Democrats needed a replacement candidate for Graham Platner. The name at the top of their list comes with his own problem.
Troy Jackson, former president of the Maine Senate and the most prominently floated name to replace Graham Platner on the ticket, was vetted by Progressive Victory, a far-left political organization — which promptly discovered that Jackson allegedly struck a female colleague with a bottle he threw at her during a heated Maine state senate caucus meeting. "There are many witnesses," the group reported, "and it appears this is a widespread open secret within Maine politics and not an isolated incident." Jackson's team denied it. Progressive Victory said the denial alone "is not a credible refutation on its own" and pledged to keep investigating.
So the plan to solve Democrats' candidate problem in Maine is to replace the candidate facing two sexual misconduct allegations with a candidate who allegedly violently assaulted at a woman in front of multiple witnesses.
Democrat's bench, it turns out, has its own issues.
Democrats abandoned Platner earlier this week after a accuser, Jenny Racicot, came out with explosive rape allegations against the Senate candidate for the state of Maine. Lyndsey Fifield is the latest woman to detail the abuse she suffered from Platner during their relationship. Fifield said Platner removed condoms during sex without telling her approximately six times during their relationship from 2013 to 2014. She says she confronted him about it — both during and after — because she wasn't on birth control. His response, according to Fifield, was to act "cute about it, like 'Oh sneaky me.'"
Fifield first spoke off the record on June 20 before going public with her account this week. Her allegation of "stealthing" — the nonconsensual removal of a condom during intercourse — is classified as a form of sexual assault in Maine, as well as in California and Washington. It's treated the same way in Britain, Canada, and Australia. This isn't a gray area in her home state's own legal code.
Her account lands on top of Jenny Racicot's allegation that Platner sexually assaulted her in 2021 — a claim that already prompted scores of Democratic leaders to call for his withdrawal from the race to unseat Republican Senator Susan Collins. Among them: Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, described as Platner's "most loyal advocate" in the Senate. When Bernie Sanders tells you to go home, the party is over.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, called Platner "my kinda man." That quote has aged about as well as you'd expect.
The Platner campaign responded to Fifield's allegations by calling them "categorically false and politically motivated." That's the same template they used for Racicot. At a certain point, the "politically motivated" defense requires an explanation for why so many separate women, in separate years, with separate accounts, all independently decided to fabricate stories about the same man.
This race was supposed to be Democrats' best shot at flipping Republican Susan Collins' seat to their side. They recruited aggressively, raised enthusiastically, and now find themselves choosing between a candidate they can't defend and a backup who isn't much better.
Two accusers. Two separate time periods. One campaign response template. And a replacement option that comes pre-loaded with an open secret nobody bothered to check until the first choice imploded.
That's not a Senate campaign. That's a due diligence failure.