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As progressives fought on Tuesday to salvage some validation from the wreckage of Graham Platner’s Senate bid, his most important endorser on the left broke a conspicuous silence to try to nudge him out of the race.
Sen. Bernie Sanders backed Platner nearly a year ago and elevated the Maine Democrat as a “working-class” candidate who could transform politics. For 21 hours after an allegation of sexual assault cratered Platner’s campaign, however, Sanders stayed silent.
That quiet was notable given Sanders’ potential ability to persuade Platner to bow out by Monday, which he must do in order for the party to replace him on the November ballot. The senator issued a statement on Tuesday afternoon: “I have spoken with Graham Platner about the best path forward for Maine. In light of these very serious allegations, I have recommended that he step aside.”
Other endorsers had already denounced Platner and called on him to quit, going further than Sanders by urging Maine Democrats to choose another like-minded candidate to face GOP Sen. Susan Collins. That’s a view shared by Platner, who is reluctant to quit the campaign if it meant someone less progressive would replace him.
The prospect of Platner’s allies trying to influence his replacement struck some in the party as audacious in the extreme.
“Bernie Sanders needs to apologize for pushing this predator to Democrats, especially after the serious allegations of abuse towards women,” Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., told Semafor.
Meanwhile, numerous Maine Democrats were working their political networks, offering their services as backup candidates. Failed 2026 gubernatorial candidate Nirav Shah launched a Senate campaign page on Tuesday, proposing that all hopeful Platner replacements debate and hold “public town halls.”
For some Sanders loyalists, however, any open forum to select a new Senate nominee may be clouded by lingering frustration over two presidential primaries that they believe were stacked against them — not to mention the selection of Kamala Harris in 2024, which ignored pitches for an unprecedented “mini-primary.”
“If we’d had an open convention in 2024, I think whoever wound up being the nominee could have used such a process to their advantage,” wrote Tad Devine, a 2016 Sanders strategist, in a memoir that came out Tuesday, as Sanders dodged the Platner shrapnel.
Its title is effectively the inverse of Fetterman’s view: “How the Democrats Screwed Bernie.”
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Our Revolution, the political group founded when Sanders folded his 2016 campaign, disavowed Platner late Monday and pushed Democrats for a new nominee who’s similarly left-leaning.
Another former Platner backer, California Rep. Ro Khanna, suggested that former state Senate President Troy Jackson could be that substitute. Jackson would ensure the party had a candidate “standing for Medicare for All, opposing foreign wars, and getting money out of politics,” Khanna posted on X.
Party rules give Maine Democrats a timeline, but few guidelines, on how to replace a candidate who quits before ballots are printed. If Platner quits within six days, the Democratic State Committee would have until July 27 to inform state officials of its backup.
Sanders’ reversal on Platner comes after months of open defenses of the candidate amid other damaging stories about his past behavior and treatment of women. The senator even admonished Republican staffers who were protesting outside a DC meeting between the candidate and Senate Democrats.
Over this past weekend, word spread among Democrats that a damaging new story about Platner could break soon — and that Sanders was in touch with the campaign as it entered the bunker. (Platner canceled public events before Politico published its interview with a former girlfriend who alleged he assaulted her, claiming that he was ill.)
Beyond Shah, who placed second in the July gubernatorial primary, several other Maine Democrats are considered potential new Senate nominees: Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, who placed fourth in that primary; Dan Kleban who briefly ran against Platner before dropping out; and Jordan Wood, a former Democratic staffer who also initially ran for Senate before switching to seek the state’s Republican-leaning House seat.
But progressives are lobbying for Jackson, a logger-turned-politician from rural Maine who co-endorsed Platner, joined him and Sanders at “Fight Oligarchy” rallies, and ran on the union slogan “solidarity forever.” He filed paperwork on Tuesday to potentially seek the Senate.
Room for Disagreement
Republicans, enjoying the spectacle, were already preparing to link Platner to whomever replaced him, hoping that it would be Jackson. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, the chief of the Senate GOP campaign committee, crowed that Collins’ opponent “will either be an alleged rapist with a Nazi tattoo, or someone he selects with the same ‘values and vision.’”
While plenty of more establishment-friendly and centrist Democrats raised public alarms about progressives pushing an unvetted candidate, few were as vocal as Fetterman — who moved to the right in office after sharing some campaign advisers with Platner.
The Pennsylvanian even pointed a finger at a popular progressive TV host, using the Reddit alias Platner donned for incendiary posts.
“Why did Chris Hayes allow P-Hustle [Platner] to quickly dismiss those allegations of abuse from the NYT article?” Fetterman said. “Why did these otherwise thoughtful individuals quickly go all-in for this degenerate?”
David’s view
The Platner debacle is a real setback to the march of Sanders’ movement through Democratic primaries this year — a project that had previously gone quite well.
To explain the senator’s early silence on Platner, it’s critical to understand something Sanders believes to his bones: Personal scandals covered by for-profit media are distractions from the needs of a healthy democracy.
Other Democrats believe that he’s wearing blinders, and that his faction of the party should be blamed for screwing up a winnable race to weaken its influence in future primary battles.
When voters see a Bernie-backed candidate, many Democrats want them to think “Graham Platner” and feel turned off.
This is all moving quickly, but Sanders’ decision not to follow Shah in endorsing a more contested, open replacement fight may allow his critics to gain the high ground. At this moment, it’s the candidate who didn’t get progressive endorsements saying that Maine Democrats should get to vote on a new nominee.
Platner allies, by contrast, are suggesting that the party should be bound to what primary voters chose last month. Which is, more or less, what Harris’ supporters said in 2024.
Notable
- New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Sanders ally who had not endorsed Platner, nonetheless called on the Senate candidate to step aside before Sanders did, as Politico reported.