The left would do well to revisit New York’s Democratic primaries two weeks ago – it was a sunnier news cycle, yes, but those races were also an object lesson in progressive realpolitik.
Zohran Mamdani, busy as he already was, devoted a remarkable amount of time, resources, and political capital to selecting and backing the eventual victors in three different races – in one case reversing a promise to support an incumbent, Adriano Espaillat, in favor of activist Darializa Avila Chevalier, and in another case supporting Claire Valdez, a relatively unknown assemblywoman, even as the Working Families party, major unions and other progressives backed the Brooklyn borough president, Antonio Reynoso.
He also did what he could to push other candidates out of the running entirely, including the city councilwoman Alexa Avilés, who might have run against the mayor’s pick, Brad Lander, and Dan Goldman in New York’s 10th congressional district, and the city councilman Chi Ossé, whose planned run against the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, was torpedoed.
Only time will tell just how deeply these decisions will affect Mamdani’s standing with city leaders and key constituencies moving forward. But he and his team clearly thought long and hard about which races to prioritize and why, ran the political calculus on what it would take to win, and succeeded with a slate of candidates chosen with intention – whose only outward liabilities, collectively, are some old social media posts and a few once-controversial positions on issues such as immigration and the US’s relationship with Israel that their constituents are increasingly receptive to.
Here, by contrast, is the process by which Graham Platner, who suspended his Senate campaign on Wednesday night, became the progressive standard bearer in Maine. Last summer, after seeing footage of him speaking out against the development of a salmon farm, a group of national progressive operatives working with local activists and labor groups to find a candidate worthy of taking on 29-year incumbent Susan Collins decided Platner – a veteran, harbormaster and chair of a local planning board, with a small oyster farming operation on the side – was their man on presentation alone.
He was then put through a rushed vetting process at a discount – without a full research book on his vulnerabilities or a candidate questionnaire. The next month, Platner was introduced to Maine voters and the world with a viral ad featuring shots of him boating and chopping wood, some now-boilerplate progressive rhetoric about taking on billionaires and rescuing the middle class, and the kind of heave-ho rock’n’roll Ford sells F-150s with.
He was buff, gruff and, perhaps best of all, tattooed – traits, many imagined, that would help him connect with the working-class men Democrats have been struggling with. And 10 days later, he was endorsed by Bernie Sanders. A month later, the campaign reported it had raised more than $3m dollars.
Though Planter eventually won his primary – the establishment’s pick, the incumbent governor, Janet Mills, gained so little traction that she left the race just about two months before election day – the campaign that followed that rollout was beset by a train of scandals practically from the jump, culminating in the rape accusation that finally ended it.
The self-exonerating recriminations one would expect have ensued, alongside much more meaningful and serious conversations about how willing some in ostensibly progressive circles tolerate sexual abuse and misogyny.
But the Platner disaster also gives progressives an opportunity to think critically about their own electoral future – a chance to decide whether the left’s campaigns will be shaped from here on out by the kind of discipline and circumspection it takes to reliably win elections or whether it will continue to field candidates chosen on vibes alone.
According to the New York Times, Platner strategist Dan Moraff, one of the people who recruited him into the race in the first place, compared him to Barack Obama in conversations with Democratic officials in the early days of the campaign. As deluded as that sounds now, it was a telling analogy.
Though it’s not often remarked upon, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the generation of millennials and older zoomers now managing much of the progressive electoral infrastructure, including campaigns like Platner’s, were molded by the Obama era – a period that began when a charismatic candidate with a change message, aided by early social media, managed to upset and upend his party’s establishment in a hard-fought primary.
In 2016, Donald Trump managed a kind of negative-image version of the same within the Republican party, and both of Bernie Sanders’ campaigns for the presidency ran on the same theory of change, which now shapes down-ballot campaigns, large and small – with the right message and agenda, a winning background or personality, and the enthusiasm of base donors and volunteers, an outsider candidate can carry the day against the powers that be.
Needless to say, the left has had real successes with this approach, Mamdani among them. But it’s also run many dud primary challenges, and the business of electoral politics – as cynical and hungry for change as voters are – is a good deal more complicated than offering novel alternatives to the status quo.
As progressives say often, this is partly because the forces of the political establishment – party insiders, donors, the mainstream media – throw as many obstacles into the path of their candidates as they can. But this is all the more reason progressives should try to run the strongest candidates possible in the most promising races on the map.
Platner was not a strong candidate – as well as he was doing in the polls before dropping out, the latest allegation against him would have hobbled his general election campaign significantly if he had continued.
And even the previous controversies that dogged him – the Nazi tattoo, his comments about how much he’d enjoyed combat in Iraq, his comments about women and revelations about his relationships – should have raised questions about his judgment and fitness to carry the left’s agenda forward in Washington as a focused and undistracted policymaker. But Platner’s boosters spent months arguing that his liabilities were actually strengths instead.
Moraff – who’s notched some wins over the course of his short career but has also worked on failed campaigns for candidates accused of child abuse and homophobia – told the Wall Street Journal that candidates like Platner “are giving voters something they’ve been starving for”.
“People want someone who will fight for them,” he said, “not someone who’s been dreaming of power since they were in middle school and lived their lives accordingly.” There was similarly much talk on social media about how Platner’s rise represented “a rejection of Dem HR lady politics”, in the words of progressive commentator Matt Stoller.
“The question on Washington’s mind now is: why can’t Maine just nominate an asexual, Harvard-educated McKinsey consultant as candidate rather than some tatted up, ex-Marine riff-raff like Platner?” journalist Ken Klippenstein wrote after Platner’s sexting was revealed in June. “I call them smoothgroins: real-life barbie dolls with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be.”
In truth, there’s little evidence Platner connected with the Maine general electorate much more deeply than an ordinary Democrat already would have in a tough year for purple and blue state Republicans. Notably, he was down by roughly 15-20 points among voters without college degrees in recent polls, including a poll that showed him 25 points behind among white men without degrees specifically – numbers we should chalk up to Susan Collins’ raw masculinity and sheer animal magnetism, perhaps.
In general, some of the presumptions about candidate relatability that have shaped political punditry over the last decade rest on shaky foundations. It may be true, for instance, as supporters of Bernie Sanders often insist, that many working-class voters are tired of candidates who went to fancy schools and who’ve been in politics for decades, and that those voters can no longer trust such people to represent their interests.
It often passes without mention, though, that Sanders himself matches that description and has managed to build a political coalition that includes millions of working-class Americans anyway.
Donald Trump, for his part – a comically germaphobic billionaire with Liberace’s taste in decor who plays tracks from the Phantom of the Opera at rallies – has earned the loyalty of millions of white working-class voters despite being one of the least personally relatable candidates ever to seek the presidency in this country.
And progressives shouldn’t take the wrong lesson from the fact that Trump has been able to weather appalling personal scandals of his own – polls regularly show that his indiscretions and insanity hurt his standing among most Americans and that more conventional Republicans would have matched or outperformed him in elections overall, however strongly he connects with certain constituencies in the electorate.
This is because most Americans still do hold their political candidates to high standards of personal conduct – and defensibly so given that political candidates are functionally applying for jobs that might affect thousands or millions of lives.
Voters are, obviously, willing to look past certain personal mistakes and more ought to be done – not just at the level of political culture but in reforms to campaign regulations and campaign finance – to ensure that more ordinary people with ordinary flaws can become viable candidates for office.
But there are limits and the Platner campaign found them – to the delight of establishment figures in the party now hoping they can replace him with a less progressive candidate and use the moment to discredit the left more broadly.
Still, Platner’s candidacy was an unforced error – the product of an approach to electoral politics built around the idea that progressives will come to power once they’ve caught enough lightning in a bottle. They won’t. Instead, the left is going to have to build power in America brick by carefully laid brick.
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Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist
