BLUE HILL, Maine – Graham Platner, the progressive left, and appear to be the big winners in Tuesday’s high-profile primaries in Maine and South Carolina.
Platner, the oyster farmer and military combat veteran who has been facing plenty of incoming fire amid mounting controversies, cruised to the Democratic nomination Tuesday in and will now face longtime moderate Republican Sen. Susan Collins in a key race that is among a handful which will likely determine if Republicans hold their Senate majority in the midterm elections.
Meanwhile, in solidly red South Carolina, Trump-backed Sen. Lindsey Graham won a majority of the vote in the Senate GOP primary and will avoid a runoff against a primary challenger from the right.
And the candidate the president endorsed in the state’s Republican gubernatorial primary, Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, finished on top of a crowded field of contenders and will advance to a runoff election in two weeks against longtime South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, who came in second.
Here’s what we learned in the key June 9th primaries.
The left storms back
The convincing victory by Platner, who was backed by progressive champions Sens. of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Rep. Ro Khanna of California, looks to be another feather in the cap for the left in their intra-party face-off with the establishment.
The primary in Maine was held a week after Iowa state Rep. John Turek, who was supported by longtime Senate Democratic Leader Sen. , won the Democratic Senate primary and will face Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson in another crucial midterm showdown.
Turek, a wheelchair basketball player who won two Paralympic gold medals, defeated the more progressive candidate, state Sen. Zach Wahls. The divisive and expensive primary battle was viewed as a proxy war between the establishment and anti-establishment wings of the party.
Fast-forward a week and the ballot box performance by Platner, who promotes an economically populist agenda as he takes aim at corporate influences and advocates for the working class, gives a boost to the left.
“The Democratic establishment and powerful interests spent months trying to stop Graham Platner. Instead, they demonstrated that voters in Maine and across America want to elect shake-up-the-system outsiders,” Progressive Change Campaign Committee co-founder Adam Green emphasized.
And Green warned that Platner’s victory “should be a wake-up call for a Democratic establishment that has spent too long underestimating the appeal of economic populism and outsider politics.”
What controversies?
Platner in recent weeks has been facing one of the roughest stretches of his bid for the U.S. Senate.
The candidate has been playing defense the past month, amid . They include inflammatory online comments made on Reddit, a well-publicized and now covered-up tattoo on his chest that resembled a Nazi symbol, recent reports that he exchanged sexually explicit messages with several women while married, and new allegations last week from ex-girlfriends of a history of rape fantasies, heavy drinking and violent episodes. Platner has called the latest allegations of violence untrue.
On Monday, a day before the primary election, a former high-level staffer from the Platner campaign that Platner “is not someone who would be good for Maine or for the country.”
While the triggered some Democrats in the nation’s capital to question whether Platner was damaged goods and needed to be replaced, the candidate this past weekend thanked Maine voters for continuing to support him.
“When hurtful things I said on the internet a decade ago came out into the public as I shared my personal journey through PTSD and darkness of recovery and accountability and growth. Maine had my back,” Platner said at a rally Friday not far from his hometown in Down East Maine. “Now,
