Democrats’ Anti-Democracy Streak Continues Amid Platner Debacle

Late last week, scandal-ridden Graham Platner suspended his candidacy for U.S. Senate in Maine, touching off a mad dash to find his replacement on the Democrat ticket. This won’t be easy for the Democrat leadership of the Pine Tree State, but they do have one advantage – they won’t need to consult with any pesky primary voters about who will get the party’s Senate nomination. A few hundred Democrats will hold a “party convention,” choose a new nominee, and simply announce their decision by July 27.

Does this movie seem familiar? The Democrats have a long tradition of arbitrarily replacing inconvenient nominees at the eleventh hour without voter input, with the most obvious example being the 2024 Biden-Harris bait-and-switch. Biden became the party’s presumptive nominee after winning the Georgia primary on March 12, 2024. But after his disastrous June debate performance, the Democrats forced him to drop out of the race, whereupon Kamala Harris was handed the party’s presidential nomination without having won a single primary vote.

This is, however, hardly the only time the Democrats have circumvented their own voters.

In 2016, for example, after Indiana Republican Senator Dan Coats retired, the Democrats nominated former Congressman Baron Hill to run against GOP Congressman Todd Young to fill the open seat. Then the Indiana Democrat Party decided that former Senator Evan Bayh would have a far better chance of defeating Young than Hill, so they bullied the latter into withdrawing from the race. Hill notified Indiana voters of his decision via the following Facebook post:

“I am a pragmatic person who will always put my country and my state first. I am also a proud Democrat who wants to see an Indiana Democrat fighting for Hoosier families alongside Senator Joe Donnelly in the U.S. Senate. And, I want to do everything in my power to ensure a U.S. Senate that will govern responsibly. That is why, after consulting with my family, my staff and party leaders, I am withdrawing from the U.S. Senate race and removing my name from the November ballot.”

But like the ill-fated Kamala Harris campaign, Democrats’ last-minute switcheroo in Indiana did not produce the result they hoped for. Young defeated Bayh by 10 points.

This was not the first time Bayh had left Indiana voters in the lurch. In 2010, he announced one day before Indiana’s filing deadline that he would not seek a third term in the Senate, leaving no Democrat candidate qualified for the primary ballot. In a New York Times op-ed, he wrote that he was leaving the Senate because Congress was dysfunctional, bemoaning hyper-partisanship and unyielding ideology.

Party leaders subsequently selected U.S. Rep. Brad Ellsworth as their nominee without any input from voters. Ellsworth lost to Coats in a landslide.

Much the same result occurred during the 2014 Montana Senate race, when incumbent Democrat Senator John Walsh was pressured to abandon his re-election bid when an old plagiarism scandal finally caught up with him (a scandal which, in hindsight, seems relatively minor compared to Platner’s misdeeds). Montana’s Democrat Party replaced him late in the campaign with obscure state Rep. Amanda Curtis. She faced off against Republican Steve Daines, who represented Montana’s at-large district in the House of Representatives. Daines defeated Curtis by 18 points, becoming the first Republican to win that Montana Senate seat in more than a century.

Another last-minute Democrat replacement endured a similar fate in the 2004 U.S. Senate race in Kansas. The primary voters chose Robert Conroy to run against Republican incumbent Senator Sam Brownback. But after a few months of campaigning, Conroy abruptly dropped out of the race. The Kansas Democrat Party replaced him with Lee Jones, an obscure railroad union lobbyist, as the replacement candidate. The Jones campaign raised well under $100,000, and Senator Brownback defeated him with a whopping 69 percent of the vote.

But perhaps the most brazen Democrat candidate swap prior to the 2020s involved New Jersey Senator Robert G. Torricelli. He was accused in 2002 of improperly accepting gifts from a donor. As CBS reported at the time, the Senate Ethics Committee “severely admonished” Torricelli. Because he faced a serious GOP challenge, he was pressured to drop out of the race and did so just 35 days before the election.

The Democrats then placed former Senator Frank Lautenberg on the ballot after the 51-day legal deadline to do so had passed – a move which blatantly violated state law, but which the New Jersey Supreme Court greenlit anyway.

As the Cato Institute’s Robert Levy explained at the time:

“As a result, unless the U.S. Supreme Court intercedes, ex-senator Frank R. Lautenberg’s name will appear on the ballot instead of the Democratic Party’s nominee, Sen. Robert G. Torricelli, who resigned from the campaign not 51 but 35 days before the general election. Rationalizing its power grab, the state Court invoked ‘the public interest,’ ‘the general intent of the election laws,’ and ‘the two-party system’ — terms that appear nowhere in the relevant statute.”

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to intervene in the matter, presumably to avoid the kind of opprobrium that it was subjected to after Bush v. Gore, so Lautenberg was allowed to replace Torricelli on the ballot.

Unlike most of Democrats’ other last-minute replacements, Lautenberg defeated Republican Doug Forrester, who might well have won if New Jersey’s election law had been followed. Democrats broke the law to save themselves from electoral defeat, and they got away with it.

In total, since 2000, Democrats have parachuted in replacement candidates who weren’t chosen by primary voters in six U.S. Senate races. Add to this the Biden-Harris debacle and the innumerable times that similar skulduggery has occurred in House races, and we can draw at least two conclusions.

First, despite their natural inclination to flout state and federal election laws, it is by no means obvious that all the chicanery does Democrats much good. Most of their last-minute candidate swaps crash and burn in general elections.

Second, it’s clear that the Democrats – despite their rhetoric about “saving democracy” – couldn’t care less about actual democratic outcomes. They’re more than happy to ignore the candidate preferences of their own primary voters if they believe it will give them a better chance of winning a general election.

This is no doubt why, according to a report in the Portland Press Herald, a coalition consisting of “voters and local and county party committee members wants the Maine Democratic Party to provide time for public input before cementing the process to replace Graham Platner on the ballot.” These people are all too well aware that, despite his well-documented depravity, Platner won the Democrat primary by garnering the support of 156,000 voters – voters who still deserve to have their voices heard.

Platner himself has called for a transparent and democratic process to replace him. But if the history recounted here is any indication, “democracy” is the last thing on the minds of Democrat leaders.

David Catron is a Senior Editor at the American Spectator. His writing has also appeared in PJ Media, the American Thinker, the Providence Journal, the Catholic Exchange and a variety of other publications.