Maine Primary Open Thread

I’ve not spoken about the Platner issue for two reasons. First, if you don’t know about Maine, you are talking out of your ass. I know a little bit about Maine politics, largely because I very much recognize dynamics of the rural Northwest in the late 20th century, but otherwise, I can’t speak with much authority. Seriously, if you don’t start your analysis of Platner by centering issues in Maine, you probably should shut up.

Second, I choose to support whoever Maine voters support. Period. I don’t know why other candidates didn’t run. It just doesn’t matter anyway since this is the candidate. We can all wish for someone else, but unless we live in Maine, we can’t even speak to the contours of the issue. So any Mainers want to talk here, please feel free, I would like to learn.

Third, what I really, really, really do not give a flying fuck about is that Platner is not actually from the working class. As the resident labor scholar here and someone who actually grew up in the working class, I promise you, the only people who care about this kind of thing are people from middle class and up backgrounds. Authenticity is just as stupid when applied to politicians as it is to food. The entire history of the American left is filled–stacked–with rich people who decided to play as working class.

Mostly, I think we need to stop nationalizing every election. It’s not about you. It’s not about the Democratic Party. It’s about who the voters of Maine want. If they want Platner, then it’s my job to support that. If they want Mills, it’s the same. On Bluesky, a ridiculous site full of ridiculous people, there’s some kind of write-in candidate thing people are promoting, so sure, if they want Rando Democrat too, fine. But we are going to have flawed candidates who don’t meet your values. It is simply going to happen. They are politicians and by definition, almost all awful humans. Ted Kennedy killed a woman in a drunk driving accident. Hugo Black was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. I could go on and on and on and on here up and down the line about the horrible behavior of politicians across the political spectrum (which is in part the point of the grave and obituary series). Do I wish there were other options? Sure. They aren’t. So there we are. It’s up to the people of Maine.

And there are higher principles at play here. For that, here’s Claire Potter:

The result was astonishing: Joe Biden won the state of Maine by nine points, and Collins won her race by almost nine points. In other words, Gideon ran 18 points behind a winning presidential candidate in her own party. It was ticket splitting on an epic scale—and something that was showing up in the phone banking. Maine Democrats (when you phone bank, you always call voters from the party you are working for) would unhesitatingly say they were voting for Biden, but when I asked about Gideon there would be a silence. Then, I would hear some version of: “Susan Collins is from Maine—and Sara Gideon isn’t.”

Which was true. Gideon was born and raised in Rhode Island, had only lived in Maine for 16 years, and was de facto unable, in the eyes of too many Maine voters, to represent their state’s true interests. It was more important to them that Susan Collins (who is, I have heard, also terrific at constituent services) was a lifetime citizen of Maine than it was that she was a Republican, or that she had voted to confirm an anti-choice Associate Justice of the Supreme Court who had been accused of sexual assault by at least three women.

This should teach you at least two things: Maine Democrats make up their own minds, they think of their state as more like a nation within a nation, and they are more than willing to put the kind of bad behavior that would sink, say, a New York politician, in context.

….

OK, Now you know everything. Everything, that is, except why Fyfeld—a well-paid professional woman who presumably had her own money lots of options, and works for a party that is chronically casually contemptuous of women and riddled with Nazis—stayed with Platner beyond that first scary incident, or after she saw the Nazi tattoo, referred to her vulva as a wound, and learned that he kept an ax in the apartment in case raping the intruders did not deter them sufficiently.

She stayed in that relationship for two years.

We have learned that he was serially unfaithful to his girlfriends, a real shocker, since almost a quarter of married men and a quarter of unmarried men, admit to infidelity, and we have a thrice-married President who hired a sex worker less than four months after his third wife gave birth.

Yet another accuser brings us the breathless information that she told Platner not to come over, but he got really drunk and came over anyway and yelled at her. Is this where we point out that the current Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, has an ex-wife who hid in a closet when he was in drunken rages and gave her friends a “safe word” that she would use if she believed her life was in danger?

If we have lowered the bar on male violence to the Hegseth standard, or the Trump standard (convicted by a jury of sexual assault, and accused by his ex-wife of beating and raping her), or the Representative Corey Mills standard (dating two women while still married, becoming engaged to one of them, and engaging in sketchy international arms deals), Graham Platner should not be sending anyone, in either party, to the fainting couch.

I want to repeat, in case you rushed through that block quote: the Platner campaign “strongly disputes” that Platner attacked Fyfeld physically, and the campaign has not disputed a great many other things which, for some people, seem to fall under the category of being a “bad boyfriend.” Platner points to PTSD, and a massive amount of self-medicating, as the trigger for being a serial cheater, shit poster, and generally incoherent person for many years during and after his military service.

Honestly, this makes sense to me. If it doesn’t make sense to you, you have never known someone who came out of a theater of war broken by the experience and needing to be healed. Not every veteran does, but some do. That doesn’t make them bad, sick, or scary people—a caricature that I thought we had disposed of after the Vietnam war. But it is what military service can produce—that is, if you are not Vice President JD Vance and spent your tour abroad manning a fax machine in the Green Zone.

The storm that has descended on Platner is profoundly cynical, driven by paid Republican operatives who insinuate he is a John Rambo waiting to happen, and journalists unable to resist a juicy story about Democratic Party dysfunction. The Platner crisis is also a perfect example of the Democrats wanting to have their cake and eat it too. They claim to want candidates who are military veterans, regular guys with regular guy experiences, who will win over other regular working-class guys? Well maybe, just maybe, regular guy experiences aren’t very nice, particularly when they involve combat duty in an unwinnable, horrendously violent war fought for the benefit of Halliburton and Erik Prince.

I mean, aside from the well-documented fact that the military has very high rates of domestic violence, what do people exactly think goes on when someone who has dedicated his youth to being professionally violent has to deal with everyday strains and stresses?

But instead of having this conversation, or encouraging Platner to have it, Democrats are playing the frantic short game. Janet Mills is still on the ballot! Maybe she is more popular than she was when she dropped out! Maybe Platner could just resign his candidacy to someone voters do not know and played no role in picking, because that worked so well in the 2020 presidential!

By contrast, Republican operatives are playing the long game. They don’t care whether Platner wins the primary, any more than they care about the Nazi thing, or the violence thing, or the infidelity/misogyny thing. Instead, they are betting that either he will win the primary, and that they can damage him enough that out of state donors who do care about those things will turn away from him; or that Janet Mills will replace him, and they can batter her with endless ads about how she wants your little girl to lose her swimming scholarship to a big, hairy man.

…

That said, it doesn’t matter whether I am, or am not, on board with Graham Platner, whether I am a good or a bad feminist. Why? Because I don’t live or vote in Maine and neither do you. Nor, for that matter, do any of the op-ed columnists for any of the national newspapers I read, live or vote in Maine. No one who votes in Maine cares whether we in the other 49 states think Graham Platner has the “character” to be a Senator.

Nor should they. It’s their election, and if we want Maine on board with winning back the Senate, let’s try respecting that and not derailing the candidate they choose..

Maybe I am a bad feminist for wanting Platner to succeed today, but I don’t think so. I think I am a realistic feminist, one who would like to see transgender people not used as punching bags, women dying in hospital parking lots because they are losing a baby and some idiot hears a heartbeat, poor people getting their SNAP benefits back, medical research restarted, not having new evidence every day that Trump and his cronies are looting the government, or knowing that hard-working immigrants leave for work every day wondering if they will see their children that night.

These are my current feminist goals. All of them mean winning the Senate back: Susan Collins is vulnerable as hell, and the polling suggests that Graham Platner can beat her. If that means supporting a man with a difficult past, one that allegedly includes saying gross things about women and engaging in a peculiarly 21st century form of online marital infidelity?

Yes.

So this is an open thread for LGM commenters, who share a lot of ridiculous characteristics with Bluesky people, whining that a deeply flawed human being (and let’s not paper over it, the dude has issues) is going to be the nominee and not someone who shares their own individual values. Well hell, Bill Clinton had Ricky Ray Rector murdered by the state so he could look tough for the American public. Let’s not pretend we don’t look away from politician scum all the time. What’s important–and this is the only thing that is important–is stripping the Senate from the Republican Party.

But what I don’t want to hear is the “Platner will do this and that and he will be Fetterman and he will betray us this way and that way.” I don’t know that and you don’t know it either. What we do know is that Maine voters had no interest in Janet Mills for a lot of reasons, including but not exclusively because she’s old. It’s the choice of Mainers and Mainers will have their say, not you. Me, I just want to grind Susan Collins into the dirt in November.

I am sure I will be very annoyed if I read this thread tonight. So have at it!