Maine’s New Senate Candidates Sound a Lot Like Graham Platner

Whatever distinctions may exist between the eight candidates to replace Graham Platner as Maine’s Democratic nominee for the Senate, they weren’t on display in the first and likely only debate on Thursday night. The candidates ranged from political neophytes to longtime civil servants, but they all sounded like they were ready to champion left causes—abolish ICE, pass Medicare for All, tackle corruption in Washington, hold President Trump accountable—in the fight against five-term Republican incumbent Senator Susan Collins.

“Whoever wins this nomination, we need to show up at the polls,” said Ashley Webb, a transgender activist. “We need to vote for them, and we need to make sure they win, no matter what, because what’s going on in this country is not right.”

When sexual assault accusations forced Platner from the race on July 9, a month after he’d won the Democratic primary, he posted an 11-minute video on social media claiming innocence and blaming the political establishment and corporate media for his exit. He said “large forces” were working against him. “We live in a political system that is not built for normal people,” he said. “It is a system that is built structurally to make sure that movements like ours cannot flourish. That if they begin to succeed they can be crushed.”

That video left a sour taste in my mouth because he seemed to imply that any “normal” person running for Congress could be plagued by scandals such as having a Nazi tattoo and being accused of rape. Yet eight normal-ish people took the stage on Thursday to be his replacement, and none thus far seem to have a past like Platner’s—but they do presently have a politics like Platner’s, as all sounded eager to win over the enthusiastic movement he’d built. It made me wish for an alternate timeline in which the Democratic establishment hadn’t meddled in the primary, allowing for a wide-open field. Instead, primary voters had a choice between Governor Janet Mills, the 78-year-old centrist who was handpicked by Senate Minority Leader Senator Chuck Schumer, and an oyster farmer whom political operatives plucked from obscurity and didn’t properly vet.

Because nine candidates jumped into the truncated race, which will be decided by 601 delegates at the party’s state convention on July 25, the debate was held in two-hour blocks between four candidates each. The first half contained the expected front-runners: Maine’s Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, former Senate president Troy Jackson, former state CDC director Dr. Nirav Shah, and Jordan Wood, who came in third in the primary for the 2nd congressional district. In the second half, there was David Costello, an environmental policy consultant who worked in Maryland’s Department of the Environment, former state Representative Elizabeth Dickerson, brewery owner Dan Kleban, and Webb, who visibly teared up when she spoke about trans rights issues.

Their responses to questions were often hurried, unfinished, and a little unprepared—except Shah, who sounded the most polished, if a little professorial. But on substance they were very similar, and there wasn’t much time to go deep. The ICE shooting of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, on Monday was top of mind, especially because Collins had voted for no-strings-attached funding of the agency in April. Not a single candidate wanted ICE to continue in its current, lawless form. They also all wanted to guarantee health care for all, a big issue for Mainers, enshrine abortion rights at the federal level, and fortify Social Security. And they all pushed back on the idea that there wasn’t enough money to support the kinds of reforms they wanted, blaming instead a political system that favors the elite.

“Senator Collins is just a rubber stamp for the wealthy elite in this country, and that is nothing that’s ever going to help the people here in Maine,” Jackson said, arguing that Collins’s seniority power did little for Maine’s voters in the end because she didn’t stop Trump when she could have. “She wasn’t willing to because she’d rather go along with the Trump administration and make it harder for … working-class people all across the state.”

Bellows, too, argued that the country’s wealth was going to the wrong places. “Stop spending money on things that the billionaires and the massive corporations want, like endless war, and trying to create urgency and panic, so we fall for it, and start spending money on the things that matter for folks at home,” she said.

Indeed, they all sounded like Democrats, which was the point that Dickerson wanted to make in the second half. “The platform that we all have, I think, that we’ve heard tonight, is kind of simple,” she said. “But the thing that really keeps us from achieving this is one seat in the Senate, and that seat is currently held by Senator Collins. And it’s really important for people to vote blue to get that seat in Democratic hands for food security for all, health care for all, housing for all, to abolish ICE, and to reverse climate change and end the war.”

Since the choice to replace Platner will be up to convention delegates instead of primary voters, it was hard to see the point of the debate until then. What will people watching at home be able to do, if they can’t pick the party’s nominee? Instead, the debate served as a pitch for the Democrats in general, a plea to Mainers not to give up on the party this year just because of the Platner mess. Vote for us—whichever one of us is on the ballot in November—over Collins, they effectively argued. We’re all better than she is.

The delegates, meanwhile, will have a tough choice because instead of sharp ideological differences, they will be deciding based on the candidates’ résumés and vibes (or their personal or political connections to candidates, in some cases). The state party undoubtedly wishes it had more time—if not to hold a new primary, then at least to give the candidates more runway in their campaigns, to polish their talking points and policies. But the debate at least illustrated that Maine voters don’t have to choose between political beliefs and moral ones; that they don’t have to back a deeply flawed candidate just for the sake of a movement. Plenty of normal-seeming people were ready to show up and assume the mantle, after all. ...