Graham Platner is out of the Maine Senate race, burdened by controversies that include a troubling rape accusation, which he denies. His departure is no doubt a good thing that will make it easier for Democrats to win back the Senate.
But progressives should pay attention to the discussion around Platner. His collapse is being turned into something larger, supposed proof that people from outside politics have no business being in it.
“Say what you will, but the establishment vets candidates,” the Center for American Progress president, Neera Tanden, wrote as the allegations broke. The Atlantic mocked the “beer test” that elevated Platner and noted that the movement behind him prized “an intensity of commitment” over “a mastery of policy detail”. The implicit message is that governing is a job for professionals, and that the amateurs should sit back down.
The establishment vets candidates, we are told. And yet Bill Clinton was vetted. So were Andrew Cuomo and Eric Swalwell. The professional class produces its own share of predators and grifters, and plenty of them slip through into elected office anyway.
The most important vetting that goes on in electoral races screens for something else: whether a candidate can largely self-finance a race, or has friends who can; whether they come out of the right alumni networks, know the right donors, and strike the right lobbyists as non-threatening.
That filter is at least part of the reason why our politics looks the way it does. The Democratic party does not run so many lawyers because voters are clamoring for them but because a serious campaign takes cash and connections that a warehouse worker or a nurse doesn’t have. Fewer than one in 50 members of Congress came up in a working-class job. Barely 2% of Democratic candidates worked exclusively in blue-collar jobs before running, and the figure stays under 6% even if you throw in teachers and nurses.
However, those are the types of candidates that voters want to see in office. A study by the Center for Working Class Politics found that working-class voters preferred working-class candidates, such as construction workers and teachers, and ranked lawyers near the very bottom, above only corporate executives. On average, the study found that working-class voters give a five- to six-point boost to candidates with a working-class background compared with other candidates. Ordinary people keep asking for candidates who sound like them, but in response Democrats keep sending them candidates who sound like they’ve wanted to be president since they were in middle school.
That is the appetite Platner met. Despite his complicated relationship to the working-class story he told, he connected because he talked like a normal person and because he said the party had failed the people it claims to speak for. You can hear the same thing from Dan Osborn, a trade unionist and industrial mechanic who first ran as an independent Senate candidate in deep-red Nebraska, where he outran Kamala Harris by 14 percentage points in 2024. “The Senate is a country club of millionaires that work for billionaires,” he told his crowds.
The problem was never that voters will not back outsiders but that the structure of US politics makes it so hard for them to compete at the highest levels.
The lesson of Maine is not that we need fewer amateurs. We need far more of them, recruited seriously, through class-rooted organizations. This is old wisdom on the left. Workers’ parties were built on the idea that working-class people had distinct interests and needed to be represented by their own.
Germany’s Social Democrats were led for decades by August Bebel, a carpenter. Brazil’s Workers’ party was led by a metalworker with almost no formal schooling. During the New Deal, the CIO union federation started the country’s first political action committee to get workers into Congress. Today, only a handful of groups, such as New Jersey’s state AFL-CIO, Osborn’s own Working Class Heroes Fund, and local Democratic Socialists of America chapters make any effort at working-class candidate recruitment.
Without countervailing efforts, we’ll be stuck with a politics staffed entirely by the credentialed – people less likely to recognize and govern in the interests of workers.
Platner’s demons are his own. But his fall should not be conscripted into an argument that people without law degrees ought to leave politics to our betters. The professionals running the Democratic party have had a long turn at the wheel. They lost workers and lost the country’s trust. We deserve a different kind of politics, and a different kind of politician.
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Bhaskar Sunkara is a Guardian US columnist. He is the president of the Nation, the founding editor of Jacobin, and the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality
