General Discussion

Gifted from the WaPo
https://wapo.st/4aHn0y2

They didn't vet him for some reason....
They kept defending him when his flaws showed

What Graham Platner’s rise and unraveling reveal about the politics of 2026

The fatal miscalculation by the liberal activists who fueled the rise of an unknown 41-year-old Maine oyster farmer and combat veteran was not that they failed to vet Graham Platner.

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His backers were dazzled both by the prospect of putting forward a talented political outsider to take his shot at flipping a must-win Senate seat — and by the rebuke it would be to their own party’s entrenched establishment.

Though a rushed early scrub of Platner’s background had revealed a few potential problems, including some offensive posts that he had made on social media, his top strategist, Daniel Moraff, argued in a June interview with the Wall Street Journal that Mainers would actually view his flaws as selling points in his bid to unseat Republican incumbent Susan Collins.

“If what the voters wanted were people who were grown in vats and had never done or said anything that they might regret their entire lives, we’d have a very different country,” Moraff told interviewer Aaron Zitner. “Part of our thesis here is that people do not want their candidates grown in vats. They want people who are real human beings, and they want people who do not look and sound like the vat-grown people who’ve been leading this country off a cliff.”