Platner Wins; Washington Whines

What the Maine Oysterman’s primary victory means

Graham Platner decisively won the Democratic nomination to run for the U.S. Senate today — which will come as a shock to many in Washington media. They’ve spent the last several weeks treating his candidacy as a doom spiral to be gawked at rather than a campaign to be covered.

The clearest sign of how badly the capital wanted him gone wasn’t any single hit piece. It was the life raft the press kept throwing to Janet Mills. The 78-year-old governor, originally recruited into the Senate race by Chuck Schumer to block a fresh face from emerging, suspended her campaign back in April once the polls made clear Platner would beat her by a humiliating margin.

Mills never formally withdrew, so her name stayed on the ballot — which gave a certain class of pundit an opening. Right up until the polls closed, they kept musing that maybe, just maybe, voters would come to their senses and reject Graham "string of controversies" Platner. You know — the tattoo, the PTSD, the sexting, the threats. His real sin was failing to impress the elite, which in very independent Maine only helps him.

Washington focused on scandal because on the issues, it has nothing to say. "We're just reporting the facts," the media tells itself. But by ignoring Platner's policy views — and what Mainers actually want — it tipped its hand. Its conclusion is that the electorate can't be trusted, which is why the party keeps offering up experience and credentials (Mills, Cuomo, Biden, etc.) to keep voters from getting too uppity.

When Mills dropped out (or whatever she’s calling it), the coverage fixated on a Washington campaign finance story: she’d run out of money. Much easier than admitting she’d run out of voters, as I wrote at the time.

At every turn, voters are being gaslit about Platner. MS NOW’s uber-liberal Chris Hayes pressed him on whether he’d sexted minors — an accusation for which there is zero evidence, but the insinuation lingers anyway. The New York Times was so desperate to align itself with the Party in Washington that it published allegations that it said it “could not independently corroborate” — something I’ve literally never seen them do before.

A remarkable number of D.C. commentators insisted that sheer Maine foolishness was the only explanation for Platner’s support at home. (My favorite: the editor-in-chief of The Argument wrote an entire piece rebutting an imaginary Platner voter who supposedly thinks infidelity is good.)

Last week I wrote that Platner had lost Washington’s vote, and that he’d survive it.

I was right.

But Platner didn’t just survive the controversies. He won the primary. He won not because Maine voters are sub-par or decided the stuff he’s been accused of is good. He won because voters wanted their guy, and they didn’t want a few hundred people in a few square miles of Washington deciding which kinds of people are and aren’t allowed to run for office.

Mainers’ response to all of this is interesting. Just this morning a push poll came out finding that voters’ support for Platner actually increased after being told about the scandals. Washington of course took this as a sign of the decline of morality rather than the obvious reality that people feel the media dogpile is disproportionate and unfair to him.

So get ready. The same press that spent weeks narrating Platner’s moral depravity and inevitable collapse is now going to pivot, at NASCAR-pit-crew speed, to Mamdani-inspired hand-wringing that Platner isn’t ready for Washington.

Here are the genres of coverage to watch for.

1. “Now Comes the Hard Part”

This is the first and most predictable move: concede the primary, then immediately wave it away as the easy part — before the real test against Susan Collins comes in November.

Watch how quickly the people who told you Platner’s primary victory was in peril will turn around and tell you the primary was never the hard part. A 41-year-old oyster farmer and combat veteran with zero prior political experience — no prior office, no donor network, no beltway rolodex — may have defeated a sitting two-term governor and the Chuck Schumer political machine, but, oh my, there’s Susan Voldemort, and she’s breathing fire.

2. “Platner Won By Less Than Expected”

The goalposts are already being unloaded from the truck so that the media can move them. The second argument will be that Platner won by less than was expected, and that he therefore has a weak mandate, and is a wounded nominee limping out of his own primary who knows nothing about pain and injury when it comes to political PTSD.

Maine is one of the hardest states in the country to poll. It’s a small, independent-minded, heavily rural, ticket-splitting electorate that uses ranked-choice voting. The pollsters miss here routinely.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Look at the last Democrat to take on Collins. In 2020, Sara Gideon led in essentially every independent poll all year. She was up roughly six and a half points in the RealClearPolitics average heading into Election Day. One widely cited model gave Collins barely a one-in-three shot at keeping her seat. Collins won by 8.8 points. That’s a swing of about fifteen points from the polling average to the result — one of the worst Senate polling misses of the cycle, in this exact state, against this exact incumbent.

So when someone tells you Platner “underperformed,” the response should be: what do you know.

3. “The Real Story Is Whether He Can Win in November”

Closely related to “the hard part,” but worth flagging on its own, is the sober, forward-looking analysis that focuses on the horse race and not the issues. Don’t give Platner credit for anything, this line of argument goes, raising a hypothetical (and a generalization) that allows Washington to editorialize indefinitely.

Electability is the perfect Washington frame precisely because it’s unfalsifiable. But it also allows Washington to litigate and relitigate the case against a candidate that the establishment didn’t pick in the first place. Notice that the people most eager to interrogate Platner’s general-election viability are, by and large, the same people who were sure he wouldn’t make it this far. One might think the pundits would check their models and their predispositions. But humility isn’t Washington’s strong suit, and instead we’ll get a confident new set of predictions.

4. “Democrats Are Privately Worried”

Keep an eye out for the anonymous-sourcing genre — the “experts think,” the “strategists say,” the “operatives fear,” and the “one Democrat granted anonymity to speak candidly” construction that lets a reporter and a news outlet launder the D.C. consensus into the mouths of unnamed insiders.

This is how Washington manufactures the impression of a groundswell of elite concern without anyone having to put their name to it. The trick is that the “private worry” almost always maps perfectly onto Washington’s concerns and the public position the news media was parroting. When you see a wave of pieces about what Democrats are privately saying, ask who benefits from you believing the party’s real feelings are the opposite of how its voters just voted — and why those feelings are even relevant. Experts say. It is the most fraudulent phrase in Journalism 1.0, a gross generalization of selected experts who agree with the journalist’s views.

5. “He’ll Still Have to Answer For...”

The win doesn’t retire the controversies; it just changes their job. Where the scandals were previously deployed to argue Platner would lose, they’ll now be repurposed to argue that his victory leaves open “so many questions.” And those questions, despite the voters’ not caring, are another invitation to continue to speculate about how the candidate is still tainted. By creating the narrative that Platner is an embarrassment, the party and the news media get to pick the successor before Platner has even put his feet up on the desk.

Watch for the pivot from “this will sink him” to “this will haunt him.” It’s the same material doing a different shift. The voters who knew about all of it — and they did know, because Washington made very sure they knew — and chose him anyway are about to be told that their informed choice doesn’t count as a verdict on the controversies because they don’t know everything yet. You’ll see constant intimations of other, darker scandals we don’t yet know about but surely are on the horizon.

If Platner is smart, he’ll ignore them, choosing instead to hate on the elite media, aligning himself with the voters back home.

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The point of the coverage described above is to erase the public from the story by pretending the voters didn’t just defy Washington in an extraordinary way.

A first-time candidate with no political experience drove a Schumer-recruited, two-term sitting governor out of the race entirely before a single vote was cast. That’s the public, in their wisdom and with their perspective, rejecting the gerontocracy and the party.

America doesn’t have many Platners to vote for, but it clearly wants them.

— Edited by William M. Arkin