The Vanilla Brand of the Democratic Party Is Selling

Just look at (most of) the party’s lineup of Senate candidates.

(Photo illustration by The Bulwark / Photos: Getty, Shutterstock)

OVER THE PAST FEW WEEKS, the conversation around whether Democrats can retake the Senate has zeroed in on the state of Maine. Party operatives and impassioned observers alike are fiercely debating whether Graham Platner’s controversial tattoo, his old Reddit posts, and his sexting revelations have jeopardized chances of flipping the seat now held by Republican Susan Collins.

But lost amid the frenzy is an equally significant development about the future of both the party and the Senate. Elsewhere around the country, establishment candidates running very conventional races are finding real success with their boilerplate approaches. These candidates may lack the drama—or chaos—of a Platner, but they reduce the risk that a faceplant in Maine will cost Democrats big in November.

Let’s take a tour of these states. On Tuesday, Iowa state Rep. Josh Turek—the preferred candidate of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer—crushed progressive state Sen. Zach Wahls in the Senate primary, winning 63 percent of the vote. In North Carolina, former Gov. Roy Cooper, whom Schumer also recruited to run for Senate, appears to be coasting to victory. Up in Alaska, another Schumer recruit, Mary Peltola, is by all evidence, running a strong campaign despite receiving little national media attention. Former Sen. Sherrod Brown, yet another Schumer recruit, is in a tighter but still competitive race to win back Ohio. Top party officials increasingly see pickup opportunities in unexpected states like Texas, Nebraska, and maybe even Mississippi.

So much of the narrative this election cycle is that Democratic voters just want to cast out the old guard. And while operatives are busy fixating on the attention economy or debating candidates’ morality, it turns out that plain vanilla Democratic politics may actually be working.

“What Iowa, North Carolina, Alaska are telling us is that the recipe is actually pretty simple: You find candidates with long, deep relationships in those states who understand those states, and then you let them run campaigns that are focused on those states rather than trying to nationalize everything,” said Caitlin Legacki, a party strategist who is working with Schumer-backed Rep. Haley Stevens in the Michigan Senate primary.

Always fractious, Democrats have debated how best to campaign while Trump occupies the White House, having argued about it since the earliest days of his first term. But this perennial argument has taken on added significance as the Platner saga rumbles on. Disagreements that were once about campaign strategy have turned into fights over whether key issues or candidate morality even matter at all.

The contrast is remarkable. As Platner’s defenders have invested themselves in making him an avatar of a new type of populist politics, other Democrats running for Senate have been strikingly conventional. Cooper, the 68-year-old former North Carolina governor well-known in his home state, put out a no-thrills bio ad this week that was so colorless it borders on parody.

This approach hasn’t always worked. After all, the entire reason the 41-year-old Platner is a national figure—one who draws large, impassioned crowds on the stump—is because Maine’s 78-year-old Gov. Janet Mills, another Schumer recruit it must be said, failed to gain traction among primary voters after she launched her Senate bid. But Platner’s an outlier. There are enough data points now to say that the old candidate calculus hasn’t been proven obsolete.

“Chuck Schumer has recruited top-notch candidates in swing states that a Democratic majority requires,” said Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and a former senior official in the Biden White House. “He may face a lot of griping, but he’s set a path to a Democratic Senate and getting the job done.”

The relative success of these old-fashioned candidates has forced operatives to reconsider some of their assumptions about politics in 2026. Several officials I spoke with suggested that candidacies like Cooper’s and Peltola’s scuttled the new conventional wisdom that what really matters in politics today is going viral online.

Yes, these operatives conceded, breaking through social media algorithms matters in presidential elections and Senate races in places like Texas (where the state’s size makes it both expensive to run TV ads and difficult to rely on retail politics). But virality is no panacea. They pointed to Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff—who isn’t very online, yet holds a comfortable lead over his Republican rivals in a very competitive state—as proof that the party shouldn’t fixate quite so much on a candidate’s TikTok presence.

“That stuff is really helpful for online fundraising. It is really helpful if you are trying to break through and nationalize your race. But if you’re actually trying to communicate to voters in a statewide race, it’s different,” said Legacki. “In an era of this virality conversation, one thing we’ve heard from voters consistently in focus groups is they want someone who is going to still be effective and good at the job.”

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REGARDLESS OF HOW BETTER POSITIONED the party may be in Senate races previously thought out of reach, every Democrat I spoke with was emphatic that the Maine situation is a disaster. Sen. Susan Collins is the only Republican up for re-election in a state that Kamala Harris won; her seat should have been Dems’ easiest win this cycle. Even as Democrats make promising gains elsewhere, control of the Senate could still be decided by Mainers.¹ And there’s deep anxiety within the party that more damaging news stories about Platner’s personal conduct will come out in the coming days.

It’s a dicey situation. Many operatives I’ve spoken with are anxiously awaiting another shoe to drop. “Graham Platner is going to lose in November. Most people who are serious campaigners here understand that,” one Maine Democratic strategist told me. “The negatives against him are just much more salient than the negatives against Susan Collins.”

But if Platner does implode, it could be that another vanilla Democrat stands to benefit. Over the weekend, Mills reminded a local outlet that she may have suspended her campaign but she hadn’t dropped out. She will still be on the primary ballot next Tuesday if Mainers want an alternative to Platner. If he wins the nomination, though, Platner has until early July to drop out. The Maine Democratic Party would then select his replacement for the general election ballot.

My open tabs:

— Inside America’s Most Dysfunctional Zoo

— Desire for privacy is slowly killing this symbol of the American Dream

— California is drowning in internet campaign ‘slop.’ 2028 is next.

1. JVL ran some numbers on this in today’s Triad, if you like doing math in your spare time, and who doesn’t?