Friday on CNN’s “Inside Politics,” chief national correspondent John King said Maine voters want Graham Platner to “shut up” and “go away.”
Host Dana Bash said, “Let’s talk about Maine, even though you’re in Michigan. You have been spending a lot of time — first of all, you were in Maine last month — and then since then, you have been staying in touch, I know, with the voters, particularly the female voters who were already kind of on the fence about Platner. What are you hearing from them now that Platner has imploded?”
King said, “First and foremost, they wish he would shut up. Forgive my language, but they wish he would just shut up. They didn’t like his exit video where he portrayed himself as the victim. They think he’s the problem, and they think the people around him — again, the Bernie Sanders supporters, the consultants, and the unions that recruited Graham Platner — are still trying to play an active role in that race.”
He continued, “And that might be important to some of the progressives who supported Platner, but it is annoying to those who did not, or to those who supported Platner reluctantly and now want to move on from the whole episode — not just him, but them, if you will, all the people around him. So, as this plays out, we now have to go through this two-week process to pick a successor, and it has a lot of Maine Democrats nervous. As you noted, this was the number-one opportunity for Democrats — a Republican-held Senate seat coming into the cycle. It was opportunity number one: get Maine, take Maine from Republican Susan Collins. Now Democrats are worried this fractured family will cost them the race again. To go back in time: you know, Kamala Harris won Maine by nine points. So you say, “Oh, we can win by six points.” I’m sorry — we say we can’t win this state? Why can’t Democrats win the state? Go back further: Joe Biden won it by nine. So Maine is there for the taking for the Democrats. But you know this as well as I do — I just want to remind people, Susan Collins was also on the ballot in 2020, when Joe Biden won the state by nine points, and she was re-elected.
King added, “That’s what Democrats worry about. She has proven, in a difficult climate — 2020 was a blue year, it was a Democratic year — that she can eke out a win. Democrats up there know that she’s competitive, know that she can do this. They’re worried, just like they’re worried here, that if you have a — now you have another fractured Democratic fight to pick your nominee — that some people on the losing side decide to stay home in November. So Maine, Maine: number one, wants to get a candidate; number two, the people who had reservations about Platner before just wish he would be quiet and go away now.”
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