PLATNER WITHOUT GUILT

I had some positive things to say about Graham Platner while he was a Senate candidate. I'm not going to engage in self-flagellation now that he's out. The early critics were right about his character, but it's understandable that many people wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Commentators who've compared him to Donald Trump overlook a basic difference: Platner wasn't an unsocialized, amoral hatemonger on the campaign trail. Except when he was talking about people in power, his rhetoric was idealistic and positive. He punched up, not down. He claimed to be a better person than he'd been in the past, whereas Trump wanted everyone to understand that he was the same slimy bastard he'd always been. (His promise was that he'd be a slimy bastard on his voters' behalf.)

The consultants who saw him as a candidate who could win over working-class white men were wrong, just as Kamala Harris was wrong to think that Tim Walz would have similar appeal. But Republicans do this too: they run candidates of color and imagine that they'll make their electorate more diverse. It never really works: last year, the GOP's Black gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, Winsome Earle-Sears, won just 7% of the Black vote. In Florida and Ohio, Republican gubernatorial candidates of color, Byron Donalds and Vivek Ramaswamy, are facing backlash from racist GOP-base voters. Yet no one berates the GOP for trying to diversify.

Platner wasn't winning over men or the working class: according to a New York Times/Portland Press Herald poll that was released on July 1, Platner was trailing Susan Collins 52%-45% among men, while leading 52%-44% among women; among non-college whites, he trailed 59%-36%.

Women stuck with him even after a Times story accused him of physical violence in his relationships with women. As a Times story noted after he'd been accused of rape and had withdrawn from the race,

Several women said they recognized Mr. Platner’s swaggering style from men in their lives who had hurt them.

They supported him anyway, at least until this week, because he cared about their medical bills, had ideas to make housing more affordable and seemed to be a normal guy who meant what he said and took responsibility for past mistakes.

I think straight women expect all men to be flawed, sometimes badly, and they're probably right to feel that way. They set the bar low because they don't have a choice. Redeemable is the best they can hope for.

(I think Black people feel this way about whites -- polls showed that 60% of Black Virginians didn't want Governor Ralph Northam to resign in 2019 after he was seen in an old photo that featured blackface. On balance, they felt he'd been an ally, just as they felt Joe Biden was an ally despite some racially dubious remarks. It seems impossible to find a white politician who's an unflawed ally.)

What the women interviewed by the Times were feeling about Platner's agenda is what a lot of people felt nationwide: he had the right ideas, and he expressed them at a time when it appeared that most Democrats running for high-level positions would be Schumeresque mediocrities. I think many voters weren't romanticizing him as a swaggering, two-fisted blue-collar hero -- he was an eloquent, charismatic progressive, different in style from Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but with similar appeal. Why shouldn't voters have hoped that every scandal was the last one? He was saying what many voters wanted to hear.

I know a lot of you got off the bus when news about the Totenkopf tattoo broke. As for me, I grew up watching Hogan's Heroes and later discovered The Producers. A few years later, we had the Ramones, whose first album started with "Blitzkrieg Bop" and ended with "Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World" ("I'm a Nazi shatze, you know I fight for the Fatherland"). So flippancy about Nazis was commonplace in my youth. Sometimes Jews were the creators of these flippant works -- Mel Brooks was Jewish, as were two of the Ramones, and Robert Clary, one of the stars of Hogan's Heroes, was a survivor of the camps. And when a David Bowie flirted with fascism early in his career, it seemed like a callow attempt at transgression, which is what I think Platner's tattoo was. (Bowie grew up and denounced racism in the music business.)

I assume Platner knew what his tattoo meant, despite his denials, but I also assume he meant it as a generalized adolescent-male fuck-you gesture rather a statement of political philosophy. (I think the military allows you to be a teenage boy well into adulthood.) The racist and sexist Reddits posts seemed more serious. I think he's genuinely anti-racist now, but I don't know if he's ever gotten past his misogyny. I hope so. But it's understandable that voters want to believe he has.

The narrative that's emerging is this: a consultant named Daniel Moraff -- who himself has been accused of sexual misconduct -- discovered Platner, vetted him poorly, and persuaded other progressives to back him, thus preventing other progressives from running for the Senate seat. That's unforgivable. I hope Moraff never finds work in Democratic politics again.

All this is a shitshow, but I don't accept the premise that Democrats are now doomed in Maine. The party's numbers actually improved in the betting markets after Platner withdrew -- with good reason. Do you remember the Canadian Liberal Party's rise in the polls after Justin Trudeau announced his resignation as prime minister in January 2025?

The Liberals under Mark Carney won the election in April.

Kamala Harris didn't win, but she gave Democrats a fighting chance in 2024, improving on Joe Biden's weak poll numbers:

And with Keir Starmer's resignation as Britain's prime minister, Labour's fortunes are improving:

Labour has slashed Reform's poll lead as a "Burnham bounce" means the party's popularity has surged by 6 per cent.

The poll by Find Out Now put Reform at 24 per cent, down three percentage points from last week, with Labour now hot on Nigel Farage's party's heels at 21 per cent....

It is the first poll to suggest the Labour Party could enjoy a popularity boost following Andy Burnham's succession....

This could easily happen once Maine Democrats have a new candidate, if the party emerges ready to fight, with self-respect rather than self-abasement. Please note that on the rare occasions when a Republican succumbs to scandal -- George Santos, Matt Gaetz, Madison Cawthorn -- there's no party-wide breast-beating, no publicly aired recriminations. Republicans just put their heads down and keep fighting. That's what Democrats should do now.