Coalition of the Sane: What Graham Platner Represents Is More Symbolic to the Left Then What He's Actually Running For

 

First I would like to address this part of the article to my conservative friends who are appalled by what happened in Maine Tuesday.

As a reminder Graham Platner was basically running unopposed. Technically there were two other candidates on the ballot but ever since Janet Mills dropped out a month prior to primary day Platner was running for what used to be called a 'beauty contest' election. It was importantly symbolically but it meant nothing according to his appeal.  Had my party not shown some spine and kept fighting it out it would have meant something. No one ever accused the Democrats of being smart.

Now to the progressives who are crowing about how Platner received the 'most votes of any Democrat running in Maine'. First, again he was running basically unopposed in a primary. Platner received 153,000 votes out of 211,597 votes cast. By contrast 213,727 people voted in the Maine Democratic Gubernatorial primary. So 56,500 Democrats cast their vote for someone other then Platner but voted for governor and roughly 1800 votes left their ballot blank in the Senate primary altogether. That's not the best start to a campaign run.

And to be clear Susan Collins got 417,645 votes in 2020. Sara Gideon, who ran against her as the Democratic nominee managed to get 116,294 votes in the Democratic primary that year which was roughly 71 percent of all those cast. Platner got 72.3 percent of all votes cast. Gideon, I should mention was running in a contested primary, against Justice Democrat Betsy Sweet, who got 23 percent of the vote.

So to be clear Platner only got a slightly higher percentage in an uncontested Democratic primary then Gideon did in a contested one.  Gideon, I should be clear, got 347,223 votes in the general election, which means she lost by 8.5 percent to Collins. That's called a blowout in most states. And as I'll keep reminding people all of the polls pretty much all showed Gideon beating Collins by as much as four to 12 percent throughout the campaign before finally saying she'd win by anywhere from four to eight percent. Gideon was endorsed by Sanders, Warren and Chris Murphy along with the entire Democratic establishment and Janet Mills.

I'm reminding my left wing readers far more than my right wing readers, who understand both basic arithmetic and electoral history in a way you've basically chosen to ignore, that getting all the votes in the Democratic primary, particularly in a state that hasn't election a Democrat to the Senate in forty years, that you can get all the votes in the primary and it will count for squat if you can't win the general. Sure Annie Andrews beat her Democratic challenger two to one in South Carolina. She still got fewer votes then Lindsey Graham did in the Republican primary.  Jaime Harrison did far better six years ago in the Democratic primary. Graham beat him by ten points.

And aside from the delivery and the fact that Platner has far more scandals to his credit there is no difference when it comes to basic policy between him or Sara Gideon. Platner believes in Medicare for all, housing affordability and ending US Involvement in pointless wars and brands himself as anti-establishment and anti-corporate. Sara Gideon was in favor of the affordable care act, planned parenthood, police reform, the Paris Accord and believes in expanding abortion access. There's no evidence that Maine voters have gone more to the left in 2026 considering that both in 2020 and 2024 Trump was able to carry Maine's 2^nd district.

So the question one has to ask the Democratic Party and progressives overall is what reason could anyone rationally believe that Platner could succeed six years after Gideon failed? The reason is familiar to anyone who knows progressives: they feel certain the voters want him. When it comes to believing without empirical evidence or electoral results the certainty the modern progressive has that Americans want progressive candidates puts the evangelical's belief in a higher power to shame. And its that fact I will turn to as I address my normal readers of this column.

 

I've written in my previous articles that at the end of the day, for all their education the average progressive has no real understanding of things.  Their basic understand of governing is nothing more than the liberal dogma of 'money solves everything', they have no ability to comprehend that what works in a theoretical setting can't work in real life, they cherry pick historical facts to fit their moral narrative. And when it comes to what the average American voter wants from politics they really have moved one inch from their thinking of George McGovern in 1972 except to go further to the left.

McGovern's campaign style, in truth, is no different from Sanders in either of his Presidential campaigns or the Squad when they stump or really that much different from Platner. And it's worth remembering how Theodore White described him on the campaign trail:

On the college campuses, within the circle of his faithful, he might be cheered as the voice of the future; in the tormented cities of America, however, after a decade of similar ringing high-minded proposals, he sounded like the voice of the past – more of the same, and frightening.

Given the electoral history of Sanders and all the left-wing politicians that have followed in his wake it's difficult to argue that there is any difference. The major one is now the circle of the faithful can be expanded within the echo chambers of social media to an entire nation of like-minded people who might cheer the proposals of the candidate as the voice of the future but are nowhere near the state that candidate is from.

So in this world we have a virtual crowd listening to the speeches of Annie Andrews or Jamie Davis or Graham Platner and their voices resonates with them. And because the algorithms of social media allow you to align with like-minded people in an instant one can assume that America is in favor of these candidates.

But the virtual progressive rarely lives in South Carolina or Louisiana and Maine and they are always smaller in number in the electorate in these states as they might appear in a protest movement or a rally.  And what may appeal to Democrats on a national level, as I've argued in articles on Texas, rarely, if ever, applies to the masses in a deep red or even purple state.

This pattern has been shown to bear in countless elections for Justice Democrats or far left candidates at a state level across the country and to this point in the post-Trump America, the average voter has rejected them nationwide. Within the virtual circle of the faithful, candidates like Andrews and Platner and Jasmine Crockett, they have been cheered as the voices of the future.  In any other parts of the states where they try to vote they do sound more of the same and often frightening – and that is before cable news and the internet intervenes.

The question "What do you stand for?" has been a drumbeat of the left for more than a decade. On the campaign trail a candidate can stand for all the right things and say them with no consequences. But once they are elected, one has to compromise and move to the center in order to govern. The modern left has rejected this for decades, calling it a betrayal of principles.

Platner has demonstrated, perhaps more than any other Democratic candidate in decades, how little their moral principles really have ever mattered. Scandals that they have called upon as something that should cause a Republican to resign are shrugged off in the case of Platner. The clearest resemblance has to be everything that Trump has said or done before he became President and everything done since. Yet those who have spent years attacking Trump for his horrible behavior are now saying that it should excuse everything Platner has done, that the stakes are too important not to let this matter.

This is yet again another example of the left's funhouse mirror standards. In Trump's case he was running for President. Graham Platner is running to replace Susan Collins in the U.S. Senate in Maine. Platner's personal baggage is as bad as Ken Paxton who just a few weeks ago the media was arguing his presence in the Senate would be a degradation of Congress overall.  The only difference is Paxton is a Republican and Platner is a Democrat.  There have been far too many examples of the left excusing the horrific behavior of conservatives but been more than willing to excuse the same behavior of progressives. Platner is just by far the most blatant argument that all of these arguments for principles and moral justice and everything the Republicans were destroying by their polices were just a smokescreen for their own tribalism.

But again the argument doesn't hold water. What do the virtual faithful truly think Platner, who even if he wins, will be just one voice among the Democrats and one voice among the hundred Senators be able to do on his own? The often conspiratorial arguments in certain echo chambers willing to excuse Platner's horrible behavior and the constant scandals argue that: They must be really afraid of him.

 Afraid of what? Short of being able to turn water into wine, Platner is just going to be another Senator if he wins. As Napoleon famously said: "Without the revolution, I am nothing." And for all his fiery rhetoric, Platner is just going to be the junior Senator in Maine with one vote. His vote will have the same power that Ron Johnson or John Fetterman will have. Whatever legislation he introduces will have to go through the same process any other bills do and be subject to the same ossification. He has little chance of being placed on any committees of note for a significant period and whatever speeches he says on TV will have the same power with the base than any other Democrat or Republican does.

It's one thing to argue the liberal establishment is trying to destroy Trump, he's a once and future President. But the media establishment is putting this much effort to keep Susan Collins in the Senate?  The same people like her who did six years ago and the same people hate her as well. And even if they do, the only people who this matters to are the voters in Maine. The media has made it clear of its feelings of Ted Cruz and Rick Scott and Mitch McConnell for years and decades. It's had no effect on what the voters of their respective states have thought of them, if the fact they kept winning reelection is any indication. But the idea that it would suddenly have an effect among Republicans in Maine? That's so batshit I think even Joe Rogan would never buy it.

The other reason I'm convinced Platner serves as a metaphor for the progressive's modern flaws came from an interview I saw on News Nation. This network is a mostly centrist one and it involved one of Biden's campaign aides and the campaign manager of AOC..

Biden's campaign aide argued very simply that many people would find Platner's Nazi tattoo troubling and asked how we're supposed to deal with it. AOC's campaign manager immediately pivoted to the argument that what was more important was the persecution of Muslims and was about to talk about what was happening in Gaza.

Biden's aide refused to be deterred and went back to the Nazi tattoo. AOC's campaign manager kept going back to Platner's support for Gaza being more important. The moderator kept pushing the point of Biden's campaign.

Finally Biden's aide said that this might have the effect of pushing voters away. AOC's campaign aide didn't hesitate. "Well then go ahead and join the Republicans. I'm sure they'll be happy to have you."

There's a lot to unpack from how AOC's manager's defense of Platner but I think there are two obvious facts.

The first is that the Justice Democrats have made it very clear that even though Gaza was proven to be unimportant to the electorate in 2024, that America is clearly dealing with more important issues in 2026, most notably inflation and affordability, AOC still believe that the Democratic Party should be putting everything in Gaza front and center. That this turned out to be a losing issue for multiple Justice Democrats in the last election cycle is of no consequence to them. More importantly there's the idea that somehow Graham Platner, whose running for the Senate in Maine, can do more to solve the problem in America then whatever happens in the Israeli election in a few months' time – which again involves some of the only people who can properly resolve it.

The second is how one of the campaign mangers for AOC, a woman who is short-listed among those who will run for President down the road, has basically made it very clear that the Democratic establishments deal with the devil with the far left is a loser. The biggest problem the Democrats have had has been winning over moderates and working class voters who find the behavior of left-wing politicians like AOC so extreme that they vote Republican. And here is the campaign manager of a prominent Democrat saying to another Democrat that if you don't like our policies, vote Republican.

The left has never had any political sense when it comes to getting the mood of the electorate. Now they are saying directly: if you have a problem with our standard bearers, vote for Republicans.  That people have been doing this for years to the point that the Democrats are in this position is not something that they consider a problem.

The most recent autopsy of the 2024 election argued that "Democrats seem more interesting in winning the argument then the election." One of AOC's representatives basically just said it out loud.  Which makes me think that Platner winning the election in Maine means less to them then the fact that he says and does all the right things.  That by doing so he might never be in position to put campaign rhetoric into policy is irrelevant: the left has always made it clear they'd rather lose with an ideologically pure candidate in a landslide then win narrowly with a more moderate candidate and get a chance to make things better for the people. That the cost has been Democrats losing races they might have been able to win over the years doesn't matter; that it means things will get worse for people by Republican policies is insignificant.

It's always difficult, giving the way the media and both parties tend to argue that every election is 'the most important in our lifetime' and every result is 'groundbreaking' to keep one's perspective. While what is going on involving Platner and Collins important only to people in both parties, the media-industrial complex and the endless chatter on social media within these circles. Beyond this the people it will matter the most to are the voters in the state of Maine who are deciding who will serve them in the Senate for the next six years.  There will be a lot of money spent and a lot of attention paid to it but that's all this is about.

For the Democrats it is only as important as regaining the majority but it would be less groundbreaking then victories for Peltola in Alaska, Talarico in Texas or Turek in Iowa. The ones who feel the strongest about Platner and what he represents almost certainly don't live anywhere near the state of Maine, who've made it clear in multiple elections what they think of progressives in their state as recently as six years ago.  And any endorphin the virtual progressive mob will get about what Platner represents if he wins will end the moment he is sworn in and doesn't immediately introduce a resolution arguing that the Senate and Congress should be permanently dissolved, followed by the entire chamber agreeing to it with unanimous consent. Anything else will only disappoint the left given all the attention they've focused on what he represents to not the state of Maine or the Democratic Party or even the progressive cause, but America itself.

That assumes, of course, those who are the loudest voices on the left even want Platner to win which to me is debatable. As AOC's own communication head finally said the left prefers martyrdom and losing in a noble cause rather then winning and being forced to compromise and govern.  Hell, for all we know the loudest voices arguing for Platner may well be sending donations to Collins's campaign as we speak. They've always preferred having an elected monster that they can vilify rather than a hero who can only disappoint them.  They are more interested in winning arguments then elections because the former feels better immediately then the democratic process. My conservative readers should remember that because the progressives never will.