Inexperienced and improperly vetted, the candidate was a disaster in the making.
Anthony Weiner must be gnashing his teeth. Al Franken too. Weiner lost his political career for sexting while married (he went to jail for sexting with a 15-year-old girl, but that came later). Franken fake-groped a sleeping woman as a joke, and was then credibly accused of groping numerous women for real. Away with him! But that was before Democratic dude-bros decided the party was dominated by “HR lady politics,” as Matt Stoller memorably put it, and that white working-class men were the real Americans, having absolutely no political experience kept you pure of heart, and that being “rough around the edges” (Stoller again) was a testament to your authenticity.
Graham Platner shows us how that works out in practice. First, freelance progressive strategists Dan Moraff and Leanne Fan recruit him after a single meeting. They’re smitten: He’s the real deal, a former Marine who after some years of PTSD and heavy drinking has settled into small-town Maine life as an oyster farmer and married man. He’s got a “gravelly voice”—always a plus. Joined by Morris Katz, the man who brought Zohran Mamdani to the world, they commission a quick vetting on the cheap. It doesn’t hurt that Platner is good-looking, charismatic, a great public speaker and energetic campaigner, competing in the primary with 78-year-old governor Janet Mills, aka the Establishment, in the race to unseat longtime Republican Senator Susan Collins. And so the legend of Platner, man of the people, is born.
A great deal of ink has been spent debating what it is to be working-class. Non-college-educated? Brought up low-income? Sells his labor to a boss? Works with his hands? None of these are perfect—a housepainter works with his hands, and so did Picasso. I’m not sure Platner meets any of these criteria—his family was educated and middle-class; he went to private schools and got into (but dropped out of) George Washington University. He owns a business—the main customer for which is his mother’s restaurant. Platner was a political consultant’s idea of a working-class man, a profanity-spewing bro you’d want to have a beer with.
It was a bit of a grift, but for a long time, it worked. Platner had a huge following in Maine among fed-up workers and idealistic progressives alike, including lots of women enraged by Senator Collins’s vote for Brett Kavanaugh. He won the primary. People loved him so much, and were so eager to beat Collins they excused flaws that would have sunk an ordinary Democrat: the tattoo he claimed not to know was a Nazi symbol but probably did, the misogynistic Reddit posts, bad behavior with some—but not all!—girlfriends, sexting with multiple women after the marriage that was supposed to have turned his life around. It was all down to PTSD or alcoholism. Each thing was supposed to be the last—he swore it—but it never was.
Dude-bro pundits—Stoller, Ryan Grim, Ken Klippenstein, Glenn Greenwald—doubled down: What about Trump, the rapist in the white house? What about Gaza, and AIPAC and the oligarchs funding the Dems? They shredded Lindsay Fifield, an ex-girlfriend who told The New York Times Platner had twisted her arm and locked her in a room. Fifield was a “republican operative” who had helped orchestrate Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court bid—obviously she’s lying. It was only when another ex, Jenny Racicot, told Politico and Jake Tapper that he had raped her after invading her house while drunk that the handwriting was on the wall. But, really, it had been there all along. As Maya Angelou said, when people show you who they are, believe them the first time. His endorsers—Bernie, Warren, Ro Khanna, Planned Parenthood—dropped him; his volunteers turned against him, and on Wednesday Platner withdrew from the race with a bitter speech blaming the media and the Establishment for tanking his campaign.
A lot has been said about the gendered nature of Platner’s appeal. The working-class savior has to be a man, of course—imagine a working-class woman campaigning on her years working the register at CVS or running a daycare center. Where’s the romance in that? It’s no accident that Elizabeth Warren called him “my kind of man” and praised him for his “accountability,” the very quality he lacks entirely. Men get so much forgiveness for their screwups and predations. A male politician has a secret weapon, too—his wife. A wife can defend her husband when no one else can, and rare indeed is the pol who says, No, darling, it’s my fault, I’ll handle this alone. I felt so sorry for Amy Gertner telling the world that she doesn’t want a perfect marriage. When Platner introduced his wife at a rally after he confessed to the sexting, the crowd roared “A-my! A-my!” It was hard not to hear the voice of progressive America calling on women to stand by their man and take one for the team.
What have we learned from this experience? Vetting is good. Don’t do it on the cheap. Don’t assume that a politician’s autobiography is truthful. It’s PR. Finally, no matter how much you want a savior, don’t make excuses for a candidate like he’s your boyfriend who’s really sweet when you get to know him.
Love is blind. Voters shouldn’t be.