Graham Platner is a crisis of Democrats’ own making

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The deepening sexual misconduct scandal threatening to sink Maine Democrat Graham Platner’s insurgent Senate bid is just the latest uncertainty to rock a race Democrats once felt was their best chance yet to unseat longtime Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine).

It’s also a reminder that two things can be true at once. First, it should be voters, not party leaders, who choose our candidates. Second, the Democratic Party as an institution has the authority to decide which campaigns it will — and won’t — support financially.

Establishment Democrats can barely contain their excitement at having yet another opportunity to scorn Platner, a progressive outsider who had few friends in the party machine even before his recent wave of scandals. That’s especially true of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who had recruited Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) into the race only to see her candidacy die on the vine in April. On Monday, Schumer became the first senior Democrat to demand Platner’s immediate withdrawal.

The fact that Platner had few friends in the Democratic establishment was one of the reasons his campaign caught fire with Maine voters in the first place. Plenty of state Democrats voiced frustration with national Democrats for attempting to deny them a real choice in the primary by front-loading Mills as the only viable candidate. In a sense, Platner’s emerging flaws became a sign of just how not-Washington he was. As it turns out, those flaws also turned him into the party’s biggest liability ahead of a must-win Senate race.

What lesson can we draw from Maine?

It’s obvious that a historically weak and unpopular Democratic Party has no business trying to artificially restrict who runs in its primaries, especially when voters already feel ignored. If the Maine primary had been allowed to play out without the national party’s heavy hand, perhaps voters would not have felt the urge to so thoroughly repudiate D.C. Democrats by selecting Platner as their standard-bearer. Unheard voters are far more likely to make extreme electoral decisions that “send a message,” even if those choices are ultimately harmful to their own interests. Do establishment Democrats really want to replicate Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republicans in their own party?

Yet it isn’t clear the party has learned its lesson from Maine. National Democrats are leaning on the same strategy in Michigan, where they are engaged in an all-out push to prevent popular progressive Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed from winning the state’s August 4 primary, up to and including state Sen. Mallory McMorrow’s (D) last-minute exit from the race. Instead of trying to prevent leftists from mounting statewide campaigns, Democrats should be reflecting on why their voters are embracing progressive and democratic socialist candidates in the first place.

One of the uncomfortable truths about our current politics is that Democrats don’t seem to trust their voters to know their own interests. Democratic leaders have attempted to marginalize their voters’ moves to the left over the past decade, and in doing so they have muzzled and muted politicians who could have been the party’s next leading luminaries.

A party that trusted its voters would have recognized the value of elevating Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) to chair the House Oversight Committee instead of undermining her campaign. Even now, as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is busy building a blueprint for how Democrats can reconnect with alienated working-class voters, most party insiders are still minimizing his achievements and dismissing the voters who elected him.

It is hard to see that strategy as anything but self-defeating for a party that badly needs to rebuild trust with huge swaths of its coalition.

Party organizations like the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic National Committee have every right to decide which candidates they fund and who they abandon. It is probably wise for the DSCC to cut ties with Platner, who at any rate looks doomed, given the serious nature of the allegations against him. But the party would need to cut bait on fewer candidates if it would only stop trying to force upon voters such unpopular candidates as Mills and Michigan’s Rep. Haley Stevens (D). The party should instead just acknowledge that frustrated Democratic voters aren’t interested in another round of phlegmatic establishment politics.

Platner was always a bad bet. I said as much in multiple episodes of Lincoln Square Media’s “Strategy Session” over the last few months. But part of trusting voters is allowing them the freedom to sometimes make bad bets, and having the moral authority as an organization to say the Democratic Party will not finance deeply flawed candidates.

Unfortunately, voters feel like Democrats lack that moral authority because party elders have spent more time and effort trying to manipulate primaries than they have actually understanding why voters are so annoyed.

The end result is a bad look for the national party and a possible loss in a Maine race that Democrats absolutely must win. In other words, that’s Democrats being Democrats.

Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Chuck Schumer

Democratic Party

Donald Trump

Establishment

Graham Platner

Haley Stevens

Janet Mills

Maine

progressives

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Susan Collins

voters

Zohran Mamdani

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