With Graham Platner officially out of the Maine Senate race after a series of scandals reached a breaking point last week, it’s natural to look for lessons in his campaign’s collapse.
But as disastrous as his candidacy was for Democrats, the more important lessons may come from his successes. His failings were mostly personal. His successes, on the other hand, were political — and significant.
He went from an unknown candidate to a progressive star who easily defeated his state’s sitting governor in the Democratic primary. This basic underdog story has become familiar in recent years, but Mr. Platner did something that most progressive outsiders haven’t: He was able to appeal across the ideological spectrum of the Democratic primary electorate, even though he was unmistakably a factional candidate of the activist left.
Only 13 percent of Maine Democrats said Mr. Platner was “too far to the left” in a New York Times/Portland Press Herald/Siena poll last month. He led his moderate opponent, Gov. Janet Mills, among self-identified moderate voters, 52 percent to 32 percent, in a University of New Hampshire poll taken before she dropped out of the race.
Mr. Platner’s progressive, populist message — anti-corporate, anti-establishment and opposing military aid to Israel, but not “woke” or democratic socialist — was able to occupy a kind of middle ground in the Democratic primary electorate. It’s a middle ground that many mainstream Democratic politicians have talked about in theory, but haven’t usually seized in actual elections.
There have been many successful progressive primary candidates in recent cycles, but not many have been able to win like this. Most have faced a wall of determined opposition from moderates. The opposition to Zohran Mamdani in New York, for instance, propelled a viable independent candidacy (Andrew Cuomo) and split Democrats in last year’s general election. Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign was stymied as soon as moderate rank-and-file Democrats could coalesce behind an alternative (Joe Biden). As a consequence, progressive breakthroughs have often been limited to highly educated, heavily Democratic urban areas with many young voters.
Mr. Platner was opposed just as vigorously by the moderate Democratic establishment, which backed Ms. Mills. Moderate voters, on the other hand, treated Mr. Platner quite differently. The usually stubborn ideologically-grounded resistance simply didn’t materialize. Ms. Mills never gained a footing in the race, and she scrambled toward the left on taxing millionaires and opposing data centers under certain conditions.
It’s hard to think of many examples of such a decisive victory over a well-known establishment-backed candidate in a recent Democratic primary. Even Mr. Cuomo — who was viewed significantly less favorably among New York City Democrats than Ms. Mills among Maine Democrats in Times/Siena polling — managed to win 44 percent of the vote in the Democratic mayoral primary.
Importantly, Mr. Platner’s feat occurred in a key Senate race in Maine. Yes, Maine is a Democratic-leaning state, but it’s not Williamsburg. It has the oldest population in the country, and it voted for Mr. Biden over Mr. Sanders in the 2020 presidential primary. Mr. Biden defeated Mr. Sanders among moderates, 49-13, according to the exit polls (with Michael Bloomberg in second place at 21 percent).
For good measure, Mr. Platner was running in a challenging Senate race where Democratic concerns about electability would be expected to be significant. To the extent voters were concerned about his electability, it seemed to be because of his personal history, not his ideology.
Our last poll offered striking evidence that Mr. Platner’s views weren’t putting him at a particular disadvantage: Fewer Maine voters thought he was “too far to the left” than said the same of the Democratic Party in general. Let that sink in: A candidate recruited and elevated by the activist left wasn’t necessarily perceived as farther left than the Democratic Party.
How could this be? One important part of the explanation is that the voters are right: Mr. Platner really wasn’t far to the left of the Democratic Party, even though he was a factional candidate backed and promoted by progressive activists.
Most obviously, he campaigned as an economic populist, but not as a democratic socialist. He supported Medicare for all but did not emphasize the broader array of familiar left-progressive policies, like a Green New Deal, free college, free child care and so on.
It’s not clear how much it matters if a candidate dons the “socialist” label, but there’s no doubt it’s a divisive term. It instantly identifies someone as much more to the left than the typical Democrat, or even as a radical. It could alienate many voters who associate socialism with something very different from Nordic social democracy.
Either way, Mr. Platner was focused on economic populism, which has much broader and nonideological appeal across the electorate than socialism. In the last Times/Siena national poll, a clear majority of voters — including 83 percent of the Democratic coalition — said the nation’s political and economic system needed major changes or needed to be torn down entirely, and 88 percent said the economic system was generally unfair to most Americans.
Mr. Platner couldn’t be characterized as woke — and not just because of his blue-collar affect and, shall we say, decidedly “unwoke” Reddit posts. In general, much like Mr. Sanders, he didn’t emphasize culture wars and identity politics. Instead, he usually suggested that the culture wars were being used by Republicans to try to distract from economic issues.
And while Mr. Platner’s identity may not be the full story, it probably was a factor in its own right. It’s hard to show whether being a white male with a deep voice made him appear more moderate, but there’s reason to think so. White men may be likelier to be perceived as moderates, research shows, and candidates with deep voices tend to do well in general — and perhaps especially with relatively conservative voters.
Of course, Mr. Platner was still unequivocally a progressive candidate. He didn’t move to the center on any major issue. Most important, he championed the progressive cause on two litmus-test issues for progressives nowadays: support for Medicare for all and criticism of Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
A decade ago, these stances would have put Mr. Platner far to the left of the typical Democrat. Today, they’re basically the mainstream view in the party. In the last Times/Siena national poll, health care was one of the few issues where Democrats were likelier to say they wanted the party to move to the left than move to the center. There’s a case that Mr. Platner’s basic position isn’t even all that different from what mainstream liberals have promoted in recent years. Senator Chris Murphy, for instance, has argued for Democrats to embrace a working-class populism since the 2024 election.
What’s telling, though, is that very few mainstream liberals like Mr. Murphy or Gavin Newsom have actually succeeded at seizing this potential middle ground — populist and anti-corporate but not democratic socialist or focused on identity politics — even when they’ve identified it as an opportunity.
The reason varies, but one overarching issue is that mainstream liberals struggle to run as populists or anti-system candidates. Mr. Trump’s brand of populism made it much harder for them: He co-opted the traditional Democratic message on trade, promised not to cut entitlement programs, and put Democrats in the position of defending the establishment. Against the backdrop of Mr. Trump, most mainstream liberals just aren’t populist.
Perhaps the only recent example of a successful, mainstream liberal populist is Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, whose re-election campaign has been focused on corruption and money in politics. He’s been one of the few mainstream liberals to earn acclaim from across his party in midterm campaigns this year. If Mr. Platner was an example of a progressive who was reaching toward this emerging Democratic middle ground, Mr. Ossoff is an example of a moderate trying to seize the same basic position.
There are, of course, significant differences between Mr. Ossoff’s claim to the party’s center and the Platner model. One flashpoint is that Mr. Ossoff doesn’t support Medicare for all, which remains a crucial dividing line between liberals and progressives. Still, the Platner-Ossoff divide is a lot smaller than the growing gulf between centrists who want the party to moderate on both cultural and economic issues and democratic socialists.
That divide seems potentially unreconcilable — it might even risk a third-party candidate in the years ahead. The gap between a Mr. Ossoff and a Platner-style populist, on the other hand, is manageable. It’s not the only way forward for Democrats heading into the next presidential election, but it’s a plausible one.
