Kate and I discussed the ongoing Graham Platner controversies on last week’s episode the podcast. As I explained, having never fallen hard for Platner as so many did I come at the matter from a different perspective. I was basically a soft skepitc. Not against him but also not wowed. Because of that I wasn’t really let down by any of the scandals because I wasn’t up in the first place. As I half jokingly put it, as long as he agrees not to be a Nazi going forward and stays off any dating apps until November, I’m basically fine with this candidacy.
More seriously, you judge candidates by their candidacies. He pulverized the sitting governor and establishment backed candidate and he’s weathered something like ten candidacy-ending scandals. Polls also suggest he’s highly competitive against Susan Collins. To me those facts make him definitionally a strong candidate, regardless of what I might think of him personally or whatever I can tell about his ideology. It’s also the case even if it surprises me that he remains a strong candidate. Until that changes, he’s the candidate. He strikes me as a pretty strong one. I’m skeptical the latest scandal is really going to hurt him in Maine whatever it may be doing with opinion-writers and influencers. Maybe he’s toast. But it’s him or Susan Collins and that, to me, makes it a simple question.
What’s more interesting to me than the latest scandal itself is the way that Platner’s candidacy has become a staging ground or perhaps a kind of Rorschach test for everything factional disagreement in the broad Democratic or center-left coalition.
I’ve seen what I guess I’d call members of the dissident, horse-shoeing former Democrat crowd – Matt Stoller, Zaid Jilani – calling the whole brouhaha an instance of “Dem HR Lady” politics. It’s basically a customized and on-brandly denigrating version of their anti-identity politics/wokism grumbling both have been pushing for the last six or seven years. Others portray Platner as a violent sociopath who has abused women his whole life or simply an epic sleazeball whose rise and persistence demonstrate the entrenched misogyny of Democratic politics. If Democrats keep backing Platner all their support for gender equality is a sham.
Meanwhile, a whole other group of online Democrats are not only upset about Platner’s tattoo and appearances with right wing podcasters but see Democratic acceptance of him as a candidate in some basic way discrediting decades of Democratic opposition to rightwing extremism, white supremacy etc. For others, Platner is an indictment of the progressive operatives who are running his operation and also helped Zohran Mamdani and other progressives get elected. I’ve even seen one identifiable line of critique blaming Platner on Chuck Schumer and Kristen Gillibrand I guess because they held out so long for Janet Mills that they basically kept any other normalish candidates from getting into the race and stuck the party with Graham Platner. (Yes, this argument really exists.) Then of course there is a very large contingent basically telling all these different groups to STFU, recognize that it’s Platner or Collins and that’s all that matters. For them all of this is purity politics Democrats simply don’t have time for in an existential struggled with Donald Trump. Or it’s just Democrats getting pulled into second-guessing and hitting the fainting couch because of media narratives that don’t mean anything.
I’m probably closest to that last line of reasoning. But again, I’m not so much judging the other viewpoints as marveling at how almost everyone with a grievance in Democratic politics has managed to find a way for Platner to vindicate their views and demonstrate the badness or fecklessness of their intra-party enemies.
Just as I was writing this – literally, having the conversation while I was writing this – I got into a back and forth with someone whose instincts I really respect telling me that Platner is 100% toast, will be destroyed by Collins and that I must have brain damage not to realize this. I don’t have certainties about this. He’s the candidate, until something happens to change that. He seems to me like a strong (as evidenced by the record not my subjective opinion) one. And it’s him or Collins and that’s really all I need to know.
