A Case Study in Recklessly Endangering the Senate
Graham Platner had talent, but was selfish and reckless. And now it will take the type of politics he decried to clean up his mess.
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Platner and the Perils of Performative Populism
by Sam Stein
Having sparked his fair share of intrigue and passion, scandals and uncertainty, intraparty debates and bitter online feuding, Graham Platner finally delivered a universally shared sentiment: He will not end up in the United States Senate.
In a new, devastating report from Politico on Monday, a woman who once dated Platner said he sexually assaulted her nearly five years ago. The details are both disturbing and well-documented. Her substantiation alone—Facebook messages supporting her account and corroboration from another ex-boyfriend whom she told about it—gives her account credibility. That Platner denied the accusation is far from convincing. At a certain point, the pattern of behavior becomes impossible to dismiss, even if the details are obscured by the fog of memory.
He cannot win. The question now is not so much whether Platner goes, but how he goes. “We’re taking the time to reflect on the best path forward,” he said in a video posted right as the Politico article dropped.
People relatively close to the campaign expect Platner not to try and brave this out, but to leave the race before July 13, giving the Maine Democratic Party the opportunity to pick a replacement. There is less than a week between now and then. What happens in that period is high-stakes. It’s not just control of the Senate at risk, but the equilibrium of the Democratic party and the larger message sent to voters about how seriously the party takes accusations of sexual assault.
Serious reflection is in order. Platner unquestionably tapped into the Democratic party’s id in ways that other candidates for office have not. His burn-it-down populism resonated among an electorate desperate for confrontation, both with Donald Trump and their own establishment. He had a fluency on the trail and online that belied his inexperience in politics.
But what did it say that the red flags got so obscured in the process? Why did the idea of better vetting get so casually dismissed? And how was it that political neophytism was treated as an asset and not a liability? Maybe having been through the wringer of an election is a value-add. Maybe having a political résumé should not be considered an opprobrium.
These are questions Democrats are asking now, not just because they want explanations for the mess that the party is currently facing but because they are desperate to not blow these midterms.
“As politics revolve more and more around who is the most effective communicator and who can connect with voters online, we will need to think about what we’re willing to accept in order to win,” Christina Reynolds, a longtime Democratic operative and former top official at EMILY’s List told me. “Elections are choices, of course, but there are a lot of critical elections out there right now, many with far less attention than this race, with candidates who don’t have these same issues and could win with a fraction of the attention and money aimed at this one Senate race.”
Reynolds’s point is a retrospective one. Too much wish-casting was made for Platner. There was too little willingness to acknowledge that his flawed (now fatally flawed) candidacy was costing Democrats time, money and credibility. It was selfish of him to go on, knowing there were other stories out there, knowing that he was asking everyone invested in stamping out this type of behavior to swallow their pride.
But that’s just one half of the puzzle Democrats have to solve. The other half involves what to do next in Maine. Switching candidates at this juncture is not a simple task. A chunk of that state’s electorate will look at what’s happening and find a conspiracy behind it. Others will recoil at the mere perception that the media or Democratic leadership are pushing Platner from the race. They will read the Politico story and declare it a he-said-she-said proposition. They will respond with some variation of: “Well, Republicans rallied around Donald Trump.”
Can we get to a place where these people aren’t totally disillusioned? Frankly, who knows? That some of Platner’s biggest supporters have said he needs to drop out should provide some relief to Democrats. But not much. Hasan Piker may be fine with Platner leaving the race. He also may hate who ends up replacing him.
But what are the other options?
It was notable on Monday that just minutes after the Politico story was published, Sen. Susan Collins tweeted about how the Treasury Department, at her urging, would be reopening Taxpayer Assistance Centers in Augusta and Bangor. The most endangered Republican in the field was chugging along doing classically insider stuff—the type of politics so causally downplayed by those arguing that a wave would simply overwhelm the Republican party—while an epic, self-made clusterfuck engulfed her opponent.
That’s the irony that Democrats are now dealing with. They are forced to engage in the insider politics that Platner ran so successfully against in order to save themselves from Platner’s implosion. They put it off too long. And now, they can’t any longer.
“I have been on Team We Get Behind The Nominee Until It’s Too Much,” Rob Flaherty, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s top digital guru, told me. “And this is too much. He very transparently can’t win this election. He should get off the ballot.”
But, Flaherty added, reflecting on his own experience in the 2024 campaign, “changing candidates mid-stream is difficult. As we saw, it doesn’t guarantee success. But in the last election Kamala Harris being the nominee materially saved a bunch of Senate seats. There were upsides even in losing. But you have to get him off the ballot.”
“The situation is,” he observed, “unbelievably fucked.”
AROUND THE BULWARK
Graham Platner Crossed the Voters’ Red Line… There was one thing Maine women told us would keep them from supporting him—and it just became public. SARAH LONGWELL shares what she gleaned from her focus group.
When Conscience Conflicts With Commission… An Air Force major’s recent protest in uniform provides an occasion to clarify the purpose and value of professional discipline in the military, observes MARK HERTLING.
Why We Won’t Stay Silent About Christian Nationalists in Our Own Churches… The Nazi books didn’t appear out of the blue. They were the predictable destination of ideas that have been growing for years, write PHILIP D. BUNN, ELI McGOWAN and EMILY McGOWAN.
Trump Wants All-out Kleptocracy… On the flagship pod, BILL KRISTOL joins TIM MILLER to talk about the Putin-grade corruption of Donald Trump.
Quick Hits
MUM DEPORTATIONS: The Trump administration has been of two minds about its mass deportation agenda over its first year and a half. Most of the time, the order of the day has been “shock and awe” with spectacular displays of militarized might, which culminated in the extra-judicial execution of two Americans in Minnesota. But sometimes the administration has urged caution, instructing congressional Republicans not to use the term “mass deportation” (at least until the midterms) and signalling that 2025-style ICE invasions of major American cities were at an end.
For now, apparently, cooler—though by no means more generous—heads have prevailed, Politico reports:
Three months into Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s tenure, he is succeeding in his pledge to get his department out of the headlines.
Mullin and his deputies have adopted a lower-profile approach to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, mothballing the flashy and aggressive tactics employed by his predecessor Kristi Noem. While the Department of Homeland Security continues to deport large numbers of unauthorized immigrants, it is making fewer arrests in public, holding back from deploying fresh waves of immigration agents to hotspots and has scrapped a plan to expand mega-warehouse detention facilities. . . .
Instead of arresting immigrants in their homes or on public streets, Mullin and other administration officials have promoted agreements that allow local and state law enforcement agencies to help identify and detain immigrants who are already in custody after being arrested for other crimes.
Just because ICE is maintaining a lower profile doesn’t mean that it’s less productive: So far the agency has reportedly been meeting its quota of 2,000 arrests per day. If they can keep up that pace, that’s 730,000 arrests per year—but that’s a big if.
DIE DEUTSCHE NATO: Donald Trump enjoys few pastimes more than alienating Europe—with derogatory comments about their defense spending and burden sharing, with tariffs and trade wars, with unseemly coquettishness whenever Vladimir Putin is in the room,1 and on and on. Now we’re starting to see the results. The Economist reports:
The strange creatures rumble out of the forest, their bodies clothed in moss, torn fabric and plastic grass; their heads veiled in black netting. The Leopard tanks and Puma infantry fighting vehicles of Germany’s 45th Panzer Brigade are in fancy dress to hide them from hostile drones. For a month the unit trained along Lithuania’s border with Belarus, a Russian satellite state, as part of a recently completed exercise called “Freedom Shield”. The goal: to be ready to “fight tonight” to defend Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, and hold the Suwalki corridor, which links the Baltic states to Poland.
To that end, the 45th Brigade is not going home. For the first time since the end of the cold war, Germany is permanently deploying military units abroad. These troops are the tip of the spear of an army that is expanding to become Europe’s largest. They will get the latest armour, artillery, drones and anti-aircraft systems as their unit grows from 1,600 soldiers to around 5,000 by the end of 2027.
American forces in the region, meanwhile, are dwindling. An American tank unit—the 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry Regiment—trained for months in the same area. But it shipped out in June, along with the rest of its brigade in Poland. Nobody knows when or if another American unit will replace it.
This is a world-historical gamble. In the past, when Germany has been the dominant military power in Europe, things haven’t turned out so well. But, hey, maybe the third time’s the charm?
MEANWHILE, IN GAZA: Hamas announced that it was dissolving its administration of the Gaza Strip so that the technocratic administration created by Trump’s Board of Peace could take over. But believe it or not, it’s gotten kinda complicated, reports the Financial Times:
Hamas said on Monday that it has dissolved its governing arm in Gaza and was preparing to hand over governance to a committee of technocrats formed under the terms of a US-brokered ceasefire deal with Israel.
The Palestinian militant group said its Emergency Governing Committee had been disbanded and its head Mohamed Abdul Khaleq al-Farra had resigned, but that the Gaza civil service would continue to function.
Hamas made no mention of turning over its weapons, a prerequisite under the deal for reconstruction in Gaza to proceed. The militant group has so far refused to give up its arms, and Israeli forces continue to occupy more than half of the strip. . . .
The [Board of Peace], the body appointed by US President Donald Trump to oversee the ceasefire deal and plans for reconstruction, said its assessment of Hamas’s announcement “will be guided by actions, not promises”.
The National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, NCAG, the transitional body of Palestinian technocrats intended to take over governance in the strip, was formed in January but its members remain stuck in Cairo.
It’s hard to tell what Hamas’s message here is. It could be: We’re willing to give up control of the Gaza Strip to a Palestinian government but we won’t disarm—at least not while the Israelis are here. Or it could be: We officially renounce any responsibility for the welfare of the people we’ve systematically oppressed and abused for a generation, but we reserve the right to shoot at whomever we like. Unfortunately, that ambiguity counts as an improvement in the situation.
SHUT UP AND TAKE THE W: The key to understanding Trump may be that he wants the appearance of corruption. He embraces it because, at least in his own mind, it makes everyone think he’s the center of the universe.
This helps explain why he inserted himself into the Folarin Balogun red card controversy.
In case you’ve been living under a rock: Balogun is the U.S. Men’s National Team’s star striker; he was given a questionable red card following the misapplication of video replay. Under World Cup guidelines, a red card leads to a one-match ban, but Balogun’s ban was suspended by FIFA the day before America’s game against Belgium. Trump reportedly called the president of FIFA to—depending on who you ask—either ask him what the rule around the one game suspension was or to ask him to review the play that led to the red card.
FIFA insisted that they simply kicked the process to an independent review board, which determined that Balogun’s ban was not proper.2 But people were outraged, and rightly so: Trump has no role to play here, his self-regard notwithstanding. The United States had an airtight case for appeal and the rest of the world was likely to lose their minds when the Balogun ban was (correctly) overturned.
This sort of gloating is routinely self-defeating in a strategic sense. I couldn’t help but think back to the Jimmy Kimmel suspension in September of last year, following a tasteless crack about Charlie Kirk in the aftermath of his assassination. ABC suspended Kimmel out of fear of affiliate station backlash. After Trump and his FCC Chair Brendan Carr took victory laps celebrating their “win” over the late-night host, however, ABC not only reinstated Kimmel but when he made jokes about Melania Trump being a “happy widow,” the network rejected calls to punish him and boosted its case against the government effort to force an early license renewal.
This is a running theme of Trump’s going back at least to the Bowe Bergdahl case, in which Trump’s remarks may have led to the dishonorably discharged soldier having his conviction set aside. But Trump’s lack of self-control is a feature, not a bug—at least, if you happen to be a narcissistic president who believes the world revolves around himself.
—Sonny Bunch
Cheap Shots
And, most recently, with dramatic appeals to FIFA to undo red cards given to American strikers before a match against Belgium.
The same rule was cited to suspend the ban Cristiano Ronaldo was supposed to serve at the start of this World Cup.
Suggested approach for Maine Democrats when (not if) Platner drops out. Just a few weeks ago in the Dem Governor primary, three candidates emerged as the strongest competitors to the eventual winner: Nirav Shah, Shenna Bellows, and Troy Jackson. They just demonstrated voter support. Why not have the three compete in caucuses and a convention. (Troy Jackson is a strong Platner supporter). Then we can avoid the "Biden/Harris" problem of a dictated choice, and all of them have campaign staffs and have been vetted.
Perhaps in the search for authenticity, it would be wise not to vote for someone who is authentically an asshole.