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Coffee Break: The Dem Establishment Goes All-In Against Platner

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While nominally an opposition party facing an existential fight with an authoritarian GOP, the Democratic party establishment and their allies in the MSM are laser-focused on taking out Graham Platner before he can win the party’s nomination for one of Maine’s US Senate seats.

Normie political observers can be forgiven for being confused by the behavior of the American Democratic party and its centrist leadership.

On the one hand, Dems seem utterly feckless to resist POTUS Trump and his MAGA-dominated GOP’s open attacks on the very electoral processes upon which the American Republic is based.

At the same time, elected Dems are reluctant to oppose Trump’s very unpopular, and highly illegal war, on Iran.

Meanwhile, state-level Democratic officials consistently deploy local police in support of ICE while congressional Democrats continually vote to increase the controversial department’s budget.

But what truly motivates establishment Dems is the need to crush populists within their own ranks, regardless of the political consequences.

Perhaps the polling explains these seeming anomolies.

Let’s Look at Some Polls

Maybe Democratic voters support Israel?

Looks like that’s a “no.”

Maybe Democratic voters want their elected officials to help ICE with support from state and local police and more congressional funding?

How about ICE, maybe Democratic voters are supporting Stephen Miller’s goon squads?

Here’s from a Marist poll in February:

Increasing proportions of Democrats (93% up from 83%) and independents (71% up from 59%) think the actions of ICE in enforcing immigration laws have gone too far.

Maybe it’s that Democratic voters are supporting the Iran War bigly:

Hmmm, that’s not it either.

Let’s ask a novelist wtf is going on.

Schumer Ain’t Going Nowhere

Reporter Daniel Drake and novelist Joseph O’Neill have been discussing the American political dilemma at the New York Review of Books and the latest installment has some insights.

O’Neill opens with a litany of actions the GOP seems likely to take to interfere in the 2026 mid-term elections including: “a presidential declaration of a national emergency; an illegal executive order commanding state authorities to suspend elections; and compliance with the illegal order by corrupt red-state authorities.”

O’Neill then speculates that these acts could take place “against the possible background of riots in the summer provoked by ICE and pro-GOP propaganda obscuring and normalizing the end of US democracy.”

Drake then lists some of the feckless acts of the Democrats, including spending the first weeks of Trump’s illegal war on Iran “issuing timorous statements that criticized Trump for not doing a good enough job weakening the Iranians, rather than opposing the war outright, then pivoted to fretting about the influence of Hasan Piker, a popular podcaster, on their party” and outlining the issues where the GOP is least popular — the war, the genocide in Gaza, AI data centers, inflation, unemployment — and then bemoaning the Dems’ inability to forge a powerful opposition out of this raw material.

Then Drake pops the big question.

Drake: If you were Chuck Schumer, what would you do?

O’Neill: If I were Senator Schumer, I would take stock of the polls, which reveal an amazingly unpopular Democratic Party that is despised by its own base. I would take stock of the collapse of DNC and DSCC fundraising. I would ask myself if I was responsible for this disastrous state of affairs. I would answer this question in the affirmative. Because I, Chuck Schumer, and my network of politicians, consultants, and donors, have for decades controlled the Democratic Party—its policy platform, its brand management, its finances, its political strategy. I’d reflect that that I am indeed unequipped—temperamentally, ideologically, and (at seventy-five) physically—to engage in the politics that this moment calls for. And I’d finally accept that my loyalty to the interests of the Democratic Party conflicts with my loyalty to Israeli interests and, by extension, to the interests of Likud’s sister party in the US, the Republican Party. Then I’d resign as Senate minority leader.

This is precisely what will not happen.

Your question about feckless Democrats has never been more urgent or exhausting. About a week ago, 144 House Democrats voted to give ICE, supposedly the government agency they’re very concerned about, new surveillance powers in the name of combating—wait for it—retail theft. Then Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, succumbed to pressure from Trump to commute the prison sentence of the corrupt elections clerk and would-be election saboteur Tina Peters. The structural challenge is that enormous investments have been made in the status quo. You and I might think that we need a principled, vigorously forward-looking, worker-aligned, and adversarial Democratic Party that’s free from the corrupting influence of foreign and corporate donors. But powerful factions—the Congressional Black Caucus, the Problem Solvers Caucus, the AIPAC brigade, etc.—are intensely suspicious of any change that might disturb the current distribution of machine power, especially if the change comes from the left. It isn’t neurosis that has disabled the party’s response to authoritarianism. It’s pathological careerism.

Are Careerists Threatened by Platner?

O’Neill’s analysis goes a long way toward explaining the massive centrist Dem and MSM freakout about Maine’s likely Democratic US Senate nominee Graham Platner.

The last fortnight has seen attacks on Platner from GOP war criminal turned Democrat David Frum, Saudi Arabia’s top lobbyist, glass-house dweller David Brooks calling Platner a “moral degenerate”, and wall-to-wall handwringing about Platner in the NY Times:

The most damning attacks on Platner aired by the NYT come from a single woman, Lyndsey Fifield.

Ryan Grim has more on Fifield’s background:

It’s kind of wild to find out that the Republican in the NYT story that says she had a toxic relationship with Graham Platner is Lyndsey Fifield. Having been in DC for too long, I know a decent number of people who know her quite well. For a long time she was the co-host of a podcast with her best friend Bethany Mandel, called Ladybrains, though she has also worked for multiple super PACs, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Heritage Foundation.

Some background, presented without judgment: In 2014, Fifield began work as digital director for American Action Network, a Republican Super PAC that oversees House races. The next year she became social media manager for the Heritage Foundation, where she stayed for the next seven years.

In 2022, she joined the Super PAC backing Nikki Haley for president, switching to the official campaign side the next year, and staying until the campaign flamed out. She now lists herself as a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, a prominent dark money group that is best known for helping usher Brett Kavanaugh on to the Supreme Court and giving Susan Collins the talking points she needed to make her decisive speech in his favor.

The NYT breezed past all this, saying she was “a Virginia conservative who has worked for right-leaning groups and Republican campaigns.”

In an interview for a news outlet called Red Alert Politics that named her to a “30 under 30” list back in 2016, she said that she wanted to “emulate the late conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart’s approach to online activism.” Breitbart, known for pushing the boundaries when it came to political combat, is perhaps best remembered for having exposed Anthony Weiner’s penchant for sending nudes to young girls, and for his work elevating James O’Keefe.

That she worked for Independent Women’s Forum recently is even wilder since IWF played a critical role in Kavanaugh’s confirmation and in persuading Collins to support it.

Heather Higgins, chair of IWF, laid out the group’s role in a talk several years ago. “We wrote a memo. It was used by a lot of members of the Senate and the House, Fox News, and elsewhere. Most important, Susan Collins told me that without that memo, she would not see how to support him,” Higgins said. “And if you look at the speech she gave on the Senate floor, it’s entirely the playing out and architecture of how we said to structure the argument — what to say and how to say it, which is just so gratifying. We’re watching TV and we’re like, ‘That’s ours! That’s ours!’”

Meanwhile, the timeline Fifield gives of their relationship is confusing, because during at least some of that time she was actually dating a different person, her longterm boyfriend who became her fiancee before she called off the wedding in 2018. We all know this because she and Mandel did a podcast episode on it that went mega-viral in Republican circles back then. Apparently this is the kind of thing the NYT thinks is important now, so I guess it requires more reporting. I’ll report back.

The NYT does at least admit that most of Platner’s supporters are standing behind him:

Many Democrats here say they’re unconcerned by reports about Mr. Platner’s personal history, dismissing them as distractions from more pressing matters. They say that they’re thrilled to see a political outsider like Mr. Platner, an oysterman, on the ballot, and that they’re inspired by his progressive message. And the prospect of handing another term to Senator Susan M. Collins, a Republican, does not sit well with them.

There’s also some inside game going on.

Who’s Who Behind the Scenes

The Bulwark has an interesting take on the intra-consultant rivalry driving some of the attacks on Platner:

…it is the Philadelphia-based ad firm chiefly behind Platner’s rise that has taken it most on the chin.

Fight Agency is a new shop that has had a fairly remarkable run of success. Launched in 2025 by alums of the campaigns of John Fetterman, Ruben Gallego, and Bernie Sanders, the group quickly set the pace for the rest of the party in re-engaging the Trump-curious voters it lost in 2024. Its formula was fairly obvious: elevate more nontraditional, outside-the-box candidates with a working-class and anti-establishment appeal. And it scored arguably one of the most significant wins over the past year, when it helped a previously unknown New York state assemblyman named Zohran Mamdani to Gracie Mansion.

Platner seemed poised to be Fight Agency’s next triumph. And he may very well prove to be.
…
Consultants aligned with the campaign have accused those critical of it of trying to plant stories designed to force Platner from the race. Their main target has been Genevieve McDonald, a former state legislator who was Platner’s political director.

McDonald left the campaign in October after Platner’s old Reddit account resurfaced. And she has not hidden her concern about the trajectory of the campaign. Platner’s allies have responded by attacking her for being a source for the Wall Street Journal sexting article, releasing incredibly private details that were divulged to her by Platner and his wife.
…
THE FRUSTRATION WITH FIGHT AGENCY’S handling of the Platner race is symptomatic of a larger debate within the party—a debate not just over how to expand Democrats’ appeal but also over which consulting groups and operatives ought to be entrusted to bring the party into the future.

Then there are those in the party who’ve stressed that Minority Leader Chuck Schumer deserves to shoulder just as much of the blame as Platner and his team. They argue that Schumer’s decision to recruit the term-limited Mills to the race—sending a clear signal to other ambitious Maine Democrats to get lost—led a slate of high-quality candidates to run for governor instead. While Mills hemmed and hawed all summer long about whether to run for Senate, the field was left wide open. Platner was largely alone in it, helping his candidacy to take off.

Sludge has a look at the dark money arrayed against Platner:

Two dark money nonprofits incorporated in Delaware with no public presence and no disclosed staff have contributed at least $750,000 to a super PAC working to defeat likely Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner in Maine. A federal watchdog group says the groups’ spending looks like an illegal straw donor scheme.

Condorcet Initiative Corp. has given $500,000 to Pine Tree Results PAC across two separate donations, including $250,000 on May 1 that was disclosed in a filing reported to the Federal Election Commission last week. Ardleigh Impact Corporation contributed an additional $250,000 in April. The PAC has spent nearly $4 million on attack ads against Sen. Susan Collins’ Democratic challenger Graham Platner, according to FEC data. Rather than engaging with policy, the ads are exclusively focused on personal attacks against Platner, digging up comments the candidate made online going back as far as 2013.

Both organizations list a Springfield, Virginia address—7816 Rose Garden Lane—that property records show is the home of Staci Goede, a former chief financial officer of the Republican State Leadership Committee who now runs a political consulting firm called SAGE Advisory Group. Ardleigh was incorporated in Delaware in October 2023 and began funneling millions of dollars of dark money into Republican super PACs just months later, and Condorcet was established in December 2023 and has followed a similar pattern. Neither group has a public website or any visible activity beyond writing checks to political committees.

Why All the Hate?

David Sirota’s feature on Platner at The Lever gives some clues:

In his out-of-nowhere Senate bid that could decide America’s midterm elections, Platner invokes that word a lot: “power.” Which is weird coming from a member of a Democratic Party that almost never promises to wield it, mostly casts it as something to fear, and rarely uses it for anything other than stomping its left-leaning voters and enriching its donors.

Platner is promising the opposite in his crusade to unseat Maine’s longtime Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins. After combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, a post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis, and then a political firestorm over his internet comments and tattoo, Platner seems to now be in the DGAF stage of his candidacy, not just pledging to wield power, but telling a story about agency rarely uttered outside the pages of a Howard Zinn tome.

“ We are in a new era of American history — an era that looks a lot more like the 1880s, the 1930s, and the 1960s than it does the last 40 years,” he told the crowd in a line he repeats at every campaign event I’ve seen him at. “We have entered an era of a politics of power. And in this nation, power comes from two places: organized money and organized people, and the money is organized. That’s why it’s winning.”
…
Platner used a recent Pod Save America interview to reject the historical revisionism about the Democratic Party being spewed by Barack Obama’s former speechwriter, Jon Favreau. During a discussion about the financial crisis, Platner told the program’s liberal audience that Democrats’ insistence on protecting big banks as millions were foreclosed on was part of what disillusioned so many working-class voters.

Platner also refuses to code-shift on matters of war and peace, as he campaigns against the culture of permanent war.

Matt Stoller has more on Platner positions that may be setting off the oligarchy:

Platner has a clear anti-corporate philosophy, which we saw last year when he coherently discussed, of all things, lobster regulations.

“The state of Maine has passed laws over the years that have regulated the lobster industry in a very specific way, and it means there’s one boat, one captain, one license. Fishing can only be conducted while the captain is aboard. This has entirely disincentivized consolidation,” he explained. “The result is a half-a-billion-dollar-a-year industry for the state of Maine that has almost no corporate ownership.”

Platner is a populist. He rejects corporate PAC money, supports breaking up health care monopolies, called to “bring the hammer of antitrust” down on the Paramount-Warner merger, and has even gone after the Fanatics monopoly for screwing over sports fans. And his broad view is that big business today is simply too profitable.

He also has a basic opposition to the U.S. alliance with Israel and the broad security architecture underpinning the post-Cold War world. Like Mamdani, Platner does not see a world dominated by American finance as a safe place, or worth preserving. And that is a frightening prospect to most political and economic elites, whose positions of prestige and wealth are dependent on this particular architecture, and whose last real challenge was during the Great Financial Crisis.

While it seems likely Platner will win the primary, time will tell if the attacks on him continue and if they have any impact in the general election.

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2 comments

  1. John M

    I think Platner will do quite well and will likely win the election against Collins. The Trump playbook of attacking the “crooked” media can work for any candidate, and, honestly, in this case, it looks like the NYT is trying to do a hit-job on him.

    I read from other sources that Platner had a town hall yesterday that was well-attended and Mainers cheered him on. I think the attacks from the Schumer-aligned groups will likely fall flat, especially with young people.

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