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The Graham Platner campaign has collapsed in spectacular fashion, with the upstart candidate suspending his run for Maine senator in a video he released Wednesday night. A woman Platner had dated accusing him of sexual assault effectively ended a candidacy that had a lot of warning signs, from his controversial Nazi tattoo to prior reports alleging mistreatment of women. I and many others were too enthusiastic about Platner’s potential. But while Democrats rightly abandoned Platner after the woman’s allegations emerged, they shouldn’t abandon what Platner represented: an attempt to find candidates and messages that appeal outside of the party’s core voting base. Such experimentation and innovation is vital, because as the 2016 and 2024 elections showed, there just aren’t enough stalwart Democratic voters to defeat MAGA on their own. The initial enthusiasm about Platner came from three parts of the Democratic Party coalition. Most importantly, Maine liberals crowded his events, excited by both his personal story and populist politics, and eventually overwhelmingly backed him in last month’s Senate primary. Outside of Maine, leftists such as journalist Ryan Grim and Senator Bernie Sanders got behind Platner as the man who could defeat the party establishment’s more centrist choice, Governor Janet Mills. There was a third group of people on the left and center-left, perhaps best exemplified by the hosts of Pod Save America, who perhaps thought that Platner could appeal to voters who don’t traditionally back Democrats and not only finally defeat Susan Collins but offer clues about how the party could win such voters across the country. I had a foot in both the second and third camps. The electoral aspect was an important part of the fanfare around Platner. The backlash to President Trump alone may be enough for the Democrats to win control of the House, Senate, and presidency over the next two elections. But even under that optimistic scenario, today’s radical, antidemocracy Republican Party would control about half the states, including almost the entire South, and have a strong chance of regaining power in Washington in 2030 and 2032. And the Republicans will be in a strong position as long as they keep winning the white (57 percent for Trump in 2024), male (57 percent), white noncollege (63 percent), and rural (69) votes nationally, particularly since many independent voters and younger people either keep backing the GOP or don’t vote at all. So a white male veteran gun owner running in a very rural swing state was destined to get outsize attention from Democrats. This electoral aspect of Platner’s candidacy is tricky—and a bit icky—to discuss. A party like the Democrats that does better with urban voters than rural voters, women compared to men, Black people compared to white people, and college graduates compared to non–college graduates isn’t doing anything morally wrong. In fact, considering the history of America, the party that is more popular with women and Black people is no doubt on the right side of most moral questions. But to win elections, it would help Democrats to woo more men, rural voters, white people without degrees, and white people overall, particularly since the Electoral College and the Senate give disproportionate power to the latter three groups. So while no one who backed Platner admitted this openly, it’s unlikely they would have as enthusiastically supported a Black or female candidate in Maine with no political experience, an incendiary tattoo, and crazy social media posts. Platner was benefiting from affirmative action for gruff-looking white men, with political elites supporting Platner in part on the theory that he could reach other men like himself. It was irritating to see Platner portrayed as a candidate for the working class, since his background was fairly privileged and the voters that he would ideally reach were much better described by their gender (male) and geography (rural) than their income or working conditions. But I was more annoyed by the coded conversation than the reality it masked: There are probably some voters in Maine and other states who will back a white man like Platner but not Democratic candidates of other demographics. I don’t love elevating gruff white guys as an electoral strategy. But it’s in some ways preferable to the Democratic establishment’s favorite tactic: constantly moving to the right to appeal to a mythical constituency of anti-Trump Republicans. Following the center-left playbook, Kamala Harris spent the latter part of her 2024 campaign abandoning populist economic policies, promising to ensure that America’s military remained the world’s “most lethal,” and touting her support for more Border Patrol officers. That approach not only moves the party in a worse direction on policy, but rarely wins over many non-Democratic voters. Many of the Democrats running in 2026 backed anti-immigrant measures last year, although they have shifted left as Trump has become more unpopular. There are two alternative approaches that hold promise. First, some Democrats rely on parts of their biography to woo voters who aren’t traditional liberals. Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock leans into his Christianity and pastoral role. For Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, it’s faith and a nerdy dad vibe. Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger, and New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill all won swing House districts and then statewide office by emphasizing their service in national security jobs. Second, a growing number of Democrats, such as Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, are running as anti-system, anti-corruption figures. They emphasize their opposition not to Republicans but to big corporations.The virtue of these two approaches is that they don’t require Democratic candidates to be Republican-lite on policy as Harris was on some issues in 2024. And the anti-corruption message allows candidates to tap into the anti-Washington, anti-institution sentiment that pervades the country. In 2024, Harris was constantly highlighting how much support she had from Republican politicians like Liz Cheney. But being well liked by fellow politicians, even from the other party, isn’t that useful in appealing to voters who hate everyone in Washington. Two of the most surprising victors in the post-Obama political era, Trump and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, both won over swing voters and inspired people to vote who often sit out elections by running against the establishments in both parties. Platner was using both of these approaches. He was bashing elites in Washington and calling for limits on corporate and billionaire spending in politics, like other populist candidates across the country. At the same time, his candidacy was very much about his own unique biography: small-town veteran and oysterman who had never previously run for office. Would this have worked in November? As my colleague Greg Sargent wrote before the sexual assault report, Platner was far behind Collins among voters without college degrees. Perhaps his message and bio weren’t selling. Alternatively, all of the swirl around his past made voters wary, no matter what he said on the campaign trail. We’ll never know how a general election between Collins and an untainted Platner would have gone. And we don’t know how El-Sayed, Ossoff, or others running on the anti-corruption, anti-system agenda will do this November. But we do know how the 2016 and 2024 elections went. The Democrats, for the presidency and key congressional races, ran traditional candidates with centrist policy platforms—and they lost. That doesn’t mean Democrats will automatically win if they run pastors, oyster farmers, or anti-corruption warriors. What those elections tell us is that there isn’t yet a clear formula for beating the MAGA right. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer shouldn’t be so confident he knows which candidates are best. Nor should Morris Katz, the strategist who helped steer Mamdani to victory but also helped create the debacle that was Platner’s campaign. Platner wasn’t the right candidate. But neither were Hillary Clinton or Harris. The Democratic Party shouldn’t only look for white men with unusual jobs to run for office. But it should look for candidates who get voters to give Democrats a second look—even if those candidates are white men with unusual jobs.

On Wednesday, I discussed how the White House Domestic Policy Council’s “Saving America’s Story” report makes a number of false claims about what’s missing from the National Museum of American History. Today, I want to discuss what the report finds objectionable that’s actually there—starting with the person who oversees it all. Surprisingly little of the report, which was released July 4, finds fault with what a visitor will encounter when visiting NMAH today. A huge chunk of it is devoted to the character assassination of Anthea Hartig, the museum’s director since 2019. The word “Hartig” appears 229 times, compared to 81 mentions for “visitor,” 73 mentions for “United States,“ 61 mentions for “National Museum of American History,” 49 mentions for “founder,” 49 mentions for “president,” 38 mentions for “race,” 31 mentions for “Congress,” 18 mentions for “ideology,” seven mentions for “bias,” five mentions for “ethnic,” and six mentions for “patriotism.” Firing Hartig is clearly Job One for this report. The Domestic Policy Council condemns Hartig for everything from identifying her pronouns as “she/her/hers” to saying she would like to “problematize” the semiquincentennial. As Philip Kennicott notes in an excellent essay about all this for The Washington Post, “Problematizing is the essence of historical thinking.”I can’t defend Hartig’s public comments against 229 petty complaints because that won’t leave time for anything else, and anyway it’s a distraction from the topic at hand, which is her museum. So let’s stick to the report’s criticisms of how NMAH presents the materials on display in what the museum world, annoyingly, calls “didactics,” meaning those posters and cards that explain what you’re looking at. My method here is to search the document for the word “didactic.” There are 160 of these, so obviously I can’t field all these, either. But to give you some flavor, here are the first four.“A didactic in NMAH’s American Democracy exhibit entitled ‘Abraham Lincoln in the Classroom’ … provides no information about the accomplishments of the two great American heroes it cites—Lincoln and Washington—noting only that both were presidents and that Americans have used images of them in an attempt to ‘instill patriotic values and reinforce the idea of a shared national heritage.’”I did not see this particular didactic when I visited the museum earlier this week. But it would appear its subject is not the life of America’s beloved Railsplitter but rather how Lincoln is, you know, taught in the classroom. If the Domestic Policy Council is trying to suggest that biographical information about Lincoln is hard to find at the NMAH, let me assure you it is not. For example, a permanent exhibit titled “The Price of Freedom: Americans at War” contains a large section about the Civil War and, inevitably, much discussion of Abraham Lincoln. If anything, the didactics here tilt rightward. Here’s one:Lincoln hoped that the nation could be reunited without rancor, but he found himself at odds with Republicans in Congress. They wanted to punish the South for seceding and wanted Southern states to guarantee the freedom and rights of African Americans.Lincoln’s assassination, and the ineffectual leadership of his successor, Andrew Johnson, enabled the Congress to control Reconstruction. They divided the South into military districts, withholding statehood from some former Confederate states until 1870s.This approximates the pro-South narrative still taught when I attended high school in the 1970s, all about Northern carpetbaggers, Northern scalawags, wild-eyed Radical Republicans, and ex-slaves unready for citizenship rights in dear old Dixie. I know that the Domestic Policy Council is aware of the Reconstruction revisionist Eric Foner, who called bullshit on all this in 1988, because he’s quoted favorably elsewhere in the report. (It’s probably heard, too, of W.E.B. Du Bois, who made a similar case in his 1935 text Black Reconstruction.) But peddling a Gone With the Wind story about Reconstruction’s tragic overreach is never going to raise any hackles in the Trump White House.“One didactic about the Broadway musical Hamilton in ‘Entertainment Nation’ simply called Alexander Hamilton an ‘influential and flawed founding father’ likely, in part, because he may have owned slaves.” Any child who’s seen Hamilton knows that the man’s most conspicuous character flaw was not that he “may have owned slaves” (he also may not have; the historical record on this point is inconclusive, and I don’t think the matter comes up in Hamilton at all). Rather, it is that Hamilton had an extramarital affair with Maria Reynolds that, when made public, destroyed his chance of becoming president. In the age of Trump, is it now “woke” to look askance at a politician who cheats on his wife?In the “Many Voices, One Nation” exhibit, according to the report, a didactic presents ours as “a fundamentally oppressive nation” in saying European settlement was “a profound unsettling of the American continent” because its “population actually declined … as Old World diseases swept through Native populations that lacked immunity.” For starters, during the period described here our nation couldn’t have been “oppressive” because it didn’t yet exist. To say that European settlement spread disease “through Native populations that lacked immunity,” and that the North American population therefore declined, is merely true. To describe all this as “a profound unsettling” is offensive only to those who question the value of human life.In the same exhibit, the following sentence appears in a didactic: “In creating the new nation, early leaders envisioned a country that promised opportunity and freedom—but only for some.” This, the report states, is a “slander of America.”A slander by definition is untrue. Where’s the untrue part in that sentence? Early leaders granted the vote only to white male property owners. Women were excluded. Blacks were excluded, and anyway most of them were slaves, and slavery is the precise opposite of freedom.As I stated Wednesday, even when judged by the standards of the form, the White House’s anti-woke polemic is a shoddy piece of workmanship not unlike the peeling blue sealant in the $15 million renovation of the Reflecting Pool. No honest conservative could argue otherwise. I wonder whether that matters. I hope it does.

A new report from Data for Progress spells good news for Democrats—particularly those running on a message of economic populism. DFP surveyed 447 swing voters between May 15 and June 21 and found that they favor Democrats over Republicans on the generic congressional ballot by a 12-point margin, though the plurality of swing voters (46 percent) are unsure which party they prefer.What were the top issues that would move swing voters to vote for a Democrat? Raising taxes on the wealthy, instituting Medicare for All, and banning artificial intelligence from using personal data to set wages or prices. Economic issues like these have been embraced by progressive candidates, such as Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Randy Villegas in California, and Sam Forstag in Montana. Villegas and Forstag both won their House primaries against opponents who ran to the center, and El-Sayed’s Senate primary against an establishment centrist will be held on August 4.“I think the big takeaway from this report is that swing voters who could decide the midterms are not asking Democrats to sound more like Republicans,” said Ryan O’Donnell, DFP’s executive director.DFP ran a similar survey in 2024. At that time, swing voters tended to be younger and more racially diverse. Today, DFP found that there aren’t significant demographic differences between swing voters and other likely voters. Despite the change in demographics, economic issues have consistently remained a top priority for swing voters. “Even though the electorate’s changed, the fact that their focus on economic populism has stayed so consistent is something to consider,” O’Donnell said.Other findings in the report support that notion. DFP asked respondents what issues they consider most when deciding which candidates to vote for. The top three issues were “economy, jobs, and the cost of living,” which 38 percent of respondents selected; “programs like Social Security and Medicare,” which 17 percent selected; and “health care,” which came in at 6 percent. So-called culture-war issues ranked far lower: Only around 3 percent of respondents selected “LGBTQ+ issues” as their top priority, and around 1 percent selected “race relations and racism.” Notably, “immigration” was the third-highest issue in 2024 but has fallen to twelfth in this year’s survey.Swing voters also shared what they find most concerning about the Democratic Party, and the results echo what many progressive members of the party have been saying for years: 32 percent of respondents said that “leadership is too old and out of touch,” and another 32 percent said that the party is “not doing enough to lower costs.”Some economic populists have rejected the Democratic Party brand and are running instead as independents, like Senate candidate Dan Osborn in Nebraska. “He’s doing a great job at pushing that message in Nebraska,” O’Donnell said. “Swing voters in general largely reject partisan and ideological labels, so it reflects that, as well.”Overall, the poll helps dispel the popular wisdom that running a conservative, centrist campaign is the best way to get the support of those in the middle. “If I were a Democratic leader reading this, I would say that these results indicate that taking a more conservative stance is not the way to win over the voters you need to win,” he said.

Troy Jackson, Shenna Bellows, and Nirav Shah all bring different qualities to a showdown with Susan Collins. The post Maine’s Three Likely Replacements for Graham Platner appeared first on The American Prospect.

Sens. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., Jon Husted, R-Ohio, Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, and Andy Kim, D-N.J., are backing the bill.

The vice president is focusing on domestic priorities while President Donald Trump and the military take point on the conflict.

At the NATO summit on Wednesday, Donald Trump lashed out wildly at, well, everyone in sight. He threatened more war with Iran. He angrily vowed to cut off all trade with Spain. He hinted again at stealing Greenland. There were many other pratfalls. Amid all this, a Danish journalist had an extraordinary confrontation with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, asking him point-blank: What does sitting next to Trump and praising him while he viciously attacks allies, threatens to take whole countries by conquest, and unleashes wildly destructive trade wars do to your “self-respect”? In an understated way, it was a crushing takedown of Trump, treating him as a ludicrous, sidelined figure while essentially saying: All that matters is how the rest of us react to this lunatic. We talked to foreign policy expert Elizabeth Saunders. She explains how deep and lasting Trump’s damage to the alliance will be, how our NATO allies are quietly managing Trump with flattery until he’s gone, and how they’re even trying to “de-Americanize”—that is, move on into the future without us. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

Democratic powerbrokers are now positioned to use the Maine Senate candidate’s withdrawal to overturn voters’ policy demands.