Kyle Kulinski wants to talk about Bill Clinton and Gaza. Nobody wants to talk about why Maine had two clean alternatives to Graham Platner a
Jul 08, 2026
It’s not like Maine was experiencing a statewide shortage of anti-war progressives. Nirav Shah, the former director of the Maine CDC, was running in the very same cycle and said outright that he opposed sending aid to Israel and considers what’s happening there a genocide. Troy Jackson, the longtime state senate president and a logger by trade, ran with backing from the Democratic Socialists of America and endorsements from the very same pro-Palestinian progressives—Ro Khanna and Bernie Sanders—who eventually lined up behind Platner. Same ideological lane. Same coalition. Same policy agenda. Dramatically fewer opportunities for an opposition researcher to yell, “Oh, you’ve got to see this.”
It’s almost impressive. They walked into a political buffet full of candidates who believed everything they believed, looked around the room, and somehow came out carrying the one entrée with a giant warning label on it. That takes commitment. Bad judgment, admittedly—but commitment nonetheless....
It really is that simple: you got behind a flawed candidate. That’s it. That’s the whole conversation. Not left versus center, not establishment versus anti-establishment — just, does your side actually vet the people it falls in love with, or does it treat every red flag as an attack from outside rather than information from inside? Because this isn’t new, and it isn’t confined to one wing of the party. Before Platner, there was Eric Swalwell in my own state of California — the frontrunner for governor, forced to resign from Congress this spring after multiple women came forward with allegations ranging from unwanted advances to rape. Different ideology, different state, same pattern: known behavior, quietly tolerated, publicly ignored, right up until it wasn’t.
So let’s stop pretending this is about ideology, because it never was. Swalwell wasn’t too centrist. Platner wasn’t too progressive. Neither one of them got caught because of where they sat on the political spectrum — they got caught because their own parties spent months, sometimes years, treating documented red flags as noise instead of information. That’s the actual pattern, and it’s the only one that matters.


















