The Politics of Unquestioned Assumptions

Democrats made the wrong bet with Graham Platner, and can't understand why

Amanda Litman is a Democratic Party operative who worked on President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and directed email fundraising for Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign. After that debacle, Litman launched Run for Something, a 501(c)4 “dedicated to recruiting and supporting young candidates running for down-ballot office. Its mission is to get young progressive candidates from non-traditional backgrounds to run for and win state and local offices, and create a next generation slate of political candidates that will seek higher office in the future.”

What drew my attention to Litman was, first, her assertion that “everyone made mistakes” regarding scandal-wracked Graham Platner, who won last month’s primary in Maine to become the Democratic Party’s challenger to incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins. Did everyone really make mistakes about Platner? Or by that sweeping categorical statement, did Litman mean just the Democratic campaign operative class of which she is a member? Because I am pretty sure there weren’t many Republicans who were mistaken about what a complete dirtbag Platner is. Certainly I was not.

But it was Litman’s second post that really intrigued me: Why is “beating Susan Collins … the top priority”? Did Litman even think about that sentence before she posted it? Susan Collins is the most liberal Republican in Congress, and the only reason any Democrat would regard her defeat as “the top priority” is because this is necessary for Democrats to win a majority in the Senate. Although the Senate majority is not an inconsequential matter, is it so important that Litman and other Democrats should have “looked past” Platner’s obvious problems? The further rationalization — “it seemed like Maine voters were fine with him” — is also dubious. Was this a reference to public opinion polls? Vibes at campaign rallies?

Here are some numbers that Amanda Litman might want to think about: In her 2020 election, Susan Collins got 417,645 votes (51%), while her Democrat opponent, Sara Gideon, got 347,223 (42.4%). In the Democratic primary that year, Gideon got 116,264 votes, which was 71.5% of the 162,681 ballots cast in the primary. Let’s compare the performance of Gideon to how Platner did in this year’s Democratic primary: 154,084 votes (72.1%) — about 38,000 more votes. But if Collins once again tops 400,000 votes in the November election, where’s Platner going to come up with the extra 250,000 votes he’ll need to beat her? Those hundreds of thousands of Maine voters, who didn’t bother to turn out for the primaries, are they really “fine with” Platner? Do they share Litman’s “top priority” assessment of the need to defeat Collins?

This week brought an avalanche of disavowals after Politico got Jenny Racicot, one of Platner’s ex-girlfriends, to go on the record accusing him of breaking into her home and raping her. Racicot had been quoted by the New York Times in their June article, but that didn’t include her rape accusation. Instead, the Times story focused on Republican operative Lyndsey Fifield, who dated Platner for two years while he was a bartender at a popular Capitol Hill pub, the Tune Inn.

The “toxic relationship” story got shrugged off by Democrats because, well, Lyndsey’s a Republican so maybe she deserved to be abused? Whatever their thinking, it’s not as if Platner’s supporters weren’t warned that this wouldn’t be the last shoe to drop. Veteran journalist Mark Halperin had been clear about that much earlier:

Mark Halperin said Friday [May 1] on 2WAY's "The Morning Meeting" that an NRSC [National Republican Senatorial Committee] source tells him the opposition research they have yet to release on presumed Maine Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner is so damaging that he won't just lose the election, "he'll have to leave the state."

“The NRSC says they’re going to go so negative on Platner,” Halperin said. “I saw one of the spokespeople say he’ll have to leave the state. He won’t just lose the race, he’ll have to leave Maine.”

Halperin predicted the timing will be strategic: “I assume the RNC will drop some oppo on the eve of the first debate, like that afternoon.”

“And reporters, Susan Collins, and whoever is moderating will say: ‘Mr. Platner, you wrote, said, or did this thing.’ Will Platner just say, I was young and irresponsible?”

Could any warning have been clearer? Halperin’s source obviously didn’t want to tip their hand too much, but they were very confident that Platner couldn’t win, once that opposition research became public. And yet, inside the hivemind cocoon where Amanda Litman and her Democrat allies were operating, this warning was ignored.

This week, when nearly every prominent Democrat — including Bernie Sanders — has rushed to repudiate Platner, the blame-game circus involves lots of disingenuous rationalizations, like Michelle Golberg’s New York Times column that Litman cited:

Maine Democrats were willing to overlook Platner’s Totenkopf tattoo, his terrible Reddit posts and his sexting with other women while he was married because they felt so invigorated by him and the movement he was creating. They went out on a limb for him, and he had every reason to know it was going to be sawed off.

Also liable for this disaster are the progressive operatives who recruited Platner and were so infatuated with his identity — a gruff, handsome oysterman with social democratic politics — that they failed to do their due diligence. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Platner’s top strategist, Dan Moraff, didn’t want to spring for a thorough background check, which can take weeks and cost around $20,000. “Moraff asked for an expedited, cheaper review to be done within days,” The Journal said.

Moraff, who travels the country trying to recruit left-wing, working-class candidates, reportedly learned about some of Platner’s troubling Reddit posts but decided to charge forward anyway. “Part of our thesis here is that people do not want their candidates grown in vats,” he told The Journal.

He’s correct about the appetite for unconventional candidates, but that is no excuse for such willful sloppiness. Before blithely assuming that voters would forgive a candidate’s flaws, he had a responsibility to try to find out what those flaws were.

This fiasco might seem to vindicate the establishment that Platner railed against, but Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, who wanted to stop Platner, is also partly culpable here. Schumer badly misread the Democratic electorate and tried to clear the field for his preferred candidate, Maine’s 78-year-old governor, Janet Mills, leaving a vacuum that Platner filled. …

While I’m assigning blame, I shouldn’t leave out myself. Last October, when stories about Platner’s tattoo and Reddit posts first broke, I went to Maine to write about him. I tried to convey what I saw: a campaign that was electrifying angry Maine voters. But I deeply regret that, impressed by Platner’s political charisma, I wrote that he was “nothing like the edgelord caricature I encountered online.” If anything, he seems to be significantly worse. …

Platner offered many on the left something they’re desperate for: working-class aesthetics married to uncompromising lefty politics. Many progressives want to believe that with a sufficiently populist message and style, they can win over voters alienated from the Democratic Party, obviating the need for ideological concessions. Platner seemed to embody this possibility, and that made a lot of people look past a lot of red flags until it was almost too late.

You can read the whole thing, but nowhere in it does Goldberg confront the unexamined premise that “progressives” should enjoy a monopoly of influence in the Democratic Party, and that the party should be a vehicle for “angry” voters yearning for “uncompromising lefty politics.” However much any Democrat may despise Chuck Schumer (whom no Republican has ever admired) this no-enemies-to-the-left mentality was sure to lead to bad places, and yet it seems every Democrat except Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman has decided to jump aboard that bandwagon.

Unquestioned assumptions are not conducive to long-term political success. Most Americans are not angry about the issues that motivate partisan operatives. How many Maine voters, for example, share the pro-Hamas “river-to-the-sea” anti-Israel bias that has defined the left wing of the Democratic Party since October 2023? Maybe they’re upset about how the war with Iran has driven up gasoline prices, but I doubt Jew-hating is so prevalent in Maine as to produce more than 400,000 votes for the Democrat with the Totenkopf tattoo, even without the rape scandal.

As for Platner’s alleged “working class aesthetics,” that’s just Democrat code-talk for heterosexual white guy. Democrats looked at the 2024 exit-polls and freaked out at the realization that their coalition of disgruntled ethnic minorities, unmarried women and assorted sexual deviants did not add up to a electoral majority. “We need our own Joe Rogan!” they yelled in unison, because Rogan’s popular podcast was believed to have some kind of magical effect in getting young guys to vote for Donald Trump.

In point of fact, as the Washington Free Beacon has reported at some length, Platner’s “working class aesthetics” are utterly bogus. He is the scion of a prosperous family and attended a prestigious New England prep school. He claimed to use veteran’s benefits to buy his house, but that was lie — his dad loaned him $200,000. His oyster business has exactly one customer, his mother’s restaurant. It is true that Platner enlisted in the military and served in combat duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, but as for his 100% disability? Well, far be it from me to assert any medical expertise about PTSD, but if you suspect Platner’s just a malingering drunkard, you’re not alone.

“As Democrats waited for [Platner] to make an announcement … a small team of strategists behind his candidacy spent the day trying to navigate an exit from the race without entirely squandering the movement he built during his campaign against GOP Sen. Susan Collins.

“We’ve said from the very beginning that this campaign was never about Graham but about a movement of working people united to take back power,” Ben Chin, the campaign manager for Platner, said in a message to supporters on Wednesday.

So says CNN, anyway. Others are wondering whether Platner might decide just to hang in, no matter how remote his chance of winning in November may be. Does he actually owe anything to the Democratic Party? He got 72% of the primary vote, and now they’re telling him he’s no longer welcome? Do they expect the Nazi tattoo guy to exit gracefully? The dude whose idea of a fun weekend is home invasion and rape?

Allegedly, I hasten to add. Probably he’s got too many problems at this point to bother filing defamation suits against obscure Substackers, but I’m not the one making accusations against him, merely repeating what others have alleged (while sharing my opinion that it’s probably all true and just the tip of a vast scandalous iceberg).

Oh, but “the movement he built … of working people united to take back power” from whom? Susan Collins — yes, the unspeakable evil of a 73-year-old lady who has usurped the power of Maine’s working people! Do these Democrats hear themselves? Do they realize how crazy they sound, describing the faux proletarian Platner as the builder of a “movement” when, in reality, he was recruited by two out-of-state activists looking for a second-choice candidate after their first choice backed out?

Platner’s campaign manager accuses the state party of scheming for a “closed door” process to replace the candidate who won the primary, while the state party executive director accuses Platner of “distracting from the job of defeating Susan Collins,” as if there is still some feasible scenario of any Democrat beating Collins in November.

The Democrats have spent the past several weeks proving beyond any doubt that they are completely incompetent. To borrow the colorful phrasing of Bill Clinton, they “could not sell pussy on a troop train.” Their hopes of capturing a Senate majority this year are increasingly remote, and the best part is, they will learn nothing from it. If they were capable of learning lessons from failure, they wouldn’t be Democrats.