Democratic leaders have rightfully lost credibility. But that's no excuse for political adventurers to seize the moment and pump up false saviors.
Graham Platner’s video dropping out of the US Senate race in Maine.(Graham Platner / X)
The least surprising news about Graham Platner is that his senatorial candidacy in Maine crashed and burned. The genuinely startling news about him is that he got as far as he did. He won the Democratic primary by a landslide (receiving 72.1 per cent of the vote in an election with a robust turnout). Some of Platner’s more besotted admirers, like his political consultant Morris Katz, were even touting the idea that if the candidate won the Senate race, he had a shot at becoming the Democratic presidential candidate in 2028.
This is even though, during his rapid ascent and equally quick plummet from political stardom, Platner waved more red flags than the track marshals in a hundred auto races. Among the major scandals he endured were: the Nazi tattoo on his chest; six years of employment as a private defense contractor (in other words, as a mercenary) for the firm then known as Blackwater; a history of lurid, misogynist, and generally inflammatory Reddit posts; a recent pattern of sexting other women while married; and allegations of abusive behavior towards women.
Democratic voters largely forgave Platner for all of this. Many accepted his narrative that his behavior was due in part to severe PTSD from his military service as a Marine in Iraq and Afghanistan. He presented himself as a flawed person who was changing and struggling to get his life on track. And after he stormed to victory in his primary, it seemed as though he might have successfully overcome all of his baggage.
That was until Monday, when a former partner, Jenny Racicot, alleged to Politico and CNN that Platner had raped her during their relationship. Racicot’s horrifying and credible story made clear that Platner’s flaws went well beyond the realm of forgiveness. Another sign of that came in Platner’s video announcing the end of his political run. He seemed not at all contrite over the damage he had done but rather aggrieved and self-pitying.
Now, it is left to Democrats to pick up the pieces, and to the rest of us to see what can be learned from this debacle. Here’s one important lesson: the Platner story is about more than the downfall of one deeply damaged and flawed man. Rather, its true significance is that someone with as many glaring blemishes as Platner was able to win over so many primary voters who had lost faith in the Democratic Party establishment.
The emerging storyline is that Platner wasn’t properly vetted by the political consultants who managed his cause. This is only partly true. The rape allegation is new (although it had already been floating around as a rumor for weeks), but many of the other discreditable facts about Platner were well known. But Maine voters were not only willing to brush those facts aside—they overwhelmingly backed Platner, who had come virtually from nowhere, in a primary race against their state’s sitting, two-term Democratic governor. Why?
David Axelrod, former adviser to Barack Obama, raised the salient point:
Lost in the recriminations about Platner is the most essential question that applies well behind Maine: How did a deeply flawed but gifted candidate build such a devoted following? It was a vote of no-confidence in policies and a politics that many Mainers feel are failing them. So Dems, you may not have liked his [solutions] but you’d better have some real, meaningful answers to these concerns.
Axelrod is right in suggesting that Platner would never have shot up like a rocket if there wasn’t widespread dissatisfaction with status quo politics. But Platner and his team also took advantage of that desperation for change in ways that need examination.
This is a drama with two significant acts. The first part of the tale is the failure of the Democratic Party establishment over the last generation to fend off the far right—culminating in the 2024 re-election of Donald Trump—which has led to a cohort of disillusioned voters hungry for an alternative. The second act involves the rise of political adventurers who have seized the moment to pump up a false messiah.
These two plot points shouldn’t be seen as separate. A sclerotic party establishment deeply allergic to voter participation and the rise of havoc-prone anti-system demagogues who thrive on personality cults are not opposing tendencies but two sides of the same crisis of democracy (and the crisis of the Democratic Party).
With the midterm elections now firmly upon us, the question is whether Democratic candidates will do more than merely occupy ballot lines as mild alternatives to the red-hot crisis that is Donald Trump.
As Trump spends over $1 billion a day on a globally destabilizing war on Iran and admits that he doesn’t “think about Americans’ financial situation,” millions across the country are struggling with the surging costs of essentials. Democrats must seize this moment and advance bold, small-“d” populist ideas—not settle for cynical caution that once again snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.
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The manifold sins of the Democratic Party have been much rehearsed and go back at least to Barack Obama’s underwhelming response to the global economic meltdown brought about by the GOP. In a recent post in his newsletter Off Message, the journalist Brian Beutler provides a bracing survey of all the reasons Democratic voters have soured on their leaders in the last two decades. The insufficient response to the Great Recession was part of a larger embrace of cautious, no-boat-rocking politics that failed to take into account the increasing radicalization of the Republicans, who in the same period have become ever more anti-democratic.
After Trump went unpunished for his role in inciting a riot in 2021 and then reclaimed the White House, the die was cast. The voters who oppose Trump—a majority of the electorate over the last decade—no longer trust party leaders to act as an effective opposition.
In Maine, party leaders displayed their typical fecklessness. To oppose Susan Collins, the Republican senator notorious for caving to Trump while expressing faux concern, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer tried to clear the field on behalf of the state’s governor, Janet Mills, an uninspiring centrist who is 79 years old. To accuse Mills of running a zombie campaign would be generous. Zombies are at least half-alive and, although brainless themselves, capable of eating brains. The Mills campaign enjoyed only a theoretical existence.
Knowing the weakness of the party establishment, a group of political consultants decided the hollowed-out state party was ripe for a takeover. Unfortunately, their solution was to manufacture a savior. As The New York Times reports:
Last July, in a small town in coastal Maine, a couple of progressive, self-styled recruiters of economic populists showed up at the blue-shingled house of Graham Platner, a little-known oyster farmer and Marine veteran who lived largely off government benefits.
They knew his name from local labor organizers and activists, and they had watched a video on the internet of him talking about oysters. Struck by his left-leaning ideology, his working-class affect and his gravelly voice, they became convinced that he could win a Senate seat in Maine — and quickly persuaded Mr. Platner of the same.
The initial headhunters, Dan Moraff and Leanne Fan, and then a third out-of-state operative they called up to Maine — Morris Katz — told Mr. Platner he was “the one,” a “hero of the movement,” “a historical figure” who could be “leading a revolution,” according to half a dozen people with knowledge of their conversations.
As the over-the-top flattery makes clear, the campaign was based on selling Platner as a messiah—both to voters and to Platner himself. It turned into a disaster not just because Platner turned out to be a false messiah, but also because messianic politics is a dead end.
In a democracy, it is fatal to turn any candidate into “the one.” Effective political change involves building movements that are far larger than any one person, so if a candidate fails, the work of organizing can continue.
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Morris Katz, at the very least, should have known better. He’s been involved with a very different type of left-wing politics as a consultant to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. While undeniably charismatic, Mamdani’s rise has been fueled not just by his personal charms but also by the organizing strength of the Democratic Socialists of America, which has had a string of victories in municipal elections and congressional primaries. The DSA model has parallels in the organizing of groups such as the Working Family Party and Run For Something. This is a political left that is not looking for “the one” but rather in cultivating a broad range of candidates springing up from continuous mobilization.
In the wake of Platner’s implosion, establishment figures, notably Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress, are trying to exploit the scandal to tarnish other progressive politicians with sleazy guilt-by-association rhetoric. (This line of attack is particularly odious because of Tanden’s long history of supporting dubious figures such as Bill Clinton, Andrew Cuomo, and Larry Summers.) This is a despicable tactic and likely to be ineffectual. After two decades of disappointment, it will take more than one scandal to rehabilitate the establishment.
But the model followed by Katz, of parachuting into a local election to elevate a telegenic figure into being a movement leader, is also discredited. The only path forward is the DSA model: the hard labor of organizing a mass movement from the ground up.
Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.