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The Democratic Party, less than four months from a pivotal midterm election, is navigating a new kind of culture war over exactly what kind of behavior — from candidates and staff — the party should tolerate.
The meltdown of Graham Platner’s Maine Senate bid over sexual assault allegations reopened old divisions between the party establishment and a crop of swaggering young men on the left, many of whom entered politics with Bernie Sanders’ presidential runs. As one prominent Platner defender denounces “Dem HR lady politics,” mainstream Democrats lament that the “Bernie bro” image of 2016 has essentially persisted.
“There are so many instances where a woman candidate or a person of color candidate is asked, time and time again, whether or not they are qualified, and they are given so many tests. And then you have someone [who makes] you feel good because they’re wearing plaid, and so that you should just give them the benefit of the doubt?” asked Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove, D-Calif.
The plaid-clad Platner’s campaign “asked Maine voters to put their morals on a shelf, and that’s unacceptable,” she said.
Now a party that will rely on women’s votes in the midterms is trying to figure out its boundaries in how male candidates talk about, and to, women, after conservative backlash to tightening norms for workplace behavior. Platner, for example, hung onto support from prominent Democrats even after a report of intimidating behavior toward girlfriends.
The story of Daniel Moraff, the bearded former Sanders staffer who helped recruit Platner, offers a glimpse of the cultural divide. Before Moraff landed in Maine to find a working-class challenger to GOP Sen. Susan Collins, he helped progressive Summer Lee rise to the state legislature in Pennsylvania. By the time Lee ran for Congress in 2022, though, Moraff wasn’t involved.
A widely-circulated report last week alleged that Moraff was blocked from her campaign over alleged “sexual misconduct.” According to a person close to the Lee campaign, however, Moraff got barred — even from campaign events — over concerns he was disrespectful to others, rather than allegations of sexual harassment or misconduct.
A Moraff spokesperson didn’t contest the suggestion that he fell out with other staffers over his style, but denied any allegations of misconduct, adding that Moraff requested an investigation into the claims that wasn’t conducted.
“The reality is that Daniel had professional disagreements with some members of Summer’s campaign regarding performance, execution, and standards. He was direct about where he believed improvements were needed, and he makes no apology for holding people to a high standard,” the spokesperson said.
Moraff paid real heed to some concerns about sexual misconduct when he first arrived in Maine last year with fiancee Leanne Fan. As Politico reported, Platner was not their first-choice Senate recruit. They focused initially on Chris Williams, a leader of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers in Bath, Maine.
They turned away from Williams, according to a person close to the recruiting effort, after learning of a 2023 sexual harassment complaint against him. In a copy of the complaint that Semafor reviewed, on file with the Maine Human Rights Commission, one union member alleged that Williams harassed another member.
The progressive recruiters questioned whether the harassment complaint was true, this person added, and Williams denied it. Ultimately, Moraff and Fan deemed the issue politically damaging and moved on from Williams to Platner — who was already the subject of a 2024 Facebook post warning women not to get involved with him.
Williams did not comment for this story.
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Even progressive leaders were turned off by the spotlight courted by some of Platner’s consultants.
“It actually hurts our movement more broadly when every individual thinks they’re more important than the movement,” said Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis. “And I don’t think the movement had a really strong enough vetting process in general.”
Some establishment Democrats are now concerned about Platner-style electability problems in must-win Michigan races ahead of the state’s August primary. That includes the Senate primary; left-leaning Abdul El-Sayed, is vying to become the first Muslim elected senator, against centrist Rep. Haley Stevens. El-Sayed has been married for 20 years and faced no allegations of misconduct of any kind. But his brash approach to his rival — he told Semafor that AIPAC might teach Stevens “how to string together two coherent sentences” — has rankled her supporters, some of whom have edged into gender politics.
One of them, Rep. Hillary Scholten, D-Mich., criticized progressives who “prop up other candidates who have said really problematic things,” adding — without elaborating — that “Abdul has a problematic record with women.”
Asked about Scholten’s comments, El-Sayed spokesperson Roxie Richner said: “Unless the congresswoman has specific accusations she would like to make, perhaps it’s better to avoid repeating throwaway talking points to push an unfounded narrative.”
Room for Disagreement
Others argued most of the pile-on stemming from the Platner campaign was happening online and not of consequence to voters.
“Consultant discourse is not movement discourse,” strategist Zara Rahim, who served as a key adviser to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani during his political ascent, told Semafor, adding that tenant organizers, union members, and campaign volunteers are unlikely to care about arguments happening mostly online.
She described the media frenzy that has followed Platner’s meltdown as reflective of the “elitism” that got the Democratic Party to where it is today, replicating the echo chamber that fueled the left’s rise.
At the same time, she acknowledged the danger to any political movement or party of allowing a relatively small number of people to hog the microphone — and she pointed to Mamdani’s ability to avoid that trap.
“He was the story because he was telling people’s stories,” Rahim said.
Nicholas, Brendan, and Lauren’s View
There’s a real difference of opinion about how intense the Democratic reckoning is right now — whether it’s largely happening online or becoming a real risk for November.
But our colleague David Weigel recently touched on the root of the problem: Sanders, whose machine has shaped an entire decade of progressive insurgents, has always disliked journalism that focuses on personal scandals like those that wrecked Platner’s campaign.
It’s not just a campaign culture schism between the left and the establishment. Part of the Democratic disagreement comes from just how much attention to pay to media outlets’ prying, versus the power of the message.
Here’s what we know: If El-Sayed pulls out a victory over Stevens next month, his general election fate will prove the cycle’s biggest test of whether progressive swagger can prevail in battleground seats.