Graham Platner’s primary victory in Maine means Democrats officially have their candidate in a race that is pivotal for their hopes of retaking the Senate.
But Platner isn’t a typical Democratic nominee. For reasons both personal and political, his candidacy has captivated national attention and become arguably the most-covered race happening this year.
First off, he is indisputably a fresh (bearded) face for the party — a 41-year old populist who’s never run for anything before, who’s worked as an oyster farmer, and who presents as having a tough-guy affect.
Simultaneously, Platner is a guy with some messy personal history — a Nazi skull tattoo, crude Reddit posts, volatile past relationships, drinking, and sexting other women while married. A fresh round of these reports in recent weeks has heightened Democrats’ fears about his general election chances.
And finally, there’s the fact that Platner is a player in a bitter factional struggle inside the Democratic Party, where he’s aligned with a left socialist faction that is trying to supplant the existing establishment.
Over the past decade, this left faction has powered Sen. Bernie Sanders to two second-place presidential primary campaigns, brought “The Squad” to the House of Representatives, and elected New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani — whose top strategist, Morris Katz, is also Platner’s.
What they haven’t really done is beat a formidable Republican in a high-profile general election — like this one, against five-term Sen. Susan Collins. And these activists’ choice of an inexperienced outsider in Platner cuts against the conventional wisdom of who can win such a race.
Party leaders prefer to nominate credentialed politicians with a proven track record of electoral success. That’s what they’ve done in other key Senate races like North Carolina, Ohio, and Alaska. And that’s what they tried to do in Maine, by actively recruiting two-term Gov. Janet Mills to run — but the race got away from them.
Mills was a 78-year old two-term governor whose popularity had been dropping and who ran a low-energy campaign after waffling for months on whether to run. Platner was nearly four decades younger, an outsider, and promising to take on both parties’ establishments. There were elements of class and gender politics to his perceived appeal too, since there’s been much handwringing in recent years about whether Democrats have lost the ability to connect with the working class and with men generally.
Platner’s campaign caught fire, becoming a viral phenomenon, and he amassed such a polling lead that Mills suspended her campaign in April, making Tuesday’s primary largely a formality.
He clearly struck a chord among Maine Democratic voters — going beyond his core of support among the pro-Bernie base.
“He’s taken stances on the far left of the party, but I think even more important than that has been his persona and the approach,” Mark Brewer, a political scientist at the University of Maine, told me. “He’s anti-establishment; he’s not politics as usual. He’s going to take a sledgehammer to the establishment. I think for a lot of Democrats in Maine and nationwide, that’s the kind of mood they’re in.”
Read Andrew’s full story here.
