benefit of the doubt from that corner of the party.”

Platner and his team had been more insulated from the kind of coalitional pressures inside the national Democratic Party that might have punished him earlier in a different state, said Tré Easton, a Capitol Hill veteran and vice president for public affairs at the centrist Searchlight Institute. “Anywhere else, the party would laugh this guy out of the room,” he said. Certainly, women in Maine were becoming a political problem for Platner. Well over half of the state’s electorate in Maine is female, and Platner was noticeably underperforming among women voters compared to Democratic nominees in other states like Texas, Ohio, North Carolina, and Iowa, according to a series of New York Times/Siena polls released last week. But Easton told me that Platner’s problems would be even worse in states with more voters of color—an obvious red flag for Bernie-style socialists who have held up Platner as a future national leader.

Would Platner have been able to catch fire anywhere else, especially the South and Midwest? “The way that liberals and leftists alike have bear-hugged this obviously flawed candidate is absolutely remarkable,” Easton told me. “Platner’s people should ask themselves why this person who faced so many problems in the past 20 months was able to withstand them,” Easton said. He pointed to Abdul El-Sayed, the Bernie-endorsed frontrunner in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, who was interviewed in this newsletter yesterday. El-Sayed, of course, is a non-white candidate in a diverse state with a larger voting base. “He would have been toast,” Easton insisted.

In retrospect, it was probably futile to hang so many of the party’s hopes on a monolithic state with fewer than a million registered voters. “I think part of the reason why Platner was such an important project to the left is because Maine is a place where you don’t have to navigate all the very real coalition issues in the Democratic Party writ large—race and gender dynamics and all sorts of things,” Easton said. “If you are not honest about the limitations that presents for your candidate, then you’re going to be limited in how far your project can go.”

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