It Will Be Hard for Democrats to Replace Graham Platner

I f there is one thing savvy consumers of political news should have learned over the years, it’s to never take news about political candidates — or the responses of people in the political arena to that news — at face value without considering when it is released and who benefits from it. That’s not to say that it’s all lies and conspiracies; most campaign-season stories are at least partially true. But journalists are often fed information by people with agendas, and the journalists and their editors often have agendas, too. Both of those things affect when and where stories get published. It’s usually not hard to see who would want a particular story, or poll, out at a particular time.

That observation informed how I read the Eric Swalwell stories and Democrats’ response to them: People who had been allies and supporters of Swalwell for years turned on him at precisely the moment when the Democrats needed to narrow their primary field for the California governor’s race, and when Democrats were worried that waiting on the stories would give Republicans the chance to hit Swalwell once it was too late to replace him as the Democrats’ nominee. When a problematic candidate is a Republican, by contrast, we tend to see partisan pollsters put out favorable general election polls for them at critical junctures of the primary, which just happen to aid their partisans in arguing that the candidate should be nominated. I noted this dynamic over a decade ago, contrasting two polls by left-leaning pollster Public Policy Polling: one that talked up self-destructive Missouri Republican Todd Akin before the 2012 primary, helping him win, and one that promoted independent Kansas candidate Greg Orman while there was still time for the Democratic candidate Chad Taylor to drop out and clear the field for Orman.

So, in wondering why left-leaning outlets such as the New York Times are dropping stories about Platner now, consider the calendar. The Democratic primary in Maine is on Tuesday, June 9. Platner has been all but formally anointed the party’s nominee after his opponent, two-term Governor Janet Mills, dropped out of the race on April 30. Mills has not resumed campaigning, but she has been careful to point out through spokespeople that she is still available: “People have the impression that I ‘withdrew’ or ‘dropped out,’ but I simply suspended active campaigning. I am still on the ballot.” A primary victory for Mills is the only mechanism Democrats have to get rid of Platner without his consent. So, there is some urgency for anyone wanting that to happen.

The Remaining Options

Mills is plainly enjoying the turnabout: She was the party establishment’s choice and dropped out rather than face a humiliating loss in the face of Platner’s surge of grassroots support and fundraising and his backing by influential figures such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. In late April, I thought it was a sign that she was about to throw in the towel once she vetoed a bill placing a moratorium on building data centers in the state, and opposed an embargo on weapons sales to Israel — both stances at odds with the increasingly large lunatic fringe of the Democratic primary electorate. She suspended her campaign a week after that.

But Mills is also now in a bind. On the one hand, it seems very unlikely that the voters will turn on a dime back to her with just four days to go and early voting underway. At age 78, her heart never really seemed to be in this campaign in the first place, so she has to look like a team player by not abruptly jumping back in to try to torpedo Platner. On the other hand, you don’t win elections in modern America unless the voters can see and taste that you’d throw your own mother to a starving pack of jackals to win. By not campaigning, Mills is signaling that she’s only half-hearted about still wanting the nomination.

Under Maine law, the options get harder if the primary voters stick with Platner:

State law sets an extremely early deadline for candidates to withdraw, a deadline . . . at 5:00 PM on Monday, July 13. If Platner were to drop out by that point, the Maine Democratic Party would be able to replace him on the ballot.

But if he were to withdraw after that point, his name could be “removed” from the ballot, but his party would not be given an opportunity to replace him . . . Maine Democrats could find an independent candidate to support in the general election, but they couldn’t field a new one — the filing deadline for independent candidates has passed.

It is possible that the state legislature could move to modify that requirement and lengthen the period of time for naming a replacement nominee, but such a change would be difficult. Lawmakers adjourned on April 29 and are not scheduled to meet again this year. Mills could exercise her power under Article V, Section 13, of the Maine Constitution to convene the legislature in an extraordinary session, but even then, there’s a serious catch.

That’s because the state constitution further provides that bills only come into effect 90 days after the conclusion of the session in which they were passed. Realistically, then, if an extraordinary session were convened after July 13, the effective date of the legislation would be too late.

Ask Abigail Spanberger if that sounds like a risky legal strategy. And as you can imagine, those sort of machinations by the governor would be even uglier if the governor herself is the candidate to benefit.

The Players and the Game

The Democratic establishment is nothing if not ruthless about putting the party’s interests above those of individual candidates once they become a liability, and Democrats are traditionally much better at collective action of this sort than are Republicans. But it can still be a hard road. In 2002, they forced out corrupt New Jersey Senator Bob Torricelli at the end of September in favor of retired Senator Frank Lautenberg, salvaging a race in which Torricelli was headed to defeat. In 2024, of course, they even managed to do the same thing to the sitting president of the United States.

But Joe Biden was a lifelong creature of the institutional Democratic Party, famously unable to stand up to its various interest groups and constituencies. By contrast, Platner is a volatile outsider who might just refuse to go — especially if his factional defenders within the party keep his campaign from going broke. If that happens, Democrats are well and truly stuck with him, and even an effort to write in an alternative would just fracture their vote (although Maine’s ranked-choice voting system makes this at least somewhat more plausible as a path). Given that Maine is a must-win Senate race for Democrats, the party organs cannot possibly refuse to fund his campaign even if he gets caught with the proverbial live boy and dead girl.

I can’t really see at this point how they can substitute in anyone but Mills. Her age and poor approval ratings as governor are liabilities, but nothing on par with what’s been coming out on Platner. It’s too late to stand up a replacement who hasn’t been in the race and doesn’t have the name recognition of a sitting governor.

There are also the internal party dynamics to consider. Among Democratic professionals, activists, and public voices, there are four factions that had lined up behind Platner before the heavy opposition started dropping.

First, there are the Mills partisans. Nationally, most of these were more anti-Platner than pro-Mills. These include pro-Israel Democrats and Democrats who are less populist and more pro-business on economic issues. They’re doing a round of “I-told-you-so”s at the moment and would be easy people to recruit to any effort to replace Platner. Most, however, will come around and support him if he’s the nominee, because that’s what Democrats always do.

Second, there are the partisan Democrats who just want the seat, were not deeply emotionally invested in the Platner vs. Mills primary, and only really cared about the primary as a choice of which candidate was stronger in the general election. By now, a lot of those people would gladly ditch Platner as they did to Biden and Torricelli, but they’re looking for the signal from the top of the party that it can be done. And it’s increasingly hard to see exactly where the top of the party resides. Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and George Clooney could weigh in to squeeze out Biden, but who plays that role now?

Third, there are the partisans who fell in love with the idea of Platner as a manly-man who could win working-class white men. There is a theory of the case here that is especially apt to Maine: Democrats have tried and failed before to run liberal women against Susan Collins, but they haven’t tried running a brawny male populist who could reach some of the Trumpy Paul LePage voters in the upstate who have never warmed to Collins. These people are the ones most pained right now by the contrast between the theory of Platner and the reality, because they are also partisans who prioritize winning, and they now must eat a lot of crow if they have to admit that Mills was the safer choice all along.

Fourth, there’s Platner’s base: tankies, Israel-haters, weirdo iconoclasts, and other Bernie Bro types (for the moment, conspicuously not including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is prudently keeping some distance from Platner). These are the people most publicly blowing their tops at the Times story. They will go down with the ship, because they’d rather lose an election than lose a factional battle against the “neoliberal” wing of the party. Also, let’s be blunt here: If you are already an apologist for Hamas, nothing that Platner has done or said is that hard to explain away.

There’s still no guarantee that Platner will lose in November if he survives all efforts to displace him as the Democratic candidate. He’s running as a Democrat in a Democratic state in a Democratic year, and we are far through the looking glass by now as far as what disqualifies a candidate from winning an election. But it now looks quite clear that Democrats would be better off with a generic candidate, even an old and unpopular one, than with Platner. But they may have discovered that just barely too late to do anything effective about it.