Maine Democrats running to replace Platner as Senate nominee scramble to woo his voters

Graham Platner went from Maine Democrats' great progressive hope to "the disgraced oysterman" in about the time it takes to shuck a bag of littlenecks. That phrase alone tells you how fast this fell apart, and now the party is left holding a Senate nomination nobody quite wants to touch but everybody needs to inherit.

What's actually happening here is a scramble to keep Platner's voters without keeping Platner. That's a neat trick if you can pull it off. His base didn't show up because they loved the Democratic Party establishment. They showed up because he wasn't the establishment, or at least played the part well enough. Now the same apparatus that was lukewarm on him is trying to convince his supporters that whoever gets anointed next carries the same energy. Voters tend to notice when they're being handed a substitute and told it tastes the same.

And all of this is happening because Susan Collins is still standing there, four-term incumbent, having outlasted every wave that was supposed to take her out. Maine Democrats keep telling themselves this is finally the cycle. Instead they're going to spend the next stretch relitigating why their handpicked guy imploded rather than making a case against her record.

There's a lesson in here that goes beyond Maine. When a party outsources its enthusiasm to a candidate it never fully vetted, it ends up paying for it twice: once in the scandal, and once in the scramble to pretend the scandal didn't happen.