The Brief: State Party Wants Platner to Have ‘No Role’ in Picking Replacement

Platner Replacement Battle Begins to Take Shape

In the hours after multiple outlets published stories on Jenny Racicot’s allegation that Graham Platner had raped her in 2021, we saw a lot of predictions that he would swiftly step aside. That has not come to pass. His team, according to the state party, is trying to assert some influence over who replaces him — using leverage that his presence on the ballot continues to create, but that many Democrats say he has no right to exercise.

“Unfortunately, Graham Platner’s team has repeatedly reached out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like,” Devon Murphy-Anderson, the executive director of the Maine Democratic Party, said in a video posted Tuesday evening. She said Platner would have “no role” in picking his replacement.

Platner’s team denied trying to put a “thumb on the scale.”

There is an irony here that Democrats are trying to navigate delicately: attempts by both Platner’s team and the party to simply choose a replacement could backfire, taking away voters’ ability to pick who they vote for in a critical race for Senate control this November.

Some potential candidates are calling for a kind of mini-primary. “What matters more than anything right now is that the process to select the nominee be as open and transparent as possible,” Nirav Shah, a candidate in the gubernatorial primary and the former head of the state health agency, said in a video posted yesterday. “For example, there should be debates and town halls to make sure that Mainers know who they are selecting to take on Senator Collins.”

Shah said he is considering a bid to replace Platner, as did Shenna Bellows, the secretary of state and a former gubernatorial candidate. A third gubernatorial candidate, former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson, filed paperwork to form an exploratory committee. Punchbowl reported this morning that outgoing U.S. House Rep. Jared Golden (D) will not enter the race.

Whoever the replacement is, Nate Cohn writes that they would start as a “modest favorite against Susan Collins.”

A White Nationalist Group’s July 4 March Sends Ripples Through D.C.

The white nationalist group Patriot Front marched through Washington, D.C. this past weekend, a grim spectacle amid an already surreal observance of our nation’s first quarter millennium. 

• The march set various powerful right-wingers conspiracy theorizing, Hunter Walker reports. Elon Musk and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) speculated that the group was a leftist or a law enforcement front, an echo of similar theories about the January 6 insurrection, which some elected Republicans attempted to excuse by baselessly casting it as the work of “antifa” or the FBI. 
• Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) took things further, proposing that a congressional committee she is on could probe the group while also theorizing that something fishy was going on. “What I find odd about Patriot Front is how under Biden they were never investigated,” Luna wrote on X. “Well funded. Never investigated.”
• Meanwhile, also at TPM, Christopher Mathias traces how an idea espoused by the founder of Patriot Front and various other far-right activists — the “remigration” of immigrants — has in a few short years become official Trump administration policy, with a dedicated office at the State Department. The term, he writes, is a “euphemism with the clearest, most traceable of fascist lineages, designed just over a decade ago to soften or obscure the atrocities associated with its actual meaning: ethnic cleansing.”

Tabs

• Ed Kilgore describes the SAVE America Act bait-and-switch I examined yesterday as a kind of “consolation prize” for Trump, which feels about right. 
• A Trump-appointed federal judge blocked a grand jury subpoena for information about 2020 election workers in Georgia. 
• Mitch McConnell appears to be talking — and, after a series of age-and-health related scandals in Congress, his allies really want us to know about it. Majority Leader John Thune said he and McConnell had a “lengthy and substantive conversation.” Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) said he and McConnell spoke for “roughly 20 minutes.” Conservative talking head Scott Jennings also said he spoke to McConnell for “just shy of 20 minutes.”

Man of the Hour

It’s Ken Paxton. “Despite his own warnings, Paxton appears to have used an address where he did not live while voting in six elections in the past two years, including in May’s runoff that made him the Republican nominee for U.S. senator,” ProPublica reports.

Are We At War?

Today, yes.