By Nick Catoggio
Wednesday, July 08, 2026
Search for an analogy to what’s
happening in Maine, and you’re destined to land on the Biden-Harris
switcheroo of 2024.
Same basic facts: Something has happened to make the
Democratic nominee unelectable, and now party leaders are forced to solve not
one but two crises. They need to persuade their candidate to quit the race. And
then they need to figure out a way to replace him without pissing off half
their voters.
And they need to do it fast.
But the switcheroo isn’t the only useful analogy for Platnerdämmerung
in recent political history. Sniff around and you’ll also detect a whiff of the
Access Hollywood fiasco of 2016.
Same basic facts: A populist nominee with a cultishly
devoted fan base is caught behaving in a disgusting way toward women, seemingly
rendering him unelectable. But replacing him on short notice would be difficult
and wrenching. The candidate himself plainly doesn’t want to leave the race.
And, being a narcissistic anti-establishment “outsider,” he feels no obligation
to his party or its leaders to make their lives easier by doing so.
It’s not a perfect analogy. 2016 was a presidential
election, which raised the stakes for suddenly deposing the nominee. The Access
Hollywood scandal arrived a month before the general election, not in the
middle of summer, making a last-second replacement logistically more
hair-raising. And as loathsome as Donald Trump’s “locker-room talk” about women
was, it was talk. (In that case, anyway.) What Platner has been accused of is much worse than that.
There’s another distinction. In both the Biden switcheroo
and the Access Hollywood episode, there were obvious presumptive
break-glass-in-case-of-emergency replacements. Biden and Trump each had running
mates, after all. Not so with Platner. Even if Democrats solve the first crisis
by convincing him to withdraw before next week’s deadline, there’s no easy
fallback option for solving the second crisis before the July 27 ballot deadline in Maine.
Fortunately, the ever-helpful Platner campaign has a
suggestion: Why not let us solve it?
Ransom.
On Tuesday the executive director of Maine’s Democratic
Party posted a video accusing Team Platner of quietly trying to “put their
thumb on the scale” as the party weighs what to do about replacing him.
“We have repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team
that they have no role in determining our U.S. Senate nominee, nor in
determining what this process looks like,” Devon Murphy-Anderson said, hours
after even more allegations of scummy behavior by the candidate dropped.
Platner’s camp denied it was trying to meddle in party deliberations and
said it had reached out to party officials merely to better understand how his
replacement would be chosen. But denying unflattering claims that are almost
certainly true is basically force of habit with Platner’s handlers at this
point.
According to the available reporting, the question is
less whether Team Platner is meddling in picking a new nominee than what its
goal is in doing so. Per a statement released by the campaign itself, a free and fair
democratic succession is its only priority: “While Graham wouldn’t want to be a
part of the process, he would want to make sure the voters and volunteers make
this decision—not the political establishment.”
Sources are whispering to the press that Platnerites’
interest in who inherits the nomination is more substantive than that, however.
“Behind the scenes, Platner and his political operation are working to ensure
any potential replacement comes from his progressive, anti-establishment wing
of the party,” Politico alleged. The New York Post went further: “A source familiar with
the campaign discussions said Platner, his campaign and political strategist
Morris Katz are deliberating about the Maine Democrat dropping out but only if
his replacement shares his left-wing values.”
That would explain why the video released by the Maine
Democratic Party official had the air of a cop declaring, “We don’t negotiate
with terrorists.” If the Post is correct, Platner has taken his party’s
Senate nomination hostage as the walls close in. Because he can’t be forced out
of the race, he’s demanding an ideological ransom from Democrats in exchange
for quitting before the withdrawal deadline.
We’re all used to audacious behavior from populists in
the Trump era, but “do as I say or I’ll blow our chance to flip this winnable
Senate seat”—in the middle of a rape scandal—is truly next-level. My hat
is off to Platner and his apologists in exploring this bold new frontier in
political chuddishness.
It’s tempting to laugh at his belief that he has any
leverage. His choice realistically is either to quit now or lose in a
humiliating landslide to Susan Collins and be despised by his party for his
selfishness in refusing to stand aside, no? If the Senate were to end up 50-50
next year thanks to Collins’ victory, Platner would be known forevermore as the
man who cost the left veto power over Donald Trump’s nominees. Surely, his best
option is to skulk away back to the oyster farm.
Are we sure he’d lose in a landslide, though? In this
era?
The Access Hollywood episode is again instructive.
Within three weeks of that happening, James Comey announced that he was
reopening the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, shifting the
public’s focus from Trump’s foibles to hers. Granted, it’s unlikely that any
skeletons will tumble out of Susan Collins’ closet that are scary enough to
make rape claims against her opponent pale by comparison. But what if gas
prices climbed back to $5 per gallon, a scenario that’s back on the table now
that our uneasy ceasefire with Iran is “over”? How intense might
anti-Republican sentiment become?
Even absent some new albatross for the GOP, Collins is
unlikely to pull away in a national environment like this one. “Given how
negative partisanship works, the left-wing tilt of the state, and the control
of the Senate at stake, it’s easy to see Democratic voters talking themselves
into the idea that they have to suck it up and support Platner,” Philip Klein argued yesterday at National Review.
“If it comes to October and the seat remains crucial to Democrats retaking the
Senate, let’s see if the national committees stick to their pledges not to
support him.”
Brazening it out worked for Trump in 2016. It worked for Virginia Democrat Jay Jones in 2025. Why couldn’t it work
for Platner?
Some left-wing voters are
already shrugging off the new allegations. They’d already gotten in the habit after the last 15 or so Platner
scandals, reasoning that what’s good for the Trumpy goose is good for the left-wing
gander, and the latest disgrace appears to be no exception. “If it’s true,
is it disqualifying historically? Yes,” one Maine Democrat told Politico of the rape allegations. “But since Trump,
stuff like this that we used to think of as historically disqualifying isn’t.
I’ll still vote for the guy.”
Another told the outlet that Platner should drop out
“only if he does it in time for another good strong candidate to actually hit
the ground really running like hell,” adding, “I do want a fighter.” It’s
undeniable from the polling that Democrats would benefit from
replacing him, but Trump-haters of every stripe in Maine will eventually reduce
this race to a referendum on whether Congress should or shouldn’t remain a
toothless Duma for the Putin admirer in the White House. I’d bet good money
that Platner would remain within striking distance in polling.
Besides, at this point there can’t be many more shoes
still to drop for him. No more than 10 new scandals before November, I’m
guessing. Twenty, tops.
A needless hostage.
My best attempt to be fair to his hostage-taking is this:
He’s only doing what progressivism compels him to do.
As with the Tea Party and the Republican Party 15 years
ago, so too with the
Mamdani left and the Democratic Party now. The most urgent priority of a
radical ideological insurgency is to gain influence over the party to which it
belongs, not to defeat the party to which it doesn’t. Insurgents scarcely
perceive a difference between the two, in fact, which is why the dopey term
“uniparty” is so popular with Trumpists.
Platner’s ransom demand is the logical endpoint of that.
Democrats can have a new progressive Senate nominee who stands a good chance of
winning, or they can be saddled with their current progressive nominee, who
stands a poor chance, but he insists that they have a progressive nominee one
way or another. Progressivism’s ascendance is the important thing, much more so
than maximizing Democrats’ chances of unseating a Republican and breaking a
deranged caudillo’s stranglehold over the federal government.
So I understand Platner’s audacity of cope—to a point.
But then I consider the political dynamic in Maine and the whole ploy seems,
well, stupid.
The scenario his campaign seems eager to avert is the
Democratic establishment imperiously tapping some centrist milquetoast to fill
his shoes, crushing the hopes of progressives energized by Platnermania. And to
be fair to him again, that’s not unthinkable. If moderate Democrat Rep. Jared
Golden were willing to run, he probably would be the party leaders’ choice to
take on Collins on pure electability grounds.
But Golden
isn’t willing. So tell me: Realistically, even absent the hostage-taking,
isn’t it likely that replacing Platner ends either with Democratic officials
tapping another progressive nominee or opening up the selection process to let
grassroots Democrats make the decision?
“We are just leery about a new kind of Kamala Harris
situation, where we don’t get to choose whatever Democratic candidate will be
on the ticket,” one Maine voter told Politico on Tuesday. The switcheroo of 2024 is
likely to become a cautionary tale for local party leaders about the risk of
foisting a new nominee on voters who might not be enthusiastic about him or
her. Better to hold “a pop-up convention or … a statewide caucus to
effectively redo the party’s primary election,” per the New York Times,
and give grassroots Democrats a say about who should represent them.
If that’s what ends up happening, Platner’s hostage play
is pointless. Democratic voters will decide whether his replacement should be a
progressive, not the Maine Democratic Party.
On the other hand, if Democratic officials opt to repeat
the switcheroo process by naming a nominee themselves, it seems more likely to
me that they’ll pick a leftist in line with Platner’s program than a centrist
like Gov. Janet Mills, the 78-year-old landslide loser in this year’s Senate
primary.
It’s all a question of enthusiasm. Progressive voters
already hate the Democratic leadership, are demoralized by Platner’s implosion,
and will resent seeing party bigwigs “overturn” a momentous primary win for the
left in Maine by swapping in some cookie-cutter moderate as nominee. The only
way to placate them is to affirm progressivism’s ascendance by nominating
someone in line with Platner’s platform, like failed gubernatorial nominee Troy
Jackson.
Sure, that will risk alienating centrist voters in Maine.
But the far-left Platner was competitive with Collins despite his many
scandals, and centrists might plausibly warm to a new Democratic candidate who,
despite his progressive preferences, isn’t sidetracked with a new scandal every
three hours. And of course the “should or shouldn’t Congress remain a Duma?”
question will weigh on them too as they consider whether to support a candidate
from the Mamdani wing.
In other words, Platner doesn’t need to take hostages to
get party officials to choose a leftist as his replacement, if in fact those
officials intend to make that decision themselves. They’re probably going to
choose a leftist anyway. And if he were less of a narcissist, he’d realize that
he’s doing that leftist successor no favors by trying to intervene on his or
her behalf: The last thing Troy Jackson wants or needs is for voters to know that he owes his nomination to an accused rapist.
No excuses.
Ironically, the fact that Platner does stand a
good chance of being replaced by a progressive is why he has little choice but
to drop out.
In a piece today at National Review, Jim Geraghty imagined the candidate’s future if he opted
not to withdraw and fought on until November. “Collins will crack Platner like
a freshly boiled lobster claw,” he wrote, “but afterwards he’ll be able to go
on certain podcasts and claim that the Establishment and oligarchs and AIPAC
conspired to defeat him by getting everyone he’s ever known to make false
accusations against him.”
Platner would certainly want to. But how many of those
podcasts would have him?
It’s not just a matter of them not wanting to platform an
accused rapist, although it would be partly that. Platner is destined to be an
unsympathetic figure to Democrats in defeat because he has a clear chance right
now to stand aside for someone who shares his politics and can defeat
Collins.
That’s another important distinction between his scandal
and the Access Hollywood episode. Trump apologists could (and did) say
that having him withdraw a month out from Election Day would have done
Republicans more harm than good. The campaign would have dissolved into chaos
into the final weeks; low-propensity voters who had been planning to turn out
for Trump would have lost interest; Mike Pence, the likely fill-in nominee,
would have offered Reaganism on behalf of a party that had just rejected
Reaganism in a primary.
There was a good case to be made that a wounded Trump
nonetheless remained the GOP’s best chance to defeat Clinton. It is very
hard to make a case that Graham Platner remains Democrats’—or
progressives’—best chance to defeat Collins.
The data doesn’t support it. Like-minded ideologues like Jackson are
available and standing by, prepared to take the baton. And Election Day is
still four months away. There’s no reason except egotism that a damaged Platner
would insist on sticking it out.
And the left-wing podcast class would know it. Platner’s
antics have already given progressivism a black eye at a moment when the
movement has shown electoral strength in places like New York and Colorado; for
him to deprive leftists of a strong chance to win a Senate seat in Maine
because he stubbornly refused to make way for a less morally degenerate
candidate would be unforgivable.
I think he’s willing to sabotage his party, as many in
his faction are, but I don’t think he’s willing to make himself a villain—or
more of one—to the progressives he claims to speak for. He’ll go. And he won’t
get any ransom on his way out the door when he does.
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