Graham Platner's withdrawal from Maine's Democrat Senate primary strips away the weakest, most scandal-ridden opponent Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) could have faced, and that might make her seat harder to hold onto than it was a week ago.
That said, I wouldn't bet against her yet.
Collins has spent her career defying expectations. In 2020, she won by eight points despite consistently trailing in the polls. But, I’m not here to talk about Collins. I’m here to talk about the Democrat Party base, and why the ghost of Platner won’t go away any time soon.
Platner suspended his campaign on Wednesday after months of damning revelations failed to thwart his momentum; he was finally done in by a rape allegation. It may have been the worst thing he was accused of, but hardly the only terrible thing.
Last month, the New York Times reported that three women had accused him of domestic abuse. There was a trail of graphic social media posts that included racist, misogynistic, homophobic comments, and even rape fantasies. In the beginning was the Nazi tattoo. His base excused all of these scandals. His support stayed solid. His fundraising remained strong.
But a fact that gets lost in the discussion is that Democrats weren’t always stuck with him. Yes, he was the lawfully elected nominee, but before that, he was competing with Gov. Janet Mills for the nomination. And yet, through all of it, many of the terrible things he’d said and done were public before voters cast a single ballot and before Janet Mills suspended her campaign, and they chose him anyway.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) saw this coming. He personally recruited Mills to run specifically to keep someone like Platner off the ticket. Democrats had already vetted Mills. She'd won statewide office in Maine before, and had she made it to the Senate, she would have voted the same way Platner would have. She was the safe, reliable Democrat vote Schumer wanted.
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But the polls never moved. All the energy was with the guy with the Nazi tattoo. Mills couldn’t break through, even as more scandals broke. Platner's support never wavered. He went on to win the primary in a landslide.
Think about that for a second. Maine Democrats had a vetted, electable, statewide-proven alternative sitting right there, and they picked the candidate with the Nazi tattoo and the racist, misogynistic Reddit posts instead. Platner was never inevitable. He was a deliberate choice, made and remade every time a new scandal surfaced and the base refused to blink. And not just the Maine Democrat voters, but the out-of-state donors and the left-wing influencers who all supported him as well.
Whoever the Maine Democrats land on now doesn't erase what led to this point. In the end, the most damning fact about the Platner debacle is that the Democrat base had a choice all along, and they kept choosing him until it looked like he couldn’t win.
