Platner's fall should not discredit outsider candidates, columnist argues

Working-class voter demand for non-traditional politicians remains strong

Graham Platner’s exit from the Maine Senate race has prompted a debate among Democrats about the role of outsider candidates, but Guardian US columnist Bhaskar Sunkara argued that the party should not draw the wrong lesson from his departure.

Platner ended his campaign last week after a woman publicly alleged he had sexually assaulted her, an accusation he denied. In a column published Sunday, Sunkara wrote that while Platner’s exit is “no doubt a good thing that will make it easier for Democrats to win back the Senate,” the broader interpretation being placed on it is misguided.

“His collapse is being turned into something larger, supposed proof that people from outside politics have no business being in it,” Sunkara wrote.

Sunkara, the president of the Nation and the founding editor of Jacobin, took aim at establishment figures who have argued that Platner’s vulnerabilities reflect the dangers of running untested candidates. He quoted Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, who wrote amid the initial allegations: “Say what you will, but the establishment vets candidates.”

He also cited The Atlantic’s characterization that the movement behind Platner prized “an intensity of commitment” over “a mastery of policy detail.”

Sunkara pushed back on what he described as the implicit claim that “governing is a job for professionals, and that the amateurs should sit back down.”

“The establishment vets candidates, we are told. And yet Bill Clinton was vetted. So were Andrew Cuomo and Eric Swalwell,” he wrote, arguing that the professional class also produces its share of offenders.

The real vetting that occurs, Sunkara wrote, screens for a different set of criteria: “whether a candidate can largely self-finance a race, or has friends who can; whether they come out of the right alumni networks, know the right donors, and strike the right lobbyists as non-threatening.”

He cited data to support his argument, writing that fewer than one in 50 members of Congress came up in a working-class job and that barely 2% of Democratic candidates worked exclusively in blue-collar jobs before running. Including teachers and nurses, the figure stays under 6%.

Voters, however, appear to want a different profile, Sunkara argued. He cited a study by the Center for Working Class Politics that found working-class voters preferred working-class candidates — “such as construction workers and teachers” — and “ranked lawyers near the very bottom, above only corporate executives.” On average, the study found a five- to six-point boost for candidates with working-class backgrounds.

“That is the appetite Platner met,” Sunkara wrote, adding that Platner “connected because he talked like a normal person and because he said the party had failed the people it claims to speak for.”

Sunkara pointed to Dan Osborn, a trade unionist and industrial mechanic who ran as an independent Senate candidate in deep-red Nebraska in 2024, as an example of an outsider appealing to the same impulse. Osborn, Sunkara wrote, “outran Kamala Harris by 14 percentage points” in that race. The columnist quoted Osborn’s stump line: “The Senate is a country club of millionaires that work for billionaires.”

The column argued that the structural problem is not voter resistance to outsiders but the difficulty of competing at the highest levels without connections and money.

“The lesson of Maine is not that we need fewer amateurs,” Sunkara wrote. “We need far more of them, recruited seriously, through class-rooted organizations.”

He cited left-wing historical precedents — Germany’s Social Democrats, led for decades by carpenter August Bebel; Brazil’s Workers’ Party, led by a metalworker with little formal schooling; the CIO union federation’s founding of the first political action committee during the New Deal to get workers into Congress — to argue for what he called “old wisdom on the left”: that working-class people needed their own representatives.

Sunkara noted that today, only a handful of groups, such as New Jersey’s state AFL-CIO, Osborn’s Working Class Heroes Fund, and local Democratic Socialists of America chapters, make any effort at working-class candidate recruitment.

“Without countervailing efforts, we’ll be stuck with a politics staffed entirely by the credentialed — people less likely to recognize and govern in the interests of workers,” he wrote.

“Platner’s demons are his own,” Sunkara concluded. “But his fall should not be conscripted into an argument that people without law degrees ought to leave politics to our betters. The professionals running the Democratic party have had a long turn at the wheel. They lost workers and lost the country’s trust. We deserve a different kind of politics, and a different kind of politician.”