Graham Platner's early-morning exit from the Senate Race in Maine is a historic political disaster for his party. The seat, currently held by moderate Republican (and long-term political survivor) Susan Collins, was on paper the most winnable Republican-held seats for progressives seeking to take back the US Senate. Now, the party's chances of victory look remote.
So how, and why, did the disaster unfold? It begins with an age-old political affliction: self-exculpation.
One of the universal laws of politics is that ideologues of all stripes struggle to accept the unpopularity of their ideas as an explanation for electoral defeat. Confronted with rejection by the voters, the true believer will usually turn to procedural or strategic explanations for their failure to reach the promised political land.
These explanations come in various guises. The most common on the right, for example, is to blame the refs by asserting that “the media was against us”. Occasionally, there will be a trip into conspiracyland with accusations of a “rigged election”. Sometimes there will be heroic self-pity, along the lines of “we did very well considering the entire establishment was against us”.
On the left, by contrast, the explanations for defeat tend to sound more self-reflective, but generally have the same purpose of avoiding any substantive discussion about whether changes to policy are required: campaigns will be accused of bad messaging, poor strategy, not being sufficiently masculine, “failing to point out the lies” of their vanquishers, or simply not “fighting” hard enough.
Usually, these instinctive impulses towards self-justification are harmless. But sometimes, they lead political parties to make catastrophic mistakes – as has just happened to the US Democrats in the state of Maine.
Platner’s Purpose
Graham Platner was supposed to be a balm to Democratic Party ills. For several elections in a row, the Democrats have been roundly trounced by Donald Trump and the Republicans among a particular subset of voters: working-class white Americans without a college degree. These voters make up about 42% of all US voters and were once wholly identified with the Democrats because they were low-paid, blue-collar union members.
However, their cultural conservatism and hostility to progressive priorities domestically, as well as free trade internationally, have seen them flee en masse to the Trump column. Democrats, self-servingly, did not see it quite like that: they looked at poor white voters fleeing their ranks and reached hard for a different explanation. First, Barack Obama infamously described such voters as “clinging to guns and religion”, sparking the moniker “bitter clingers” to explain a group of voters who were stubbornly hostile to Democratic notions of progress.
Then Hillary Clinton went one further, in 2016, labeling those voters “the deplorables”, implying if not outright saying that their animus toward Democrats was motivated by racism and bigotry against blacks and women. Even as they relentlessly insulted such voters, Democrats sought explanations for their abandonment of the party, because to the progressive mind, poor whites voting for Republicans were “voting against their own interests”.
Democrats, after all, are the party of welfare and healthcare and government handouts: to the Democratic mind, poor white voters should want all of these things – but instead were being deceived by Trump into voting for tax cuts for the rich and bailouts for big corporations. Since Democrats, in their own minds, had the right answer on policy, their repeated defeats could only be explained by communications. What they needed, they decided, was to find somebody who could communicate to the deplorables.
Enter, then, Graham Platner.
The most telling comment about Graham Platner by one of his supporters was made by progressive writer Matt Stoller: “Graham Platner”, he tweeted, “represents a rejection of Dem HR lady politics.”
In other words, Platner was the opposite of a problem that Democrats think they have had for some time – that their image was that of the human resources manager patiently talking down to the staff, explaining the importance of wearing Pride pins on their lapels in June, and reminding everybody to put their pronouns at the end of their email signature, while ensuring each department met its diversity hiring quotas.
Platner was not that. Yes, he had the exact same politics as the “HR lady”, and promised even more progressivism – but he did it while drinking a beer, appreciating a shapely pair of female breasts and cursing freely. If Democrats needed to reach the white working class – the deplorables – well, then the only thing to do was to nominate somebody entirely deplorable.
The Deplorable’s Deplorable
The Democrats’ instinct with Platner is replicated elsewhere. In Germany, for example, the Green Party – which has long had a problem with young men – recently declared that muscles and working out and driving fast cars and sensitively pursuing the ladies are A-OK with them, promising to sound less like HR managers and more like, well, Stone Cold Steve Austin if Steve preferred avocado toast to a cold beer and was in touch with his feminine side.
But as Platner proved, this can go quite wrong.
One of the more amusing spectacles of the Platner implosion over the past few months has been to observe Democrats rationalizing their support for their candidate by associating his vices with the voters they were supposed to be appealing to. “He’s an adulterer?”, they seemed to ask themselves. “Well, that’s just how these redneck men are.”
“He got a Nazi tattoo?” Well, the Trump voters we need are all Nazis on issues like immigration, and he’s just one of them. And so it went: the more Platner appeared obviously and genuinely deplorable, the more Democrats told themselves that this was actually a good thing, since deplorable voters might identify with him. For the hardcore progressive, the worse Platner got, the more they convinced themselves that this was a price worth paying to win back voters they detest so much that they had convinced themselves, in their own heads, that his foulness would be a positive.
The irony, of course, is that it was not working.
It's Still the Message, Not the Messenger
The Maine Senate race is unusual in that, until this week, it pitted a soft-spoken moderate woman against a loudmouthed beer-drinking misogynist, but with the usual party stereotypes reversed. The woman was the Republican, the man the Democrat. And yet polls showed that voting patterns hardly shifted.
Asked to choose between them, working-class men were still overwhelmingly voting for mild-mannered Susan Collins. And progressive women with college degrees were backing the guy with the Nazi tattoo and the multiple accusations of sexual misconduct.
The worse Platner got, the more progressive women were determined to vote for him on a point of principle: even yesterday, on the US women’s talk show The View, host Sunny Hostin was proudly saying that she would still vote Platner – while “holding her nose” – because it was important to have Democrats win the seat. Policy, not style, mattered to Hostin. As it presumably did to all those white working-class voters who would rather have a Republican than a progressive redneck.
In the end, the lesson of Graham Platner is that parties cannot escape who they are by simply pretending to be somebody else. When they do so, they come across as phony and insincere. Say this for Hillary Clinton: she was an elitist’s elitist, and ran as herself. She also very nearly won.
By contrast, voters can – to use an Americanism – smell a phony a mile off. As Democrats in Maine have just found out. And as the German Greens will learn, one suspects, in due course.