When the first credible reports surfaced that Graham Platner, the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine, may have sexually assaulted women, my first instinct was one I am not proud of. I did not want to believe it.

The stakes are incredibly high this year, and that Senate seat is one of the best chances Democrats have to stop the current march toward authoritarianism. Poll after poll has shown Platner running neck and neck with or ahead of Susan Collins, the five-term Republican incumbent, in a race that could decide which party controls the Senate. The math of saving the country runs straight through Maine. So when the allegations came, the temptation was to look away, to question the timing, to wait and hope. I have heard others across the progressive ecosystem report the same reflex—people who believe survivors in the abstract and very much want to keep believing in their candidate.

That reflex deserves to be named honestly, and then it must be set aside. Because if we are willing to look away from credible allegations of sexual violence whenever the political stakes are high enough, then we are not, in fact, the movement we claim to be.

This week has seen a new, credible, and well-corroborated account of the candidate’s committing sexual assault. Jenny Racicot described to Politico how, in 2021, an intoxicated Platner entered her home uninvited and “forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop.”

Racicot’s account was gathered and substantiated by Cheyenne Hunt, the attorney and advocate who helped lead the reckoning that followed the Eric Swalwell revelations and who now runs Reckoning Action, an organization built precisely to support survivors and to verify claims like these. In preparing the story, Politico “reviewed documents, including emails between Racicot and her therapist and messages between Racicot and an acquaintance whom she warned against getting involved with Platner years before he ran for office.”

Platner, for his part, has denies the allegations and says they are “false.”

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We can hold two truths at once. We should be clear-eyed that the current Oval Office occupant and his MAGA movement would love nothing more than to take down a candidate who has Collins genuinely worried. At the same time, we should recognize that corroboration—together with the track record and credibility of the people who gathered it—is exactly what separates a sourced account from a smear. The familiar question “Why now?” has a painful answer. Survivors often come forward at precisely the moment their abuser stands to be elevated to greater power. Watching the person who broke into your house and assaulted you go on to secure a seat in the United States Senate is devastating and re-traumatizing. That is not suspicious timing. That is how this works.

So we appear to be left with an impossible choice: betray the survivors, or sacrifice the seat—and with it, perhaps, the Senate, and with the Senate, one of the last institutional defenses against a movement led by a man who bragged about assaulting women and who (with Collins’s support) placed the justices who shredded Roe and gutted the Voting Rights Act on the Supreme Court.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. We have another option. There is a way out—narrow, time-limited, but real—in which we keep faith with survivors and also keep this seat within reach.

Maine election law provides it. Under Title 21-A, Section 374-A of the Maine statutes, if a party’s nominee withdraws by 5 pm on the second Monday in July, the state party committee may name a replacement on the general-election ballot. This year, that deadline falls on July 13. If Platner steps aside by then, the Maine Democratic Party has until July 27 to choose a new nominee whose name goes on the November ballot. Miss July 13, and the door slams shut. After that, the party cannot field a replacement at all, and the options collapse to bad and worse. The path to keeping both our values and this opportunity to flip the seat runs through the next week.

The task before us is clear and achievable. Platner should take responsibility, recognize the larger good, and withdraw before July 13. And everyone who lifted him up—every official who endorsed him, every donor who funded him, every organization that vouched for him, every campaign staffer who worked for him—should now publicly call on him to step aside, withdraw their endorsements, and rally around a new nominee. Pressure, applied with clarity and conviction over a matter of days, will make the difference as to whether Democrats lose this seat.

If Platner does step aside, the next decision matters just as much. The instinct of many will be to reach for Governor Janet Mills, who suspended her campaign in the spring and lost badly in the primary election. That would be a grave mistake. Maine voters were given a choice between Mills and Platner, and they were not subtle about it: They moved decisively toward the outsider. The energy Platner tapped—the willingness to challenge a sclerotic status quo, the championing of working people, the demand for transformative change—is real, and it is why the surveys showed him running stronger against Collins than Mills did. Strip away the disqualifying conduct and that appeal remains. The way forward is to find a nominee who carries the energy without the abuse.

As Bloomberg opinion columnist Ron Brownstein has insightfully written, Maine Democrats actually enjoy an embarrassment of riches of strong candidates who can build on the good of what propelled Platner while leaving the bad far, far behind: “Former State Senate President Troy Jackson, a fifth-generation logger with deep working-class roots, has been endorsed in the governor’s race by the state AFL and Senator Bernie Sanders and would probably be the easiest replacement for Platner supporters to accept. Secretary of State Shenna Bellows…also [has] many liberal supporters.”

We do not have to choose between backing a progressive champion and turning our backs on brave survivors. We can have a fighter without a predator. We can have the outsider energy without the trail of harm. We can defeat Susan Collins—and defeat what she enables—without telling another generation of women that their pain is an acceptable price for power.

But time is short, and the need for action is urgent. The law gives us a window measured in days. It will take the entire progressive ecosystem moving at once, with dispatch and clarity and conviction, to walk through it in time.

It can be done. It should be done. And before July 13, it must be done.