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Maine Democrats Just Called Their Backroom Coronation of Platner Successor ‘Grassroots Democracy’

CORRUPTION

You cannot make this up. You genuinely can’t.

Maine Democrats gathered Saturday to handpick a replacement for Graham Platner — the Nazi-tattooed, rape-accused Senate candidate who imploded on a historic scale — and opened the proceedings with a land acknowledgement. Not a prayer for the voters whose trust they’re about to betray. A land acknowledgement. For the unceded homeland of the Penobscot nation. At a party meeting to select a Senate nominee that approximately zero Maine voters actually chose.

It went downhill from there.

Maine Democratic Vice Chair Imke Schessler looked at this room full of party insiders, this closed-door selection process involving 17,000 delegate voters out of the 200,000+ who participated in the actual primary, and described it with a straight face as “grassroots democracy in action.” The crowd laughed. At her. Which at least suggests some self-awareness remains in the Maine Democratic Party — though not enough to stop the proceedings.

Here’s the number that captures the absurdity perfectly. The third-place finisher in the Democratic primary — the candidate who received just 8% of the vote — got 17,560 votes. More people voted for the candidate who came in third place in the primary than participated in the delegate selection process that will now determine who faces Susan Collins in November. Maine Democratic Chair Charlie Dingman looked around the room anyway and said “look at what Maine Democrats did.” He was right, though perhaps not in the way he intended.

One attendee shouted “this is what democracy looks like” — and the room erupted in laughter. Even the people engineering this backroom coronation know how it looks. They’re doing it anyway because the calendar left them no choice and the voters left them no good options.

And then there’s Troy Jackson.

Jackson — the Bernie Sanders-backed former state Senate president who is the frontrunner to receive the party’s handpicked nomination — may not be legally eligible to appear on the November ballot. Maine has a “sore loser” law designed to prevent failed primary candidates from seeking a secondary route to the same ballot. Jackson finished third in the gubernatorial primary. Maine Republican Rep. James White has already flagged the eligibility question publicly. Republicans are expected to challenge Jackson’s candidacy in court the moment he receives the nomination.

So the Maine Democratic Party has achieved something genuinely impressive: they’ve created a process where the candidate most likely to emerge from their backroom selection may be ineligible to run, the selection process itself is being openly mocked by the people participating in it, the voter turnout for the process was smaller than the third-place primary finisher’s total, and all of this is happening in a race they were supposed to be winning.

Susan Collins is watching. She has survived everything the Maine Democratic Party has thrown at her for thirty years.

They’ve now thrown themselves.