Two years ago Democrats had one job: stop Donald Trump from returning to the White House. It was the only thing that mattered, but with breathtaking political malpractice, they imploded.
This November Democrats have two jobs: win the House of Representatives and win the Senate to turn Trump into a lame duck president for his final two years. But once again the party, fond of warning that the stakes are existential, is in grave danger of blowing it.
On Wednesday the Democratic candidate Graham Platner said he was withdrawing from the Senate race in Maine after a woman who dated him said he drunkenly forced her to have sex despite her telling him to stop. Platner denies the allegation reported by Politico.
This is a disaster because every seat counts in the Senate, where Republicans currently hold a narrow 53-47 majority. The electoral map is not favourable to Democrats this time but, riding anti-Trump sentiment, it’s just possible they could pull it off and become a vital check on the president’s power.
Who is to blame for this debacle? The list is long. First there is Platner himself, who recklessly pressed ahead with his campaign despite knowing that an entire battalion of skeletons lurked in the closet.
At his victory party last month, the candidate watched as his mother took the stage to burnish his image; with hindsight it now appears she was cynically used as a political prop. In an 11-minute video message on Wednesday, Platner played the martyr, wallowing in self-pity and railing against the “corporate media system and the political establishment” without taking responsibility for his actions.
Adam Smith, a congressman from Washington, told the MS Now network: “Platner’s a bad guy … He’s not a good person and he is using the anti-establishment feeling to basically be a demagogue.”
How Platner got this far is its own sorry story. He was recruited by the progressive activists Daniel Moraff and Leanne Fan, who reportedly paid a vetting firm only for a quick and dirty background check rather than the comprehensive version. Even that uncovered some disturbing social media posts from his past but Moraff told the Wall Street Journal newspaper: “Part of our thesis here is that people do not want their candidates grown in vats.”
Platner would be hit by other controversies, including questions over a skull-and-crossbones tattoo recognised as a Nazi symbol. Stories emerged that he had exchanged sexually explicit text messages with several women while married. Another report described Platner’s abusive and unsettling behaviour towards women. Yet many Democrats continued to rally around him.
Part of this was surely wishful thinking about class and gender. Democrats have long had an image problem as the party of the coastal college-educated elites. Kamala Harris’s 2024 election defeat by Trump (with an assist from Elon Musk) also told them they were losing young men to the manosphere.
Platner, a bearded, gruff, rugged combat veteran and oyster farmer who had never held elected office, seemed to offer an antidote. “I’m a working-class guy that lives a working-class life,” he told a local Maine TV station. His aesthetics seemed to give Democrats the blue collar cred and performative masculinity they craved.
Megan McArdle, a columnist at the Washington Post newspaper, observed on X: “People in NYC used to say that Trump was ‘a poor person’s idea of a rich person’ –which was supposed to be a dunk and actually described his political appeal. Dems trying to tap that same populist energy instead selected a rich person’s idea of a poor person.”
And just like Trump, who got millions of dollars from his dad, the rationale was based on an illusion. Platner is the son of a wealthy lawyer and an upscale restaurateur. He went to a private high school where he was on the wrestling team and played the upper-class bachelor Henry in a production of My Fair Lady. Only a small fraction of his income comes from oyster farming.
But Democrats had become so desperate to avoid accusations of elite privilege and emasculation that they over-corrected. Platner’s misdeeds came to be explained away as evidence that he was “authentic” and a “real man”. In an echo of the Bill Clinton affair with Monica Lewinsky, a 22-year-old White House intern, some liberal women defended Platner only to find themselves on the wrong side of history.
There were other Democratic divisions. Platner was a fatally flawed messenger but his insurgent message resonated with thousands of Mainers. He spoke of smashing the corruption of wealthy elites, achieving universal health insurance coverage, restoring the constitutional right to abortion and ending the “genocide” in Gaza.
In today’s toxic political climate, that meant Platner’s critics were often dismissed as anti-progressive or anti-Palestinian. Media revelations were treated with similar suspicion of impure motives and a hidden agenda. Only with Monday’s Politico report did Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Ro Khanna abandon ship.
Social media filled with Democratic moderates smugly taking victory laps, conveniently forgetting their own past blind spots over Andrew Cuomo and Eric Swalwell. But the party establishment is also culpable. Chuck Schumer, its leader in the Senate, cleared the field for Janet Mills, the 78-year-old governor of Maine, to run for the seat, for which she had little obvious appetite. She announced her candidacy late and ran a lackluster campaign that was suspended in April.
Nature abhors a vacuum. When the centre is so mushy, unimaginative and redolent of the status quo, is it any wonder that voters will rush to the bracing outsider promising to shake things up? As recent primary election results in New York have shown, people are frustrated with Democratic leadership’s meekness against Trump and looking for fighters, warts and all.
A divided opposition party, with moderates and progressives at each other’s throats over Platner and policy, is the last thing that US democracy – and the rest of the world – need right now. Authoritarians thrive when they are afforded the space to do so by competitors who are bickering among themselves.
The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, pleaded on X: “Democrats – knock off the stupid ideological food fight. Find someone who can speak articulately about housing and gas costs, corruption, doesn’t have a Nazi tattoo, and isn’t over 80. It’s not that hard.”
When it comes to a damage limitation exercise, Democrats could at least coalesce around a message of accountability. Yes, they waited too long, but they did eject Platner in the end. That contrasts with the impunity of Republicans, who continue to turn a blind eye to the misdemeanours of Trump, Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton and countless others.
There is also still hope for Democrats in Maine, where they need to find a replacement candidate capable of defeating Republican incumbent Susan Collins. The state Democratic party held an emergency meeting on Wednesday, where more than a hundred state committee members signed off on holding a nominating convention.
Whoever they choose will need to walk a tightrope, harnessing the energy of the progressive movement while also winning back moderates and independents alienated by Platner’s misogyny and his party’s willingness to lower its standards to tolerate it. Or given the time constraints, they will need to run rather than walk.
The Trump era is the story of Donald Trump and Republican capitulation but it is also the story of Democratic ineptitude. In 2016 and 2024 the party showed it could not beat a fake populist with a history of bankruptcies, blatant lies and sexual misconduct allegations. From Africa to Iran, the world is paying the price. The meltdown in Maine is a warning that help is not necessarily on the way.
