These Are Not Your Father’s Democrats |
These Are Not Your Father’s Democrats
Some are left, some aren’t. But what they have in common is that they are ready to rumble. It’s the Democratic Tea Party, with a twist.
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2These Are Not Your Father’s Democrats
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Janet Mills, the 78-year-old moderate who has served as Maine’s governor since 2019, is staid and a little boring—which is exactly why, last fall, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee pushed her to run against progressive upstart Graham Platner in the state’s Senate primary. Mills was reasonably popular and polled well against Susan Collins, the Trump-enabling “moderate” who had represented Maine since 1997. Most importantly, she had been in politics a long time—she was first elected to Maine’s House of Representatives more than 20 years ago—and therefore had already been vetted.
The same could not be said about Platner, who announced his populist Senate campaign last summer, seemingly out of nowhere. An oyster farmer and a war on terrorism veteran, Platner was gruff and tough—and looked like the answer for a party struggling to reach working-class voters and men. As it turned out, he also carried a ton of baggage. Soon after Mills announced her candidacy, nuclear-grade opposition research began falling.
Let’s get this out of the way: Graham Platner isn’t a Nazi. He had a Nazi tattoo, sure, but he doesn’t anymore. He got it covered up in October, a few days after the world learned about the Totenkopf symbol he got inked on his chest in Croatia while on military leave two decades ago. If one can get a Nazi tattoo innocently, then Platner almost certainly did. He says he didn’t know its true meaning at the time, and there’s little reason to doubt him. There is nothing in any of the statements that Platner has given in town halls, interviews, or other campaign events to suggest that he’s a bigot either, though he did write some bad stuff about Black people and women on the internet a few years ago. (For what it’s worth, he also said white rural voters were stupid and racist.) When those posts were unearthed, Platner apologized, citing his PTSD and political and cultural ignorance. Still, it’s hard to think of any recent Democratic campaign that could survive having to make so many disclosures.
It’s also hard to think of a more lethal, better-orchestrated political hit—or one better designed to showcase the value of Democratic power brokers. There was just one problem: Mills had baggage, too. The DSCC had no idea. Platner knew it the moment she entered the race. “DC’s choice has lost to Susan Collins five times in a row,” Platner posted on social media shortly after the DSCC endorsed Mills. “We can’t afford a sixth.” There were no Reddit posts lurking in Mills’s past, no fascist tattoos hidden on her body. Instead, she had a different problem: She was endorsed by the Democratic elite.
In his first town hall since the oppo started raining down, Platner apologized to a full house of 600 in Ogunquit, population 1,577, and then flipped the script: “The machine is turned on because it is scared,” he said. The attacks against him, he argued, were reflective of a party elite that had lost touch with its voters: “If the party was run by the people that were in it, it would be the party you want it to be.”
Not so long ago, any one of the scandals Graham Platner faced in mid-October would likely have sunk his campaign. The race is now up for grabs—if for a while his lead was over 30 points, it has since shrunk significantly—but Platner is still in the game. Some recent polls suggest that he has at least a small but stubborn advantage, and multiple surveys have indicated that he may be a more formidable challenger to Collins than Maine’s current governor. That is partly a result of Platner’s charisma and populist platform, but it is also a result of the growing frustration and anger many Democratic voters feel toward their leaders.
Donald Trump’s reelection represented the failure of the Democratic establishment, explained Joe Calvello, Platner’s former senior adviser. “People who in 2018 or 2020 were taking their cues from party leaders or elders are like, ‘What the fuck do these people know that I don’t know? They’ve failed time and time again.’” Having watched Democratic power brokers lose two presidential elections to Trump and control of both houses of Congress, many voters no longer trust them on questions of candidate selection or policy. Or anything else, for that matter.
And if the support of the establishment previously guaranteed a certain level of fundraising, said Rebecca Katz, a political strategist and a co-founder of Fight, a consulting firm working with Platner, “this cycle, we’re seeing a lot of anti-establishment candidates raising real money off of not being the DC favorite.” Voters are increasingly suspicious of—if not downright hostile to—candidates who have been fêted by a party establishment that keeps getting it wrong. A base that has long made pragmatic, sober decisions appears increasingly attracted to charismatic outsiders who promise to break from the party’s failures of the last decade. They see their party’s leaders as feckless and inept. They are looking to populists who represent a vastly different approach to politics. The Democratic Tea Party is here.
There are many ways to describe the drift of American politics over the last two decades, but one is rather simple. The Republican Party has experienced two related revolutions—the Tea Party in 2009 and the rise of Donald Trump in 2016—that resulted in widespread purges and transformed it into the hard-line nativist........