Are Democrats blowing it?
Platner and the DSA are weighing down the party
I’ve said for quite a while that 2026 is an election year that is the Democrats’ election to lose. Lately, they seem quite capable of doing exactly that.
The most recent crisis involves the totally predictable implosion of Graham Platner’s Senate campaign in Maine. As I wrote several weeks ago, the red flags were there, including but not limited to an SS tattoo.
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On Monday, the story broke that Platner was being accused of sexual assault by a former girlfriend. Let’s not sugarcoat it. If the allegations are true, Platner is a rapist. And given his history of sexual misconduct, the allegations are credible.
The good news for Democrats is two-fold. First, party officials are doing what they should have done months ago and calling on him to step down. With that move, the party can maintain some shred of moral integrity, unlike Republicans who seem to accept pretty much anything from their nominees these days.
The second piece of good news is that the Maine Democratic Party has a little time. If Platner withdraws by July 13, he can be replaced on the ballot. Democrats have until July 27 to replace him with another nominee, picked by a nominating committee. Even after that deadline, if Platner withdraws by August 25, he must be removed from the ballot. In that case, Democrats could run a write-in candidate.
The bad news is that Platner has to withdraw. Candidates often are the last to understand that their campaign is toast. (See Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign as exhibit A.) And someone as apparently unstable as Platner might even continue to run out of spite, taking down the Maine Democrats hopes to unseat Susan Collins as revenge for abandoning him.
Time will tell, but at this point, Platner should definitely be abandoned.
In the final analysis, Platner’s latest scandal may prove to be a boon to Democrats. Getting Platner out while there is still time to replace him could salvage Democratic chances in Maine as well as remove a liability to Democrats elsewhere.
But wait, there’s more!
At least 11 Democratic candidates for various offices are self-described socialists. Candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have won congressional primaries in Colorado and New York, where the seats are reliably blue, and are competing in Michigan and Wisconsin, where they are not.
About 39 percent of voters have a positive view of socialism, so socialist candidates start at a general election disadvantage. Only about 21 percent of Americans view the DSA favorably. Worse, most voters who approve of socialism are young, the cohort least likely to vote.
Nominating socialists also makes Democratic candidates nationwide vulnerable to Republican attacks that they are socialist and/or communist (similar to tying the party to a Nazi-tattooed sex predator). The two are not the same, but few understand the distinction, and Republicans are happy to paint with a broad brush.
In fact, the Republican tactic of dumbing down socialism may have contributed to its newfound popularity. For decades now, Republicans have decried everything they don’t like as socialism.
Universal healthcare? Socialized medicine!
Free college? Socialized education!
Higher taxes on the wealthy? Socialized redistribution of income!
As someone pointed out a while back, by painting popular ideas as socialist, Republicans have made socialism sound pretty good to a lot of people.
And that was before Republicans started adopting socialist ideas. Trump has ramped up federal equity stakes in private businesses under the guise of national security, often with a “golden share” or executive, if not controlling, interest. By definition, socialism is “governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.”
I guess if you can’t beat them, join them. File it under “How Republicans learned to stop worrying and love government seizing the means of production as long as it’s Trump.”
Democratic primary voters are not playing it safe, when that’s what they really should be doing if they want to ensure that Trump is blocked from implementing his authoritarian agenda. Especially when it comes to swing states, the safe picks are moderates who have been vetted in other campaigns. Now is not the time to gamble on radicals or newcomers with no electoral experience.
Going further, I’d like to see both parties take a more moderate stance on the issues and a more strident position on morality and decency. I want to see Trump and MAGA defeated, but I don’t want socialist radicals or trumpy Democrats to take their place. Democrats shouldn’t adopt Trump’s depravity any more than they should take up his socialist and authoritarian policies.
Speaking for independents, we want moderation and sanity. We want candidates who are decent people, candidates who we don’t have to dread seeing in the news every day. That shouldn’t be difficult, but partisan voters are making it so.
The crowning irony of all this is that Democrats are likely to win, even with bad candidates (but not Platner). Trump is just that unpopular. In the end, the Republican Trump mania may be what ushers in a socialist boom in the United States.
FOURTH POLL We ran a quick Independence Day poll on the platform formerly known as Twitter. Eighty-seven percent of respondents prefer to watch firework displays rather than shooting their own.
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