Slate Magazine69%
What’s Next for Maine Democrats After Platnerpocalypse? 51%
By Jim Newell75%
7/11/2026, 9:45:00 AM
Keywords: The Surge, Elections, Democrats, Republicans, Senate, Maine, Susan Collins, Michigan, Texas, Mitch Mcconnell
BS Summary: This article contains 1 faulty reasoning type, including Attempt to Sell a Product or Service, with Attempt to Sell a Product or Service as the most egregious example at 1.2% saturation with 23 hits. Analysis detected 23 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,841 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 51.5% and a BS Rank of 51% (7,601 of 15,517 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 51.00% of the article peer group.
What’s Next for Maine Democrats After Platnerpocalypse?
And who’s to blame for all this, anyway?
By Jim Newell
July 11, 2026 5:45 AM
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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, a newsletter that can finally stop writing about Graham Platner—for five years, when he will be a first-ballot Surge Hall of Fame inductee.
Most of the Surge this week is about developments in Maine, a once beautiful state that may now have to be domed off in concrete because of what’s gone down in its Senate race.
Also: The Texas Senate race, which has taken England by storm, and a glimpse of the next major Democratic showdown in Michigan.
We’ll write it all up as soon as we get off a phone call with Mitch McConnell after exactly 20 minutes.
We’re going triple wide for the opening: Who’s to blame for the Democratic mess in Maine?
1.
Graham Platner
Disaster.
The principal person to blame for why Democrats are self-imploding in a race that is vital to flipping control of the Senate and applying a critical check on Donald Trump is, well, the principal.
No one forced him to have a long history of edgelord posting online, or to get a Nazi tattoo, or to sext with other women while married, or to have had a history of toxic relationships.
And this week, a credible rape accusation against him, which he denies, proved to be the last straw.
He was dragged into suspending his campaign and has now withdrawn from the race.
No one forced him to keep all of this buried and push ahead, assuming that his charisma could pull him through.
It couldn’t.
This race is the main show of the 2026 midterms, with major implications for Maine, the country, and the world.
Nothing was ever going to stay buried.
It’s not hard to see why Platner is so surly in his 11-minute Wednesday video announcing that he would end his campaign.
A year ago he was nobody, and now he is nationally famous for a rape allegation.
But the video did not advance the overarching goal here: replacing Susan Collins in the Senate.
He wallowed in the fact that big, wealthy corporate and donor interests were too frightened of him and his politics to allow him to continue—the sort of conspiratorial thinking that has found a lot of purchase on the left in this year’s primaries.
But all that big-money Democratic interests, along with small-money and no-money Democratic interests, want is a chance to beat Susan Collins.
They no longer have it with Platner.
2.
Daniel Moraff
That’s a lot of wreckage.
Platner, who had no political experience, was recruited into the race by Daniel Moraff, an Ivy League–educated consultant who served as a headhunter for progressive and unconventional Democratic candidates.
While doing some express vetting, he brought in Morris Katz, the young political consultant who’d worked with similar candidates who fit a sort of gruff, working-class aesthetic (as well as Zohran Mamdani).
Per a New York Times autopsy of this train wreck, the consultants cast Platner for the role by convincing him that “he was ‘the one,’ a ‘hero of the movement,’ ‘a historical figure’ who could be ‘leading a revolution.’
”
A year or so later, the life of the recruit they promised the world is in shambles, women have felt compelled to enter the spotlight to share personally traumatic stories, and Democratic fingers are pointing at each other—rather than at Susan Collins—four months before Election Day.
But as for the consultants: Ah, well.
On to the next project.
(Well, we’ll see about that in Moraff’s case.)
3.
Chuck Schumer
A major misreading of the room.
There will be fingers pointed at prominent national progressives who jumped on the Platner wagon (including after the Nazi-tattoo revelations), only to find out that they had elevated a ticking time bomb.
But the Democratic Party’s establishment isn’t blameless either, especially when it comes to having made space for Platner’s rise to begin with.
Let me explain.
A lot of people who are now running in the Maine Democratic Party’s lightning round of a Senate nomination process opted against it at first.
One reason is that Collins is a difficult opponent who scarred Maine Democrats with her surprisingly comfortable margin of victory in 2020.
Another, though, is that Democrats knew that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was working to recruit and clear the field for Gov.
Janet Mills to run.
It was a major misreading of the room for Schumer, who, for all the flak he gets, has had a solid record of recruiting competitive candidates—and understands that given this Democratic coalition’s structural disadvantage in the Senate, the party can’t screw around and blow winnable races on the regular like Republicans do.
Recruiting a 79-year-old whose heart was never really in the race didn’t meet the moment for Democratic primary voters still reeling from the Biden debacle of the 2024 presidential race and were thirsting for energy.
Mills also didn’t make a lot of strategic sense against Collins.
Collins’ whole argument is that her seniority makes her uniquely fit to deliver for Maine, whereas Mills pledged to serve only one term and thus would be unable to build Senate seniority.
And so the oysterman had the perfect foil.
4.
Abdul El-Sayed
The next big showdown.
We are Mained out.
Let’s turn our attention to Democrats’ next factionalist battle: the Michigan Senate primary.
The major development in that race this week was that its third candidate, Michigan state Sen.
Mallory McMorrow, dropped out.
McMorrow’s attempt to split the difference between her moderate and progressive rivals—Rep.
Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed, respectively—fell flat.
We’ll have much more to say about this race as the Aug. 4 primary approaches.
But most polling has shown El-Sayed, the charismatic progressive, leading the primary with relative comfort over Stevens, who’s the preferred candidate of Schumer and whose outside allies, including AIPAC, have been pouring money into the race.
But here are a couple of unknowns to watch.
First, where does McMorrow’s support go?
One poll this week, which showed the race to be essentially tied, suggested that it would break toward Stevens.
Second, who are the undecided remaining voters?
If it’s the case that El-Sayed has already consolidated the progressive vote, and the undecideds are more moderate, risk-averse Democrats, it could be a very close contest.
5.
Mitch McConnell
The Surge has not spoken to Mitch McConnell for any length of minutes recently.
How is Mitch McConnell doing after being hospitalized on June 14, when EMS workers were at his house to help someone suffering “cardiac arrest”?
McConnell’s staff has been giving the usual amount of information that McConnell’s staff gives—none—which has led to an awful lot of speculation.
It’s not just a question of when he would be coming back to the Senate.
Will he be coming back to the Senate?
According to an obviously orchestrated set of phone calls to friends, though, the guy has never been better.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Tuesday that the two old chums “had a lengthy and substantive conversation that covered a variety of topics, including national security.”
Senate GOP Whip John Barrasso said that he and McConnell talked for about 20 minutes, catching up on everything from Graham Platner to pending policy matters.
Then Scott Jennings, a former McConnell aide who now has a gig blocking and tackling for Donald Trump on CNN panels, posted that he had just talked to his old boss for about 20 minutes.
One pictures McConnell’s aides staring at the hospital clock, counting the seconds until 20 minutes have passed, and being pleased to inform the senator that he can hang up.
It’s built into enough of a mystery that Kentucky Gov.
Andy Beshear, a Democrat, wrote an open letter to McConnell on Wednesday requesting that he update Kentuckians on the status of his health.
He’s even less likely to respond to that than he would an inquiry from the Surge.
6.
Troy Jackson
Ugh, fine, one more Maine entry …
We were so excited to assign blame for the Platner fiasco in the first few entries that we forgot to offer anything forward-looking.
Typical.
With Platner out of the picture, the Maine Democratic Party will proceed with a convention later this month to determine the next nominee.
Among those who’ve thrown their hats into the ring: public health official Nirav Shah, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, and former State Senate President Troy Jackson—all of whom were defeated in the gubernatorial primary last month.
Dan Kleban, a brewer who had briefly run in the Senate primary, has also entered the race.
It’s been interesting watching how quickly Maine progressives—who, like progressives in a lot of states this cycle, are simply much better organized than the center-left—have begun to coalesce around Jackson.
Jackson is a former social conservative who has reinvented himself into what he calls a “pickup-truck progressive.”
(As we should all understand now, that phrase sparks a dopamine tidal wave with white-collar leftists.)
What’s going to be tricky for Jackson is how close he and Platner were—there’s tons of footage of them campaigning together, and he was Platner’s preference for governor—which the Collins campaign would make hay of in the general election.
The other gubernatorial also-rans have their problems too.
Bellows ran against Collins in her 2014 Senate race.
And while it was a very different cycle, Bellows did lose by 37 points, which is a difficult number to get out of your head if you’re concerned about electability.
Meanwhile, Shah is apparently hated by Illinois Democrats for his time there?
There’s so much to learn!
It should be an exciting couple of weeks that are not at all made impossibly annoying by factional infighting.
7.
Ken Paxton
Well, the weather was probably better in England?
(Oh, they had a heat wave too.)
We can’t help but be charmed by how decades of one-party rule breeds political laziness.
Consider Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Republicans’ scandal-plagued Senate nominee in a competitive race against Democrat James Talarico.
On America’s 250th birthday, Paxton was spotted in London with his girlfriend—Paxton’s wife filed for divorce against him last year “on biblical grounds.”
England, where the dreaded king (actually, he seems really chill these days) lives!
We would just like you to imagine the reaction if a Democratic candidate in a competitive state was spotted in ENGLAND on INDEPENDENCE DAY when the United States turns 250.
With a PARAMOUR.
That would be the end!
It is what it is.
In other news, Talarico’s campaign announced this week that he raised $30 million from April to June, a record for Senate campaigns in the second quarter of an election year.
Paxton, meanwhile, raised $9 million.
That’s not nothing, but it is, according to conventional math, significantly less than $30 million.
We’ll see.
We’ll see!
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