Can’t resist touching the third rail: it’s time to talk about Graham Platner! Platner discourse will get another injection of life this fall if Collins wins (odds are good, alas), when everyone spends months arguing that Platner would have won or that Janet Mills would have won if we hadn’t wasted months and millions on Platner or that a better candidate would have won the primary if Schumer and the DNC hadn’t tried to clear the way for Mills. It’s gonna be the best kind of bitter political discourse, because there are at least three sides to the argument and the stakes are so high. If I sound frivolous, it’s only because I’m depressed, and I’m writing this to get some of that depression down on paper.
I’m not here to condemn Platner; plenty of better writers have done that in a comprehensive way. I knew he was a lousy candidate and probably a poor human being a week after the tattoo news broke, not because he got a Nazi-themed tattoo in the first place but because he wasn’t willing to stand up and admit he screwed up. Once you get into the Senate you’re in a place where most people are either flattering or denigrating you, and if you’re already showing strong tendencies to evade criticism it doesn’t bode well for your personal evolution. If I lived in Maine I’d have voted for Platner in the general election without feeling very good about it.
OK, maybe I’m here to condemn him a little bit. What I really want to talk about, though, is the way my instincts tingled back when he first showed up on everyone’s radar. Hm, populist candidate, lots of excitement from out of state, entrenched incumbent? Apparently nobody remembering that Collins beat a very well-funded pro-choice, pro-health care candidate by 8% in 2020, a good year for Democrats?
“And then a miracle occurred!” is not an electoral strategy.
I’m prompted to write this because right now, my heart is making up ideas about how Count Binface can beat Nigel Farage in the Clacton by-election. What if? Farage didn’t get an absolute majority of the votes in Clacton in 2024, and he’s maybe less popular now, and the Greens and Labour and the Liberal Democrats aren’t running candidates, and…
There’s a fairly small but very enthusiastic subreddit that’s dedicating itself to getting the Count elected with only the smallest hint of irony. People are donating to the campaign. People want to believe. I want to believe. It’s insane to believe. But what if?
And then I remember another 2020 election: Amy McGrath vs. Mitch McConnell. She outraised McConnell by $32 million. She’d come sort of close to beating Andy Barr for a House seat in 2018, for a Democrat in a red state. DailyKos members were pretty excited about her candidacy. She was the model for a more liberal netroots model of winning in red states: a combat veteran, a woman, campaigning against Trump’s movement. Surely she had a chance.
She got thumped, of course.
It’s important not to get too caught up in blaming the Platner phenomenon on the dirtbag left. I will happily be the first to say that the left has its share of power-hungry idiots, ranging from people like Daniel Moraff, who recruited Platner, to Cynk Uygur, to Dasha Nekrasova. It’s equally true that the DNC and the various power brokers in the Democratic Party are often more concerned with maintaining their own influence than they are with protecting the disadvantaged. And, yes, the liberal netroots — a movement I value very much — is just as liable to let their hearts overpower their heads and then we wind up donating tens of millions of dollars to high profile doomed campaigns. Nobody gets to get cocky here.
The Democratic Party should contest every election. Howard Dean was right. More locally, I’d rather have Marie Glusencamp Perez in office than Jaime Herrera Beutler, although I’ve stopped donating to Perez thanks to her positions on immigration, voting rights, and LGBT rights. Contesting every election doesn’t mean we need to be plowing money into whichever candidate seems to promise us a miracle.
This is why I didn’t buy Platner as the one weird secret to reclaiming the Senate back before the tattoo news broke. People were anointing him well before they had any real reason to do so. It made me less than confident that he was going to be able to put in the work, build the ground game, and deal well with adversity.
And that, I think, is a much better lesson to learn from Platner’s rise and fall than most of the lessons people are drawing. It’s not about how one part of the Democratic coalition is better than the rest. It’s about making sure miracles are possible without believing that you can will miracles into happening if we just post and donate hard enough.