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This week, a 41-year-old Maine woman named Jenny Racicot told Politico reporters that Graham Platner, the Democratic Senate candidate from Maine, raped her while the two were dating. According to Racicot, Platner showed up at her house very drunk after she told him not to come over, and forced her into sex. The morning after the assault, Platner said he didn’t remember what happened; she told him that the sex had not been consensual and stopped speaking to him.

“These allegations are troubling, serious, and false,” Platner said in a statement. “Any accusation of nonconsensual behavior is categorically untrue.”

Democrats are almost universally calling for Platner to drop out of the race, and at this point, it seems virtually guaranteed that he will. This is also now a familiar script: Man aims for position of power; man faces serious and credible sexual assault allegations; man categorically denies the allegations. But the story seems to end differently if the man is a Democrat rather than a Republican. Democratic men accused of sexual abuse or other acts of serious misconduct face intense pressure to drop out from Republicans and Democrats alike. Republican men accused of sexual abuse or other acts of serious misconduct face intense pressure to drop out, but largely from Democrats—a handful of Republicans may object, and a handful of Republican office seekers have indeed resigned, but the party has routinely rallied around men accused of all manner of wrongdoing (including the president, who was found liable for sexual abuse).

This, to be sure, is an awfully low bar to clear (which is why it’s so galling that Republicans consistently fail to clear it themselves while trying to ratchet it higher for their political opponents). And yet some on the left want to see Democrats lower the bar even further. The argument seems to be that Democrats should quit being such pansies and instead do a kind of reverse Michelle Obama: As populist candidate Abdul El-Sayed put it, “When they go low, we don’t go high. We take them to the mud and choke them out.”

The Platner disaster shows the danger in that thinking—and the perils of the macho attitude behind it. (It’s a little tough to imagine a female candidate credibly boasting about choking out her opponents.) It also makes apparent that Democrats need to embrace candidates who have not just a particular set of progressive political views but a track record of conscientiousness and ideally excellence, a tendency toward virtue, and fundamental decency of character.

That doesn’t mean no bad tweets or questionable Reddit posts. It does mean a history of........

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