Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for Senate — whose campaign received record vote totals in the June 9 primary — has suspended his campaign following a Politico article featuring “credible accusations” of sexual assault against him.
The Usual Caveats Apply
As always, I’m covering this in the hopes of providing a one-stop window into a race that has national (and thus international) implications and what it tells us about the American electorate and the forces attempting to sway it.
This is not an endorsement of any candidate, regardless of my (obvious) personal sympathies, or even of the American electoral system, which is impossibly corrupt and has led to the bought-and-paid-for US Congress being functionally impotent.
Americans won’t vote our way out of the polycrisis, so don’t get your hopes up.
The Dangers of Parasocial Relationships With Politicians
The Platner story perfectly illustrates many of the problems with representative democracy in the 21st century: cults of personality, trial by social media, media manipulation by monied players (both for and against Platner).
Let’s start with “stan culture” — a problem I believe is inherent in modern American politics.
The Discourse Blog podcast reps the anti-Platner from the left perspective perfectly (lightly edited machine transcript) with warnings against “stanning” but as far as I can see no suggested solutions:
Jack Mirkinson: This shows you what happens when you decide to become part of a politician’s stan army rather than treating them like someone who’s asking for very significant powerover your life and and acting accordingly.
A lot of people got themselves into a big hole with Graham Platner where they had spent so much time lauding him as the best thing since sliced bread; where they were reveling in the fact that the party establishment — whichas we all know is very rightfully hated by everybody — was unable to defeat him.
When you do that like too uncritically things can calcify in very problematic and crazy ways.
Aleks Chan: Graham Platner looks and behaves (how what) you think a Republican would and then as part of that is he is a traditionally masculine white guy who espouses democratic and progressive politics and so when you when you don’t have manyof those; you have sort of clean-cut Mckenzie types you find people like (Ken Klippenstein) and his ilk salivating at the opportunity to be like ‘look traditional masculinity can be progressive.’
That’s also part of ‘well we’re done with like being woke, we know where that got us, nobody wants that anymore. If you are (opposing) someone like Graham Platner then you are trying to sort of resurrect the ‘hashtag resistance’ ‘vote blue no matter who’ pussy hat blah blah blah.
They also raise the valid concerns about Platner’s history as a combat military veteran in America’s colonial GWOT and later as a mercenary for Blackwater.
Admittedly these are (likely valid) concerns I am personally guilty of overlooking in my coverage of Platner.
Yasmin Nair raised many of these concerns at Current Affairs in October 2025 when his nazi Totenkopf tattoo was first revealed:
Platner seems less a homophobe and more of an asshole who can’t keep his stories straight. He has tried to brush off his homophobic and other problematic posts by claiming they were from some distant past when he was just a wee and silly lad, but many of these were in fact from 2021: when he was 37. Four years ago.
The posts don’t confirm that he is a raging homophobe, but they do indicate that he is an immature, juvenile straight man—in other words, a very typical straight man, the kind who never grow up and away from their high school bullying days when they called every kid they didn’t like a faggot. And they don’t grow up because they never have to.
Platner is beloved amongst a certain lefty crowd, led by the likes of Sanders. Given the state of the world, literally, literally anything could happen between now and June 2026, when he may be up against Collins, so who knows.
Have to give credit for Nair for pointing this out at the time, although she presented no political alternative to Janet Mills.
There’s another important aspect about why this scandal is bringing Platner down and the specter of whatever war crimes he may have been involved with in West Asia did not: racist Americans don’t care about deaths of brown people “over there”, to wit:
The Platner stuff makes me want to talk about this picture again and how the American left does not treat violence against people in the middle east as “real” violence. Not really. This picture should be disqualifying. Joe Biden had been sponsoring the genocide for a year. pic.twitter.com/Oq3iyxopVZ
— Anthony Doyle🍉 (@Anthonysmdoyle) July 7, 2026
I’d also like to highlight the once-bitten-twice-shy words of Bhavik Lathia on The Left Hook with Wajahat Ali when asked “Why did you recommened Graham Platner and tell me he was a good candidate who was going to win?”:
I met Graham last September or October. We were both speakers at a conference put on to do an audit and an autopsy of what happened in 2024 and why we lost.
The thing that Graham and I connected on frankly was his experience in the military and how that radicalized himinto pro-peace, anti-war politics.
What he did and saw while he was deployed, the stories he shared with me deeply resonated with me. I believed that he cared about taking on the military industrial complex andI was (Kamala Harris’) battleground mobilization director.
It was a big job. I had staff across the over 80 staff across every single battleground state and state And my firm analysis is two big reasons why we lost the 2024 election is because we failed to put enough distance between our Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign and the Biden record on Gaza and inflation maybe not in that order, maybe inflation was the number one, but Gaza played a significant role.
I grew up in mid-Michigan. I have done tons of work in Michigan, Wisconsin across swing states I was hearing from all of my organizers and staff and contacts on the ground that Gaza and the Biden administration record on Gaza was killing us with voters.
And so after the election, when I saw a candidate like Graham strongly speaking about the genocide in Gaza, and before knowing what I learned yesterday that there is a credible sexual assault allegation against him, and then the way that I saw main voters responding to him…
There was a strong economic populist who was just speaking in clear language. I decided to throw my support you know support behind him and um yeah that’s kind of that’s kind of where I landed. I think we need to continue to seek out outsiders, shake up the system economic populist candidates.
We can’t like let this experience scare us from that. Now we need to be very clear that just like arming a genocide is a red line in our party, that sexual assault — credible allegations of sexual assault are also a red line.
So to all the men, progressive men moderate men, whatever (if you’re) contemplating running, unless you’ve done the work to make amends for and atone for any abuse that you have done in your life, don’t raise your hand to run for office.
This is not the moment for it. We need strong progressivesthat are going to inspire the people.
One of the things I know everyone’s feeling right now is heartbreak. I felt it when I read The Politico piece yesterday. I just felt a deep sense of sadness and grief.
There was this moment with Graham that the narrative was supposed to be redemption: imperfect people can find themselves in this moment, redeem themselves and represent just regular people in the halls of power.
And because I’ll just say it’s Graham’s lack of foresight maybe arrogance… I don’t know now, but there’s a lot of people who are just feeling really disappointed.
The whole video is worth watching if you have the time. Adam Green also explains that there is time for Platner to drop out and for Maine Democrats to hold a statewide caucus and allow voters to select a new nominee in a democratic fashion.
It’s important to remind people who supported Platner that they are not responsible for what he may or may not have done. Responding to his message is not the same as giving a blank check or excusing any personal behavior.
We’ll come back to Ken Klippenstein and others who make a case that Platner represents the overwhelming will of the Maine Democratic party primary electorate, but first I want to remind readers of the money and talent behind Platner. Campaigns like his don’t “just happen.”
The Monied Leftists Who Groomed Graham
I blogged about some of this last fall, citing a key piece from the New Yorker:
It was three days before a video titled “Platner for U.S. Senate” would drop, catapulting this local oyster farmer, harbormaster, and former marine onto the national stage.
The video was produced by Morris Katz, a top political strategist for New York City’s Democratic mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani.…The campaign rollout, which was orchestrated by Platner’s senior adviser, Joe Calvello (John Fetterman’s former director of communications), raised half a million dollars in its first four days; volunteer sign-ups for the campaign averaged three hundred a day. “No one was expecting this,” Calvello told me. The Times, ABC, NBC, and Fox News covered the launch, focussing on Platner as a political novice who represented a new approach for the Party.
The Rupert-Murdoch-owned New York Post had a near slanderous and salacious piece titled Meet the champagne socialist duo who groomed rich kid Graham Platner into a ‘working-class’ candidate — since they were just caught lying about Morris Katz advising Platner to stay in the race, take with lots of salt, nonetheless I’m including factual claims that I presume to be true:
The truth is he was discovered and coached by a pair of Ivy League-educated radical Democratic socialists, replicating a playbook they’ve used in Nebraska and Iowa. …That under-the-radar team are a couple, Yale Law School grad Daniel Moraff and his fiancée, Leanne Fan, an academic with stints at Harvard and the proudly radical University of California-Berkeley.
The pair had originally met while working for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in 2020 and are hardcore members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). They have previously been behind candidates Dan Osborn, running for Senate in Nebraska, and Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.), a member of the Keystone State congressional delegation since 2023 and part of the DSA “Squad,” alongside Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).
The point being, that Platner didn’t organically rise up from the Maine oyster beds, he was recruited and groomed by some of the most effective DSA operatives in the country.
Nothing wrong with that, but let’s not be naive about how this game is played.
Now let’s look into the specific charges that seem to have crippled Platner’s campaign.
The Times’ Opening Salvo
The MSM has been coming at Platner hard since it became clear he would win the nomination.
First the NY Times dropped “Several Women Who Dated Graham Platner Recall ‘Unsettling’ Behavior” on June 4.
The Times detailed their sourcing:
This article is based on interviews with more than two dozen people, including six women who had been romantically involved with Mr. Platner. The Times spoke with friends or acquaintances of several of the women, reviewed contemporaneous text and social media messages and saw some of Ms. Fifield’s diary entries. Mr. Platner declined to be interviewed for this article.
The worst allegations in that story came from Lyndsey Fifield. Long time New York Post readers might remember Fifield from a previous sexual assault accusation kerfluffle:
Inez Stepman and Lindsey Fifield are two millennial women who co-founded the group Ladies for Kavanaugh to show their support for the nominee when they felt that view was being left out of the public discourse. Their day jobs are in conservative politics, Stepman at Independent Women’s Forum and Fifield at the Heritage Foundation. (Their pro-Kavanaugh group was formed on their own time.)
Fifeld and her pro-Kavanaugh friends had stayed quiet during the original hearings while liberal women raged in the streets and on social media. “But in the wake of the baseless, 11th-hour accusations orchestrated to stop Kavanaugh’s confirmation, we couldn’t stay silent anymore,” Fifield said.
Supreme Court denies NFL’s bid to keep former Dolphins coach Brian Flores’ discrimination lawsuit from heading to courtStepman told me, “Our husbands, brothers, fathers and sons deserve fairness, too.”
The Times June 4 story also quoted Jenny Racicot who said “she dated him casually off and on between 2019 and 2021, said the posts deepened her belief that he did not respect women. “When I saw the old comments that he made online,” she said, “I recognized a version of him that I had experiences with.”
While that story did not force Platner out of the race, it had a dramatic effect on his polling.
Before:
pic.twitter.com/KWfBULZj93
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) July 8, 2026
After
pic.twitter.com/ngkCtRCrjJ
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) July 8, 2026
These polling numbers have allowed journalists and pollsters like G. Elliott Morris to proclaim “Graham Platner is a bad dude — and data shows he’s a bad candidate, too.”
But to Morris’ credit, he isn’t trying to push for a centrist to be the new nominee:
(Platner) tapped a genuine populist, anti-establishment current that is currently animating a lot of American politics. Democrats might pick former state Senate President Troy Jackson — a fifth-generation logger with deep working-class roots — and, if he polls well, Democrats flip from underdogs to win the Senate to slight favorites.
But back to the MSM campaign against Platner.
Politico Goes for the Kill Shot
Politico’s Monday piece got quite a bit more from Jenny Racicot — including an accusation of full-on sexual assualt while Platner was allegedly “black out drunk” — than the Times had gotten.
Politico detailed their sourcing:
The woman, a 41-year-old Maine resident named Jenny Racicot, detailed the alleged incident to POLITICO in three interviews over the past two weeks. POLITICO also spoke with a man Racicot dated and confided in the years after the alleged incident, and reviewed documents, including emails between Racicot and her therapist and messages between Racicot and an acquaintance whom she warned against getting involved with Platner years before he ran for office.
Adam Wren, co-author of the Politico piece went on MS Now’s Morning Joe where (per DropSite) “Mika Brzezinski pressed him on what evidence pushed the outlet to publish rape allegations against Graham Platner, asking what made the story more than a “he said, she said” case and what evidence directly tied Platner to the alleged crime.”
Key exchange:
Mika Brzezinski: So my question to you, given the very high standards political has before they write something like this and publish it, what aspects of this story brought it to the level of publishable?
Adam Wren: Yeah, you’re correct here, Mika. There is no police report in this case. We spent a lot of time talking to Jenny asking her for corroborating evidence.
She shared that she had confided into a number of people, including her therapist, in almost real time and we reviewed e-mail exchanges between she and her therapist, referring to what she called the sexual assault and her therapist sort of acknowledging that this had happened to her.
We talked to people who she confided in, in the months after this happened.
We asked her why she didn’t file a police report and she described sort of the insular nature of (the part of Maine) she shares with Graham Platner and she debated sort of how to handle this.
We found ultimately the number of coloborating pieces of evidence. I want to take a look at this to support her story in a way that we could report it.
Brzezinski: What are some of those corroborating pieces of evidence. So you’ve got conversations with her therapist and people who she confided in. Any conversations with Graham Platner at the time of it where she said, because apparently as part of this she said she even confirmed to him that this was not consent. Do you have that?
What do you have that actually connects …Graham Platner to raping this victim?
Wren: She reached out to him the day after via Instagram and essentially told him that she didn’t want to hear from again. She told him that morning as well.
We looked at messages that she had sent to others in the months after this happened through social media.
Brzezinski: But were you able to see those?
Wren: She tried to recover those dms. We did not, we were not able to review those dms, but she described them to us.
We also, long before he was a political candidate we saw, her essentially explain to others that he was in her words ‘consensually careless.’
Brzezinski: Were you able to see the interactions between Graham platner and this alleged victim? Did you actually physically see them? Did she produce them for you?
Wren: She attempted to uncover them, but was unable to.
At one time that would have been considered a very thin reed upon which to overturn the will of 150,000 primary voters — a record breaking total that has not been matched since record-keeping began in 1918.
Platner Paused His Campaign and His Supporters Fled
Platner quickly released a video denying the allegations but also pausing his campaign.
After that it was all over.
Chuck Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand and the DSCC were among the first to announce they would not support Platner.
I’m sure it hurt worse when Bernie Sanders, Zohran Mamdani, Ro Khanna, and Ruben Gallego withdrew their endorsements.
The Sierra Club and veterans groups like Veterans for Responsible Leadership (VFRL) were just the cherry on top.
Of course the real kick in the nads came when VFRL called forAIPAC-owned Congressional Rep. Jared Golden to take Platner’s place.
This Jared Golden: “The House just failed to pass a resolution to end Trump’s war with Iran by one vote. The count was 213-214. Just one Democrat, Jared Golden, voted to let Trump keep waging the war.”
There was also some mysterious influencing going on.
Who’s Influencing This Influencer?
Cheyenne Hunt, he social media influencer who claimed the clout for the fall of California Congressman and Gubernatorial candidate Eric Swalwell was quick to notch her belt:
If you are a Platner staffer and would like to resign in solidarity with survivors but are worried about financial repercussions, send us your resume and we’ll help you find your next gig. We did the same thing for Swalwell staff. This offer does not extend to his highly paid… pic.twitter.com/ZNB2ktTiv1
— Cheyenne Hunt (@CheyenneHuntCA) July 8, 2026
Matt Stoller described Hunt thusly: “This person runs a dark money political group and is offering to pay accusers of Platner. Who are her funders?
That won’t be the end of the reactionary push to undo the will of the Maine Democratic electorate.
The Maine Democratic Party Has Ideas of Its Own
Maine Democratic Party Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson took to the webs with a short form video arguing that Platner should not have any influence over the party’s ultimate nominee:
Update from Maine Democratic Party Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson on the Maine Senate race. pic.twitter.com/Jzj9ofinU8
— Maine Democrats (@MaineDems) July 8, 2026
“Unfortunately Graham Platner’s team has repeatedly reached out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like. We have repeatedly reiterated to GP’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for the US Senate”
The Platner campaign fired back via NBC News:
The Platner campaign has reached out to the party to try and understand what this process would look like. At no point has the campaign tried to ‘put its finger on the scale.’ Over 150,000 Mainers voted for this movement, and over 15,000 Mainers volunteered their time and energy to it. While Graham wouldn’t want to be a part of the process, he would want to make sure the voters and volunteers make this decision — not the political establishment.
Stoller and Klippenstien Still Fighting the Centrists
Matt Stoller did a lot of tweeting and deleting yesterday before boiling down his thoughts into one essay. Some key quotes (although the whole thing is a must read):
…there’s a big difference between ‘normal people in bad relationships who hate each other’ and ‘crime.’
So let’s be adults. This is a political attack.
Top Maine Democratic Party donors in recent years are Reid Hoffman, Haim Saban, and David Ellison. David Ellison! As in the Trump ally who fired Stephen Colbert and is taking over TikTok, CBS News, and CNN. These names should mean something. Saban may be the single most important AIPAC donor in the Democratic Party.
Another big donor to the Maine Democratic Party is the founder of Zynga, Marc Pincus, who said in 2024 that “an attack on Amazon is an attack on America.” It goes beyond big tech and Wall Street. Crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried’s partner Nishad Singh at FTX gave $100k to the Maine Democratic Party in 2022.
The insiders running the party are the people funded through these streams of revenue, they are the ones dealing with the donors and currying favor with them. And while I will not speak out of school, the Maine Democratic establishment simply cannot be trusted and that is well-known.
…the goal of pushing Platner aside is to destroy the agenda on which he was elected, which is about taming oligarchy and reorienting us from endless war. That is why the Maine Democrats aren’t saying ‘let’s respect Platner voters and transition to someone else,’ they are taking a sanctimonious ‘he gets NO say in ANYTHING.’ Those are not the actions of people who want to win a Senate seat, those are the actions of nasty insiders claiming factional power for themselves.
Ken Klippenstein was unrepentant:
To give you a sense of how nasty this is getting, here’s a fairly representative example from legal commentator Ken White, who said of me: “Anyway just waiting to hear what new hilarious insult [Ken Klippenstein] comes up with next to sneer at people who don’t like rape.”
Never having sneered “at people who don’t like rape,” I have no idea what he’s talking about. But I get the maneuver here. He and other commentators are trying to bully anyone who defended Platner against the earlier scandals into issuing self-abasing public apologies, by implying that anyone who doesn’t is pro-rape.
The campaign to get people to self-flagellate over things they never said is working, with virtually every high-profile figure who defended Platner in the past issuing weepy apologies about how sorry they are.
He then includes apologies from Naomi Klein, Adam Carlson, and Michelle Goldberg and added “it’s unclear to me what exactly they’re apologizing for other than not being clairvoyants able to foresee this week’s accusation before it happened.”
He continued:
I stand by my previous defense of Platner. Offensive tattoos and sexting-out-of-wedlock struck me as the most Marine shit ever. I literally know Marines who’ve done both but later grew up and became decent guys. (Hi if you’re reading this!) I still believe in my bones that people like that deserve to have a shot at public office and that our country would be better for it. But the Marines I’m describing were never accused of more serious things like sexual assault.
People were right to give him a chance before; and they’re right to drop him now.
As I wrote, people are done with the fake, plasticy candidates who’ve dominated politics in the past. I’m certain that’s still the case, regardless of how hard the media commentators try to gaslight you into thinking willingness to look past lesser flaws is the same as defending rape, misogyny, and so on.
Giving people a chance means that sometimes they won’t live up to it. No one should apologize for that.
I’m not.
More from Stoller who brings it back to the main point:
If Platner steps down, he will be characterized as a deviant, and that’s just how it’ll be forever. True or not. And everyone will be tarred as supportive of immoral behavior. It doesn’t matter if you are a liberal, centrist, young, old, whatever. People are saying the Bulwark, a centrist outlet started by ex-Republicans who were skeptical of Platner, are tarred by this. Punchbowl is reporting that Senate progressives will never have credibility going forward. The ploy here is obvious.
That is, even though the actual immoral behavior at issue here is the genocide in Gaza, the corruption of DOGE and Musk, and the neoliberal turn in American politics for 40 years that has destroyed our faith in society and each other.
Platner has been consistent about his platform, and there’s no reason to assume that will change. 70% of Maine Democrats picked him as their candidate, and he has the right to represent their views. So he should stay in the race or, if he feels he cannot win, leave on terms that will ensure his platform, and not that of Maine Dem Party oligarch donors, is the one on the ballot in November. The Maine Dem establishment cannot be trusted.
And frankly, this kind of ugly scenario is how power works. They make ordinary people pick among ugly scenarios, and then they make it seem like the obvious path is the one that accords more power and wealth to oligarchs. And if you don’t choose that one, you’re a bad person who deserves approbation and scorn.
I’ve never denied being a bad person who deserves approbation and scorn so there. But let’s get back to the future.
If Not Platner, Then Who?
WGBH has the basics:
Those names include several former Democratic candidates for governor, such as former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows and former Maine CDC director Nirav Shah. One of Platner’s Democratic primary opponents, David Costello, also said he would seek the nomination. Another potential candidate is Jordan Wood, who ran for the Senate seat before switching to the primary contest for Maine’s 2nd Congressional District. Wood finished third in that race after a ranked-choice runoff. Dan Kleban, owner for Maine Beer Co., has also expressed interest. Kleban was briefly a senatorial candidate last year, but dropped out and endorsed Gov. Janet Mills when she entered the race in mid-October.
Jackson, a logger from Allagash and a Sanders-style populist, campaign with Platner and has spent years pushing some of the same ideas: Medicare for All, workers’ rights, higher taxes on billionaires. Jackson filed initial paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to potentially run.
“There’s a movement out there right now of people that want a progressive person, they want some change, they want Medicare for All, they want worker’s rights,” Jackson said in an interview. “They want everything that I care about.”
As for Shah, he was just the subject of a NY Times op-ed called “The Covid Czar People Still Trust” by Dr. Rachael Bedard.
I got cooties just reading this:
Nirav Shah, who narrowly lost the Maine Democratic primary for governor last week, didn’t run his campaign as a populist, a celebrity or a self-funded business owner. Rather, the first-time candidate is something that would seem anathema in contemporary politics: a public health technocrat who became a household name during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Dr. Shah has some of the highest favorability numbers of any public figure in Maine, despite having been a state resident for less than a decade. He entered the race months later than his four opponents, spent less money than most of them and received few significant endorsements.…Dr. Shah got the most first-choice votes of any candidate on the ballot but was beat out in the final ranked-choice tabulation by Hannah Pingree, a former Maine House speaker. His was an impressive and surprising showing.
Less than half of Americans feel their state leadership managed the pandemic well. More than 70 percent believe the pandemic did more to drive the country apart than to bring it together. The rise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Make America Healthy Again movement was largely fueled by Covid backlash. Yet Dr. Shah managed to build durable trust, during a time when others in his field were losing it.…Beginning on March 9, 2020, Dr. Shah, then director of Maine’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, conducted hundreds of televised news conferences. He took questions on a public radio call-in show a few times a month and posted on social media constantly. He became a mini-celebrity, introducing Mainers to his hobbies (cooking) and his dog. A local company named a chocolate bar after him.…Maine did relatively well during the pandemic: Death rates were low and vaccination rates high, largely because state decision makers made good choices, compared with some of their peers. But those decisions came with trade-offs and consequences anyway: There were protests against closures, economic stress, learning loss and preventable deaths from other causes.
The real distinguishing factor of Maine’s response was Dr. Shah’s steady presence in the public eye.
Drop Site had more on Shah:
Former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Nirav Shah said he is preparing to enter Maine’s open U.S. Senate race should Platner withdraw.
Shah said he is consulting with his family, advisers and voters before making a final decision, but called for the Democratic nomination to be decided through an “open and transparent” process, including at least one televised debate and multiple town halls across the state.
He also outlined the platform he would run on, emphasizing Medicare for All, higher taxes on the wealthy, protecting abortion rights, rebuilding the economy for working people, and holding President Donald Trump and Republicans accountable.
He did not mention Palestine, Israel’s genocide in Gaza, or broader foreign policy and anti-war issues, key positions in Platner’s campaign.
Notably, Shah’s 2026 gubernatorial bid was backed by more than $630,000 in TV spending from the AIPAC-affiliated 314 Action Fund, as he declined to sign a pledge rejecting outside Super PAC spending.
So yea, my spidey sense was right.
Establishmentarian former state rep., two time congressional campaign loser and former Emily’s List executive director Emily Cain is also reported to be putting her hat in the ring.
CBS News quoted a number of progressive groups have weighed in:
“To the Democratic establishment: this is not your opening,” Our Revolution Executive Director Joseph Geevarghese wrote Monday evening. The group, which has its roots in Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, specifically warned against picking a “status-quo candidate” like Mills.
Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said in a statement Monday the Maine Democratic Party should nominate a “shake-up-the-system economic fighter who challenges powerful interests.” He added that the decision shouldn’t be left to a “small caucus of party insiders.”
Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California, who was one of Platner’s best-known backers before this week, argued Jackson should get the nomination, calling the former state Senate president “someone who has spent his life standing up for these progressive values.”
The WaPo featured the empire striking back:
“People who got us into this mess — who vouched for this candidate after 3 different scandals and kept telling us there were going to be no more — may want to take a break from Maine strategizing,” Neera Tanden, the head of the Center for American Progress, a more establishment liberal think tank, said in a social media post.
“The Democratic nominee, if there is a new one, has to be someone who is independent minded from Platner, otherwise they will be viewed by voters as a protege,” state Sen. Joe Baldacci, who lost his congressional bid this year, wrote on X. “Any connections to Platner will doom that person’s campaign from the very beginning.”
Life’s ugly and so is politics. Either way, it looks like Susan Collins might be getting re-elected again.
Related Posts:
-1024x683.jpg "Florida Roads Become a Battleground for Illegal Immigration")
-1024x668.jpg "What’s the Deal with Vance’s War on Milton Friedman?")
