Graham Platner no longer scheduled to speak at Labor Day rally

Graham Platner drops out of a Democratic Senate primary in Maine, and now he's not even allowed to show up and shake hands at a Labor Day rally. That's a fast fall for a guy who was supposedly the party's answer to Susan Collins. Something happened between "promising challenger" and "quietly uninvited," and the article doesn't tell us what, which is its own kind of tell.

Democrats love to talk about how they're the party of workers, the party that shows up on Labor Day and means it. Then one of their own candidates gets scrubbed from the lineup at the last minute, no real explanation offered, and everyone's supposed to just move along. If Platner said something that made leadership nervous, or if there's baggage nobody wants near a union crowd this close to an election year, voters deserve to know that plainly instead of watching him vanish from a schedule.

We've seen this movie before. A candidate gets built up as the fresh face who can finally beat an entrenched Republican like Collins, then gets memory-holed the moment he becomes inconvenient. Maine voters aren't stupid. They'll notice when the party that claims to fight for the working guy can't even let one stand at the podium on the one holiday built for him.

What we'd actually respect is a party willing to say out loud why a candidate got pulled, instead of hoping a Labor Day crowd doesn't ask questions. Collins has weathered a lot of challengers. She might be about to catch a break from her opponents' own mess instead.