I’ve got an unexpected afternoon off, so I decided to finally write the definitive Platner take (joke). I have been thinking about him for a while, though, because I think he’s a symptom of a long-time issue in the party.
First, let’s talk money, and boy do Democrats both raise a lot of it and whine about not having enough. I’ll let Oliver Willis have a couple of words on that subject:
the biggest lie the democrats tell, that their supporters believe, is that they are being wildly outspent by the right. it just isnt true. there are billions being spent on the left (to be fair its on the liberal/democratic side not "leftist") but its being thoroughly wasted on garbage.
— Oliver Willis (@owillis.bsky.social) 2026-03-29T14:51:51.774Z
You can click on the top Bluesky embed to see his whole thread, but, essentially, Oliver goes on to point out that Democratic consultants make money on ads, so campaigns waste money on ads and don’t develop a media infrastructure. Nothing new if you have been reading this blog, but Harris wildly outspending Trump and losing should tell us something.
Anyway, you do need money to win, and certainly any Democrat with a desire to win is acutely aware of that fact. So when there’s a “hot race” in the offing, such as the Maine 2026 Senate race, or the 2016 Democratic Presidential primary, the establishment Democratic plan is to “freeze up” the money with an inevitability candidate. By “freeze up”, what I mean is that there’s a set of donors, bundlers and PACS who are going to point their money gun at one candidate in the race. If a candidate can get donations from those big donors before anyone else, this discourages other competent candidates from entering the race. Raising money sucks, and it sucks worse if you can’t get the low-hanging fruit (the donors who will always give to a particular race).
I believe, and I don’t think this is super controversial, that the reason we didn’t have a robust 2016 primary is because Hillary Clinton and her campaign locked up the donors and ran an inevitability campaign. This is why her only serious challenger was a guy you might have heard of, Bernard Sanders. This fellow was able to challenge Mrs. Clinton because he doesn’t participate in the mainstream Democratic fundraising process. He has his own set of enthusiastic supporters and small-dollar donors. So Bernie, as the kids call him, was able to give Mrs. Clinton a run for her (huge piles of) money, just because he was the alternative. And I’m here to tell you that it worked, because I voted for Sen. Sanders in the New York primary as a protest vote because I hate it when the fix is in. The reason I was protesting with my vote was because I thought that Clinton showed that she’s a bad politician because she ran a shit campaign against Obama in 2008, her shit campaign was run by shitheads like Mark Penn, who couldn’t be bothered to interrupt the counting of the avalanche of money they were making to understand the rules of the Democratic Presidential Primary, so Obama beat their asses.
Anyway, enough history. If we apply the lesson of 2016, mutatis mutandis, to the 2026 Maine Senate primary, we have one Charles Schumer, street name “Chuck”, courting Gov. Janet Mills. Now, Gov. Mills is great, I have nothing against her, and she’s smart, but she’s also 78. She knows how politics works, so I assume that one of the things that she got from Chuck as part of the deal for her to run for Senate was a promise of a shit-ton of money from the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee as well as all of the donors that Chuck knows. I say this with respect to Gov Mills, because why the hell should she go through the misery of fundraising? Plus my guess is she fucking hates Susan Collins. Some people think that “all you need is love”, but the reality of life is that hate will get you a long way.
So, we have Gov Mills with the Schumer imprimatur and buckets and buckets of money. I don’t know Maine politics very well, but I’ll wager that all of the other Democrats that have held offices in Maine immediately decided to look for something else to do, because why the fuck would you want to go through the misery of fundraising when Mills already has a bunch of donors locked up? This means that Graham Platner, a guy with a nazi tattoo and some ugly Reddit posts, occupies the role Bernie Sanders did in 2016. He’s the one who can raise the money that Mills can’t.
Now we come to the next part of our little story, the centrists getting worried that the outsider could win. There’s been a spate of anti-Platner posts on BlueSky and other places in the last few days. That’s probably because the polls are showing that either Mills or Platner could beat Collins, and Platner generally outperforms Mills. This is a scary fact for our centrist betters. I’ll look at one centrist take, which is written by Lakshya Jain and Armin Thomas at The Argument, a substack that includes Matt Yglesias as one author. Jain is one of the pollsters who developed the WAR (Wins Above Replacement) statistic, which purports to tell us that certain candidates are good because they won campaigns that others would not in tough districts. The take:
In throwing their weight behind Mills, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and the geriatric Democratic establishment are ignoring their base’s dissatisfaction.
Mills, with her long political career, signals continuity rather than change. Given the party’s abysmal favorables with their own voters, support for Platner is best understood as an act of rebellion, an expression of the belief that it’s time to do something different.
While Platner is certainly…different, his primary advantage over Mills may disappear during a general election.
Platner is virtually guaranteed to face tens of millions of dollars of attack ads that remind voters constantly of his Nazi tattoo and his social media comments on rape. These are beginning to feature heavily in primary discourse, and they will almost certainly impact his ability to cut into Collins’ prior support with independents and moderates.
Platner’s self-presentation as the voice of the working class is a big part of his electability argument.
But the data doesn’t back this up.
Despite his reputation as a working-class whisperer, Platner is actually doing far better with upscale Democratic whites than with non-college Democrats. Each primary poll with regional breakdowns has shown a common theme: Mills does far better among the blue-collar Democrats in the rural north of the state, while Platner cleans up with wealthy, coastal liberals who skew college-educated.
In other words, the data suggests Platner is not the candidate of the working class, but rather of upwardly mobile Mainers who have an idealized working-class aesthetic.
Any of you who are still reading this piece should know a few things about what Jain linked to as “Each Primary Poll”. It was one poll. The sample size for Democrats was 280, so whatever conclusions she draws about the split between the Portland area and the rural areas needs to be taken with a grain of salt, since the sample size is tiny. That poll showed Platner beating Collins 48/42. It also shows Collins beating Mills 45/43, so they’re tied within the margin of error. Platner is also beating Mills in every poll that Jain cites in her piece, sometimes by massive margins. (Primaries are hard to poll. I wouldn’t take too much home from them, but I have yet to see a poll with Mills winning.)
So, I would argue, that based on Jain’s own premise, the “gamble” in Maine is Janet Mills, at least based on the poll that Jain is citing.
Moving on to the Nazi tattoos, Steve M had a good piece on that a while back, where he tried to explain why the nazi/reddit stuff wasn’t hitting harder:
I think many of the people who support Platner aren't deeply political. Platner clearly wasn't deeply political until recently, and it's unclear how deep-rooted the ideas he now expresses are. Platner now seems to be a compelling, passionate advocate of progressive ideas. But he doesn't seem to have thought deeply about politics for most of his life, which led him to indulge some nasty prejudices, and left him unable to recognize the harm that offensive speech can do to real people.
Which makes him similar to a lot of normal people.
I think many people are open to liberal or progressive ideas and also not particularly vigilant about bigotry. They're not free of prejudice -- who is? -- and they want some leeway on their own speech and behavior. They've been encouraged to think that "political correctness" is a greater scourge than bigotry by both conservatives and anti-progressive moderates. They associate speech monitoring with authority, at a time when they hold authorities in extremely low esteem.
But their views are a muddle. […]
Jain’s unargued-for assumption in her piece is that Susan Collins will make hay on Platner with attacks on his Nazi tattoos. But, as Steve M points out, “normies” aka general election voters, might just be willing to give Platner some grace, especially because most of us know someone who served in the Iraq/Afghanistan wars and struggled afterwards. Also, Collins is going to have a hard time going hammer and tongs on Platner’s tattoos, first because he had an ugly coverup done on them, and second because it brings Platner’s service in the military to the fore. If Platner has any political skills, and apparently he does, there’s a hell of a redemption narrative that he can spin here. “My band of brothers got tattoos that we thought looked bad ass, but we were just dumb kids and didn’t know what they really meant. And, yeah, I shit-talked on Reddit, but I’ve learned a lot since then, blah blah blah.” You don’t have to be an incredibly sophisticated candidate to talk yourself out of the spot that Platner’s in. Plus, Collins can’t go too hard on Nazis, since they’re part of her base. (I’m not kidding about that.)
To be clear, the tattoos bother me, as does the Reddit stuff, because it shows someone who wobbles around in their beliefs. He might possibly be a Fetterman, but I’ll point out that Platner didn’t go to Harvard and he didn’t have rich parents. Still, it’s a legit issue. There’s a good chance he might disappoint. And, honestly, I don’t have a gut feeling about him, which I usually do about most politicians.
So, let’s return to the title of this post: I blame Chuck Schumer for where we are in Maine right now because he decided to try to make Mills an inevitability candidate. He didn’t read the room. Jain, quoted above, is spot-on about the anger in the Democratic base against Schumer and his ilk. Judging from the polls, we’re going to get Platner, and we’re going to white-knuckle it in the general, hoping that nothing horrible about him comes out.
If you’ve read this far, the inspiration for the title of the post is one of my wife’s favorite songs, by the New Zealand country (yes) artist, Mel Parsons.
