Platner, Bernie, and a hangover

I am tired of thinking about 2016. The general election is a big ol smear across the history of my industry (when polling broke for the first time in my career, but not the last). I worked on it, it sucked, it’s caused my entire political career to be “dealing with Trump”, although I am reliably informed politics was normal-er once. I am deeply sick of Trump, but since he’s still an active threat to the country, I’m usually worried enough to not be purely exasperated.

What I am purely and entirely Done With is the 2016 primary- on which I did not work, on account of being in college at the time. My memories of the actual events of the primary are of an exciting, competitive contest. At the time, I was already a little over the endless drama of DNC insiderism/emails/who exactly was or wasn’t pushing for Clinton. I found it irritating, especially since in the end, it all came down to voters....voting.

At this point, a full decade out, my opinion has shifted: I don’t really care if a primary election is “fair”. I don’t care if the 2016 primary was fair, I don’t care if the 2020 primary was fair, the 2024 primary such as it was was definitely not “fair”, whatever. What I care about is if they selected a good candidate.

Primaries are not a democratic process. They’re just not. When I worked on the Warren campaign, I spent a year pouring over the details of the primary process (and the caucuses, and the delegate allocation rules). I know more about the 2020-era DNC primary rules than I care to recall. The upshot of all that staring was Biden sweeping South Carolina and none of the clever math really mattering, which may contribute to my cynicism here.

But those rules are just...fake1. They’re not legally binding. They are not voted on in any meaningful sense. They change every cycle. We don’t quite know what the 2028 version will be yet (Josh Putnam at FHQ is the follow if you’re interested in the decision process). The rules-wrangling starts well after candidates have begun putting out feelers. A party could decide to do some true nonsense (boxing match, Mario Kart tournament) to select a candidate and it would get them on the ballot just as well as holding primary elections. It’s a popularity contest in a silly hat.

The shadow of the 2016-era “are the primary rules fair/is the DNC biased” Sanders-Clinton fight has hung over every single primary since then and I am so tired. It has been a full decade and the battle lines in the discourse are still the same every time2, even when the actual coalitions are super different (the Chair of the Maine Democratic Party was literally a Bernie delegate)3. It’s now an easy pattern for a certain type of candidate (lefty, outsider-y, doing a populist bit) to claim that the people running the primary are biased against them in some sense. This sleight of hand lets you brush off a loss and add shine to a win, with the one teensy tiny downside of spreading conspiratorial fallout over a perfectly ordinary process. There’s no consequences for framing every setback as the fault of a nebulous evil Them, I’m sure.

This is all on display in Maine. Platner and his allies have spent the last few days throwing accusations at the Maine party and preemptively complaining that the process to replace him won’t be fair. They’re also preemptively blaming the party for a general election loss, as if “losing to a highly successful Republican incumbent after your primary dissolved into chaos” is a fun situation the Maine Party chose on purpose. We don’t yet know how the replacement process will go - it seems like a snap convention, and the logistics here are a total nightmare- but I’m sure the complaining will continue.

Ten years on, what if we left this all behind for good? We could have new, different arguments. Perhaps they could be about policy, even. It might be a nice treat.

Anyways, goodbye Graham Platner, see you never.