Graham Platner, Ken Paxton and the populists’ scandal dilemma 

People may debate whether Graham Platner or Ken Paxton is more unfit to serve in the United States Senate. But the answers will mostly depend on one’s partisan preferences.

For a few folks, their own particular detestation of certain vices might be material. You may think that Paxton is worse because many of the allegations against him relate to abuse of public office as Texas attorney general, while Platner’s transgressions were as a private citizen and, so far, seem to have occurred before he was the Democrats’ de facto Maine Senate nominee.

You may believe Planter is worse because of the allegations of antisemitism, while Paxton’s scandals are ecumenical. But unless you are interested in committing a very specific kind of election fraud, you will not actually have to choose. Platner is Maine’s problem, Paxton is Texas’s. 

A very reasonable position for someone living in neither state would be to say that both are unfit and hope that both are defeated. But if you believe it matters very, very much which party controls the Senate from 2027 to 2029, you may still care a great deal which scandal-soaked candidate makes it to Washington. 

Partisans, therefore, have an intense interest in explaining why their guy represents the lesser evil in order to maintain some shred of consistency in attacking the other party as the champion of misogyny, cruelty, infidelity and corruption. As then-Sen. Al Franken learned in 2017 when Democrats were trying to apply maximum pressure on Alabama Republican Senate nominee Roy Moore for his own allegedly creepy behavior, maintaining the appearance of the moral high ground even in seemingly unrelated cases can require sacrifices to be made.  

The truth is, of course, that the cases of Paxton and Platner really are very different, and the issues involved, while both........

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