Platner

08 Jul, 2026

People keeping asking me variations of "what do you think about what is going on in Maine" and so I'm just going to write it down.

1. I never liked Platner as a person, and was wary of him from the get-go. He has always reminded me of every New England prep school fuckup I met in college.¹ After all these scandals, he reminds me of them even more. I'm glad he's likely done.

2. Of course, that's easy for me to say because I also think it was supremely stupid to nominate a progressive warrior in a swing-seat situation where all the Dems needed to do was not lose any Harris 2024 voters in a solidly-blue presidential state. The legend of Susan Collins is surely scary in Maine politics, but the idea she was going to beat random unobjectionable Democratic State Senator X this year struck me as absurd. She was probably toast, in the same way Jon Tester was toast two years ago; the days of any Senator levitating significantly above the partisanship with a personal vote are waning, and even Collins was pretty unlikely to do it. Everyone was afraid to say that and look dumb, but it's true.

3. Amateur candidates are always going to have more scandals, on average, because they haven't been vetted and weeded out by previous elections and previous opposition research. Whatever you think of boring state legislators running for national office, they've survived some version of the microscope, and that means on the margin you will get fewer surprises post-nomination.

4. I strongly agree with Josh Barro that these low-conscientious losers are just dumb Senate candidates. The Democratic party has a ton of buttoned-up goody-two-shoes wonk dorks, but to the degree that's a problem the answer surely is not to go find some abusive drunks who can't hold down jobs.

5. I also think this is another feature of why national politics sucks; when it's all a distant soap-opera on TV, people will put up with all sorts of moral rot as part of a partisan/ideological package. No one would want anything to do with Graham Platner at the PTA; Senate candidates barely register as humans, and so their obvious character flaws become just another pro/con on the electoral scorecard. We are long past that point with Platner; the latest revelations are a completely unsurprising development. Partisans will rationalize massive amounts of dogshit in national politics before they give up.

6. Platner can no longer win; all politicians are coalitions of supporters and financial backers, and his coalition has collapsed. Thus the only card he has left to play is negative; he can make it very hard on the Dems to beat Collins, since he's going to be the Dem on the ballot unless he elects to drop out this week. And he might have a credible threat to burn it all down. And he might be crazy. And it looks like he wants to use that leverage to bargain over the selection of a new candidate. So some bargaining might be in order. Nate Silver gamed some of this out today, and I agreed with most of what he wrote.

7. Everyone and their brother is crying about the procedures for nominating a replacement. In one sense, this is very healthy. Choosing candidates is the fundamental job of a party, and the process of choosing candidates is how parties negotiate policy and power among competing factions within the party. How that choice is made has two important components: what factions are actually involved/excluded in making the choice, and what factions are mollified/angered by the process. No one really cares about the process per se; it's all a proxy for factional involvement and bargaining. Which, again, is healthy and normal for parties.

8. As to the particulars of the selection method, I'm with Jonathan Bernstein that there are lots of mechanisms for candidate selection/replacement that are democratic in nature; you don't have to have direct primaries to achieve that. And, indeed, I think direct primaries are inferior to conventions and smoke-filled rooms. But whatever process you choose, you want it to be one that legitimates the outcome, and works to make the various factions and players happy. So I disagree with Silver that you ideally want to give voters a say here in replacement; you may want to respect their previously-expressed wishes and lean toward a progressive-friendly replacement, but only to the end of keeping those factions happy. And there's no reason that can't be done by the state party acting on its own accord, and no reason to think such action is less democratically legitimate.