Dropping Candidates Is Getting to Be a Habit -- and It's Not a Sign of Strength

It's beginning to be a habit. It, in this case, is the messy business of center-left political jettisoning one leader suddenly deemed unelectable and, without resort to the usual rules or democratic procedure, designating a replacement. It's the process that came fairly close to giving Americans President Kamala Harris in 2024.

It's happening not just here but all over the Anglosphere. While the American political firmament post-July 4 was preoccupied with demands for the ouster of Maine's Democratic nominee for the Senate, Graham Platner, our cousins in Britain were witnessing the protracted ouster of Labour Party Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his replacement by Birmingham Mayor Andy Burnham.

Labour Party leaders used to last a long time. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown held Number 10 Downing Street, with huge popular vote victories and matching parliamentary majorities across the square in Parliament, for 13 years. Now, Labour owes its parliamentary majority to a fracturing of other parties' coalitions and is picking a third consecutive leader who played no visible role in national government in recent years. And hoping that it's not on the verge of nearly disappearing like social democratic parties in France, Germany and Italy.

Sometimes this works, as it did last year in Canada. Liberal party Prime Minister Justin Trudeau started 2025 hugely unpopular, the target of President Donald Trump's jibes that Canada would become the 51st state. Liberals ditched Trudeau for Mark Carney, who had conveniently spent most of the previous decade in London as head of the Bank of England.

America's Democratic Party used to revere its leaders, not discard them. Paeans to Andrew Jackson rang out from historians George Bancroft in Jackson's time, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in the 1940s, and Jon Meacham in this century. Woodrow Wilson, booster of racial segregation and speech suppression, repudiated hugely at the polls in the 1920s, was rated the fourth-best president by 1940s political scientists.

More recently, Democrats have revered Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, overlooking their weaknesses, for their great talents and some genuine successes. They're celebrated as tribunes of working-class Americans during that "midcentury moment" when the nation seemed culturally unified but economically divided along union-versus-management lines.

The Democratic Party has always been a (sometimes unruly) coalition of out-groups, but the identities of the out-groups have changed. The Roosevelt-Kennedy party was a coalition of white Southerners and blue-collar workers, farmers and union members. But the Clinton-Obama party has morphed into a coalition of white college graduates and racial minorities (with Hispanics trending Republican).

Party leaders and loyalists, however, still long to see themselves as champions of a downtrodden working class. This has inclined them, when searching for a presidential candidate in early 2020, to focus on the Scranton roots of Joe Biden, son of a Chevy salesman and grandson of a state legislator.

And, when searching in early 2026 for a Senate candidate in Maine, the only state Harris won where a Republican is defending, to enchantment with the grizzled oyster farmer Graham Platner, a prep school dropout and grandson of a nationally prominent modernist architect.

Platner's candidacy was hatched by a couple of Democratic Socialists of America organizers and advanced by what one of its insiders calls "a strong network of groups and consultants to elect far-left candidates."

Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) charged in with endorsements and stuck with Platner after revelations about his Nazi tattoo and weird behavior with women. The New York Times "did its part" with a long June 4 story which stressed one woman accuser's conservative ties. "Is there any chance The New York Times' original reporting on this was not corrupt?" asked veteran analyst Mark Halperin.

All were leaning on a wide-open door. Maine Democratic primary voters gave Platner 72% of their votes on June 9. In the primary and in polling against incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Platner, like the three victorious DSA candidates in New York congressional primaries on June 23, ran strongest among affluent white college grads and far behind among working-class Democrats whose characteristics he supposedly embodied. Especially important to these voters, it seems, is denunciation of supposed Israeli genocide and a Weimar-like loathing of "Zionists."

Inside the DSA tent, former organizer Evan Barker recalls witnessing "a daily bashing of white people, animosity for the 'deplorables' who voted for Trump, deep hatred of men, and an obsession with race that infiltrated every conversation, policy proposal, and objective." Much of the press will try to hide this. But sooner or later, the truth gets out.

Politico's Monday story, which included allegations amounting to rape of a Democratic woman, has prompted almost all Democratic politicians to urge Platner to step aside, and, under Maine law, he can petition to take his name off the ballot until the close of business on Monday, July 13.

Today's Democrats are acting much like Canada's liberals who dumped Trudeau, Britain's Labourites who pushed out Starmer, and the 2024 Democrats who spent nearly four weeks pushing Biden off the ticket after his disastrous debate performance.

As this is written, Platner hasn't complied. He may be reflecting that Al Franken might still be a senator from Minnesota and Andrew Cuomo governor of New York had they not resigned in response to lesser charges. He may calculate that, if he stays on the ballot, many Maine voters may end up voting for him, perhaps enough (it's a Democratic state in an era of straight-ticket voting) to make him a U.S. senator. A low chance, certainly, but not nada and more than it ever will be again if he drops out and slinks back into private life.

There are lessons here aplenty. It's risky to support little-known candidates. Nostalgia for a working-class politics that hasn't existed for two generations can produce bad strategy. It's off-putting when those who claim to be preserving "democracy" overturn the choices of voters. Going off the deep end may not be a profitable response to the otherwise going off the deep end.

Trump's affection for tariffs and inability or unwillingness to force regime change in Iran have put his party on the path to off-year losses. But the anti-American rhetoric and the dicey candidates of the DSA Democrats are making their side unacceptable, even repulsive, to many voters. Ditching unpopular leaders sometimes helps, but not so much if it gets to be a habit.

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Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. His new book, "Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America's Revolutionary Leaders," is now available.