A Democratic Version of the Tea Party Is Emerging

One lesson of the Democratic Senate primary in Maine is that no one should underestimate the white-hot fury of the party’s voters.

In October, Graham Platner’s insurgent campaign appeared doomed. Janet Mills, Maine’s Democratic governor, had just entered the Senate primary race, reportedly at the urging of Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader. Then a barrage of devastating opposition research against Platner dropped. Journalists reported on old Reddit posts where he wrote that all cops are bastards, spoke about fighting fascism with guns and seemed to blame rape victims for their own assaults. His political director resigned. Hoping to get ahead of an even more damaging story, Platner revealed that a skull tattoo he’d gotten while he was in the Marines, when he was drunk with his friends on leave in Croatia, looked like a Nazi Totenkopf symbol. His public image abruptly transformed from working-class hero to guy with a Nazi tattoo. Many declared his candidacy dead.

But Maine Democrats, many of whom saw Platner in person as he tirelessly barnstormed across the state, seemed ready to look past the negative stories. On Thursday, Mike Hurley, the former mayor of Belfast, Maine, told me he “loves” Mills, but had been backing Platner because he wanted a brawler. While Republicans are playing “hardball,” he said, Democrats in Washington seem like they’re playing “T-ball.” Hurley was impressed, he said, by how Platner soldiered on after his disastrous October: “A lot of people would crumble under the kind of pressure he’s been under, and he’s not crumbling.” He felt as though he understood him. “Platner is a very recognizable kind of person in small towns,” said Hurley. “He’s a thoughtful loudmouth.”

On Thursday, Mills, trailing significantly in the polls, announced she was dropping out of the race, saying that she didn’t have the “financial resources” to continue. That clears the field for Platner to run against Maine’s longtime Republican senator Susan Collins, in a race that’s crucial to Democratic hopes of flipping the Senate. Washington Democrats both underestimated Platner and misread the mood of the primary electorate, which has been radicalized by revulsion toward Donald Trump.

Though a newcomer to politics, Platner turned out to be a natural on the stump. In October, at a low point in his campaign, I went to Maine to interview him and attend one of his town halls. Watching him address hundreds of people crammed into a small-town school auditorium, I could feel the charge in the air — that rare alchemy born when a politician is able to pull a crowd into a shared vision of the future. One attendee likened it to seeing Barack Obama when he first ran for president.

Platner spoke about the struggles of working people for whom a decent life seemed out of reach, about the disastrous wars he’d fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and about the need for a Democratic Party with New Deal-scale ambitions. And he spoke to people’s feelings of being abandoned to Trump’s depredations by a weak and fumbling Democratic Party. “Nobody is coming to save us,” he said, positioning himself as a leader who could help people save themselves.

Since then, Platner has used his campaign to organize for causes besides his own election. He rallied against a ballot initiative that would have required voter ID and restricted absentee voting. (It lost.) When ICE came to Lewiston, Maine, a town with a significant Somali population, he urged people to resist the agency the way that the citizens of Minneapolis had, celebrating those who, as he said in a fiery speech, “do real things to impede ICE’s operations and physically protect our communities.” He collects donations for food pantries at his events. His campaign feels, to many of his impassioned supporters, like a movement.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Maine candidate — and I don’t care who they are, Angus King, Susan Collins or Olympia Snowe — nobody has ever had this kind of response or support,” said Hurley.

Plenty of Democrats, particularly outside of Maine, worry about Platner’s electability. Primary voters were poised to forgive his tattoo and his hotheaded Reddit posts, but a general electorate might not be so understanding. And while Platner is leading Collins in the polls, Collins has beat expectations before. In 2020, most polls showed her trailing the Democrat Sara Gideon, who outspent Collins by millions, but Collins ended up winning by nine points.

For many Maine progressives, though, Gideon’s defeat only emphasizes the peril of playing it safe. “The Sara Gideon campaign was a disaster, I think, because they made her follow a script, and she came off as totally fake because of it,” said Andy O’Brien, a former Maine legislator who now works at the A.F.L.-C.I.O. By “they,” he means Democrats from Washington. Now, he said, Maine voters have lost all faith in the ability of the party’s establishment to pick winners. “They sold us these candidates like Hillary Clinton and Kamala as the most electable candidates, and they weren’t,” he said.

Of course, the dynamics propelling Platner’s rise aren’t confined to Maine. Democrats all over the country regard their party’s leaders as feckless in the face of Trump’s blustering authoritarianism. They are desperate to break up the power of the oligarchs arrayed around the president and believe Democrats have been too timid in pushing for sweeping reforms. A Democratic version of the Tea Party is emerging as voters seek to upend a system that they believe has failed them.

In New Jersey in February, Analilia Mejia, a veteran of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, won a special election primary in an affluent suburban district with little history of radicalism. The progressive epidemiologist Abdul El-Sayed, who has recently been campaigning with the left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, is competitive in Michigan’s Senate primary. The democratic socialist Francesca Hong has become a leading candidate in the Democratic primary for governor in Wisconsin. “Voters have a different theory of what is electable right now,” said Rebecca Katz, a founding partner of Fight Agency and a media consultant to both Platner and El-Sayed. “Someone who knows what they believe and is willing to fight for it.”

These voters could be wrong; candidates can still benefit from the perception of moderation. But there’s a widespread hunger in the country for populists and outsiders, and ordinary people don’t always think in the same ideological terms as pundits. As America slips deeper into social and economic crisis — likely to be exacerbated by the job-killing effects of artificial intelligence — the electorate might gravitate toward leaders offering far-reaching solutions.

“Things are going to get worse,” Platner told me in October. “Republican policies are not going to be improving people’s lives. And as things get worse, we need to have the apparatus built to bring people in, help them, connect them with their neighbors and give them an answer about who is truly at fault.” The primary was an early test of this theory. At least there, it looks as if it worked.