The Graham Platner Debacle: Kamala 2.0?

Maine Democrats have a plan to replace disgraced primary winner Graham Platner. But their voters might not like it. Despite all his controversy, Platner handily won the Democratic Party primary this year, proving that, for blue voters in the Pine Tree State, Nazi tattoos, allegations of infidelity, heavy drinking, racism, sexism, antisemitism, and mocking veterans and the disabled can all be swept aside for the right ideology. Accusations of rape, however, were apparently a bridge too far. Platner dropped out of the race after winning 72% of the blue vote, creating a bit of a conundrum: Who will take his place, and how will that person be chosen?

The Post Platner Scramble

There wasn’t a lot of time to waste. In Maine, the deadline to replace a dropped candidate is the fourth Monday in July – that’s the 27th this year. Rumors circulated in the media that Platner’s replacement would be chosen by a big 601-delegate convention. Democratic officials confirmed that plan on Friday, July 10, and announced the event would take place on July 25, just two days prior to the deadline.

There are currently nine Democrats who are either running for the nomination or who have said they would, and time is running out. Candidates must declare their intent by Wednesday next week and obtain 500 signatures from registered Democrats only (no independents allowed) by July 21.

At the convention, voting will occur in rounds until one candidate secures a majority. The five who get the most votes in the first round will advance to the second, and from there, each round will eliminate whoever comes in lowest on the list.

Democracy Dies With the Democrats?

There’s something special about this plan, however: It’s decidedly undemocratic. Hancock County, for example, is expected to get around 20 delegates – but 494 people voted in the June 9 primary. That’s just over 4% representation of the actual voters in that county, and they aren’t even democratically selected by the people themselves. The state delegates will be chosen by “special nominating meetings” called by county party chairs.

All told, these county committees will choose 500 delegates statewide, who will be joined by another 101 members of the state committee – though this last group is, at least, democratically chosen by voters. Still, Graham Platner won 156,084 votes in the primary – including some independents. That 601-delegate committee is less than half a percent of the size of that voting bloc, never mind Democratic voters as a whole. And, of course, the requirement that delegates be registered Democrats means independents who lean left and may have backed Platner before won’t get a voice at all in his replacement.

Now, after the people have spoken, this elite group hand-picked by the party establishment will select his replacement, voters be damned. How’s that for defending democracy? In fact, one can’t get much more republican in nature than having representatives vote to elect other representatives. Democrats wail and moan about the Electoral College, demanding its abolition. They stand firm behind the 17th Amendment and the idea that senators should be elected popularly. Yet when a post-primary candidate drops out, they don’t let the voters have another crack at it – or even simply default to the runner-up in the previous popular contest. No, the establishment picks a replacement themselves.

Kamala 2.0?

If it all sounds so very familiar, that’s because it’s exactly this process that resulted in Kamala Harris taking the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2024 after the rank-and-file blue voters chose Biden again. And that’s not to say said voters wouldn’t have chosen Kamala had they been given the chance. But they weren’t given that chance, and they took notice – not to mention offense. For voters who truly believed Democrats are the defenders of democracy, the party of the people, this must have felt like betrayal.

And now the left-wing establishment is getting ready to do it all over again, though on an admittedly smaller scale.

So what does that mean for whoever the elites choose to replace Graham Platner? Nothing good, if history is any indication. Will these betrayed voters back the establishment pick they had no say in selecting? What of the independents cast out by the process? Susan Collins has won in deep blue Maine – a state that hasn’t backed a Republican in a presidential election since George H W Bush in 1988 – five times consecutively.

Platner, flawed though he certainly was, represented the single greatest threat to Collins’ continued reign. By July 1, he was even polling slightly ahead of her. A new poll conducted by Platner’s campaign after his withdrawal shows a few potential replacements running neck-and-neck with Collins – but, then again, the final PBS News/NPR/Marist election poll of 2024 showed Harris four points over Donald Trump. And we all saw how that one turned out.