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 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.”

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.