The myth of the heroic legislator

Now that highly credible rape allegations have emerged against Democratic Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, he is likely to shortly drop out of the race. I’ve been rooting for this outcome for a long time, because I always thought Platner was the wrong candidate for that seat.

To briefly rehearse that argument, Maine is a blue state with moderate-ish tendencies whose representation in the Senate by Republican Susan Collins has become incongruous. Kamala Harris won Maine by seven points and Joe Biden by nine. All a Democratic Senate candidate needs to do is win most of the people who voted for them and they will win. You don’t need some edgy, risky candidate to do that. You just need a warm body who can activate Democrats’ natural partisanship without getting in their own way.

Graham Platner is not that candidate. But a lot of people convinced themselves that he was a good candidate anyway, because they liked something else about him. He combined working-class aesthetics and authenticity with a willingness to say the word “oligarchy” and perform the other rituals that separate Bernie Sanders-aligned progressives from other progressives (and which are, in all honesty, often all that separates the two).

I understand the desire of the Sanders wing to get Platner elected as one of their guys. Winning a Senate seat for your faction is a big deal and allows you to make the case that you are where the energy of the voters is, and so the rest of the party should follow you. And, if it weren’t for Platner’s personal history, he might well have succeeded - the baseline partisanship of a state matters a lot more for the outcome than precisely how progressive the candidate is, and nowadays Maine is pretty blue.

But what I cannot accept is the willingness with which everybody jumped to support Platner before the appropriate due diligence had been done on his background. And I think the reason that they were so willing to is based on a fallacy that I call the myth of the heroic legislator.

One of the reasons that talking to me about U.S. politics in real life can be a real downer is because I don’t tend to get that excited about the candidates everybody else is excited about. One reason for that is that I believe that, in general, the stakes involved in exchanging one Democratic legislator for another Democratic legislator of somewhat different ideology are close to zero. Individual members of Congress just do not matter that much.

They matter a bit more in the Senate than in the House, and they matter a bit more when control of either chamber is thin. But when it comes to actually governing the United States of America, replacing Adriano Espaillat with Darializa Avila Chevalier is going to have essentially zero impact. Nor is getting Graham Platner into Maine’s Senate seat as opposed to Janet Mills, his erstwhile establishment opponent.

But party factions - and it is by no means only progressives who do this - often ignore this. They see victory for their candidate as meaning that their governing philosophy is on the march, and soon they’ll be able to implement a sweeping agenda. And so they become willing to take risks, like betting one of their party’s best Senate pick-up opportunities on a guy with a Nazi tattoo, a history of making offensive comments on Reddit, and credible documented rape allegations against him.

I would really rather that everybody just focused on winning seats by finding the best candidate for that seat rather than turning every race into a grand ideological showdown. Because while replacing one Democratic legislator with another one makes little difference, replacing a Republican legislator with a Democratic one has enormous consequences. The differences between the parties are enormous, and blocking the GOP from implementing its agenda and creating the room for some sort of Democratic agenda is incredibly important.

Of course, there still needs to be scope for intra-party conflict. But if progressives want to run edgy candidates without vetting them properly, I would implore them to do it in D+50 races rather than D+7 races. After all, your own most tightly-controlled districts ought to be the place to seat your most ideologically extreme members. In the meantime, it would be better to leave winning strategically vital swing seats to somebody else.