Call it Progress, Inc.: a machine for advancing full-spectrum progressivism, using working-class aesthetics as a sort of skinsuit, if need be. What the party — and the nation — end up with are politicians who certainly look the part — sometimes connected to the traditional labor movement, comfortable in plaid, tossing a football or drinking beer — but whose substantive views are indistinguishable from those that prevail in places like Brooklyn and San Francisco. 

Consider Dan Osborn. Last week, Osborn, the former industrial mechanic and union leader running as an independent for the Senate from Nebraska, was caught on tape calling President Trump’s border wall “a symbol of racism,” and admitting that he only claimed to support it to woo Republican voters. This, needless to say, will likely hinder his ability to lure back the working class and create a path to victory. 

Osborn has been promoting himself as antiwar, pro-union, and for breaking up health care monopolies. At the same time, he has sought to portray himself as not woke and aligned with the working class on immigration (which is to say, in favor of restrictionism). He thus fits right into the sweet spot of politics these days: Left on economics, but moderate or conservative on culture and immigration. But if an independent running in Nebraska holds the same views on the border as the mainstream Democratic Party — can he really call himself an independent?

Suggested reading

Inside the Democratic identity crisis

By Ryan Zickgraf

It turns out, those behind Osborn are the same people behind Graham Platner, Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, and many other Lefty and socialist candidates this cycle. All of these candidates are products of Progress, Inc. I once worked inside Progress, Inc. as a leading fundraiser for it before taking the measure of its disconnect with what working- and lower-middle-class Americans actually want. 

These behind-the-scenes operatives want to find people with “working-class costumes,” and “masculine images” — not leaders with actual working-class views. Graham Platner was the most obvious example. Before he was #MeToo’d out of the Maine Senate race, the scion of a prominent family checked all the right “image” boxes: bearded, tattooed, with a stint in the Marines under his belt. Another is El-Sayed, whose “bro energy,” his backers believe, is enough to attract disaffected men who’ve left the Democratic Party, with no need to change position on the actual issues that alienate men. Both, however, hold standard-issue ultra-progressive views when it comes to divisive identity politics, among other hot-button issues.

Working-class voters can see through the act. In Maine, Trumpy areas with factory economies tended to support his moderate Democratic opponent, Gov. Janet Mills, while Platner mainly won over the gentry Left. Likewise, El-Sayed has struggled with working-class black Americans, delivering his best performances in places like Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan.

These candidates’ views on the economy, to be sure, recall those of the old labor Left and the New Deal coalition. But they come laden with the cultural excesses of the modern Left. So far, they’ve mostly been unable to moderate Leftist positions on trans athletes in girls’ sports, immigration, and law and order, turning off working-class voters of all races. 

New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani is the rare exception. He reversed his previous #defund position on policing, retaining Gotham’s tough incumbent police commissioner and giving the NYPD a relatively wide berth to do its job. Most progressive candidates aren’t nearly as nimble. El-Sayed appeared on Fox News in August and stood firm on his unpopular cultural stances — trans sports, gender-affirming care for minors, slavery reparations. It was a missed opportunity to highlight his subtly socially conservative positions on widespread weed legalization, online porn, and gambling. 

Those who do dissent, like Amy Acton, a Democrat running for Ohio governor, face backlash from the Left. In any case, the dissenters tend to be Democrats in reddish or swing states who are establishment figures, wedded to the economic status quo, and thus facing their own flavor of electability crisis: they are unwilling to run on the bold populist economics that progressives embrace and that appeal to the working class, like universal health care.

Both wings of the party desperately need to compromise, but on different points. The progressives need to rein in cultural excesses, whereas the establishment needs to stop representing the wealthy donors who prevent it from holding populist positions.

Progress, Inc.’s mentality is not to compromise, but to push ideas into the mainstream until “they become popular.” This is what I was told firsthand by some colleagues while working inside progressive politics. The playbook, as I learned, is to go hard in midterm elections, then use that energy to get every presidential candidate in 2028 to run on Leftist causes. The strategy was learned from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018, when she used her popularity and the energy behind her victory to push the Green New Deal, leading a whopping 10 democratic presidential candidates to embrace the idea in 2020.  

What groups make up Progress, Inc.? The Democratic Socialists of America have received the most attention, because they have the scary word “socialist” in their organization’s name. But there are many more players at work. For instance, there’s the Justice Democrats, a political group whose main focus over the past decade has been backing insurgent primary challengers. The group endorsed 13 candidates this cycle — and eight of them won their primaries. Former Justice Democrats operatives worked on the victorious campaign to elect Darializa Avila Chevalier as the Democratic nominee for New York’s 13th Congressional District. The organization’s executive director, Alex Rojas, described how she recruited Chevalier to run for Congress during a podcast episode hosted by another Progress, Inc. group called Way to Win, a donor collective that boosts progressive candidates. Outside money unquestionably propels these candidates. 

Then there’s the group that advised Platner’s campaign: Daniel Moraff (who recruited both Platner and Osborn to run for US Senate) and Rebecca Katz and Morris Katz, co-founders of Fight Agency, all of whom are emblematic of Progress, Inc. Moraff is the grandson of the founder of Toys ’R’ Us, and Morris Katz, raised in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood, is the son of a screenwriter father and children’s-book-author mother. When I was inside Progress, Inc., I worked with Rebecca Katz on a New York City district-attorney race. A fundraising firm where I served as a director worked with Morris Katz on a race in North Carolina in 2022. There’s also Left Rising, a fundraising firm, where I worked as a director, and Middle Seat, a huge small-dollar fundraising firm that has worked with nearly every Progress, Inc. candidate this cycle, among many others. What I saw was a total disconnect between those now steering the direction of the Democratic Party and the people it once stood for.

Suggested reading

How ‘Progress, Inc.’ neuters the working class

By James Billot

Before Platner’s campaign imploded in July, Morris Katz was documented speaking to donors at the home of Tory Burch, where he was “holding court with roughly two dozen prominent guests about what he cast as a repeatable solution for Democrats,” according to Politico. He told the crowd, “We found a model here to win over working-class voters … a guy that looks like he’s a union working-class guy.”

This line of thinking was one of the main reasons I became exasperated with many of the people I knew when I worked inside Progress, Inc. 

Since 2019, I’ve witnessed this as the prevailing strategy, which I believe was born out of AOC’s upset win in 2018 and the creation of The Squad. Identity politics is such a deep, pathological undercurrent in the way they see themselves and the world; it would never occur to them to find candidates with actual working-class views. 

To be fair, I probably did the same thing when I was working in progressive politics. When you are inside of Progress, Inc., it is hard to see outside of it. You begin to parrot the people around you, thinking that it is you and your friends against the world. At times, I still sympathize with them. I have always supported people willing to challenge power structures, which, to the progressives’ credit, they do often.

Still, the movement’s thinking is fundamentally flawed. As I wrote in my recent book, Nothing Left, I first realized it over lunch at the “Dems Club” in DC, a private restaurant for Democratic politicians and their staff, where I was dining with two new co-workers. I believed we were there to represent working-class voters like my own mother and grandmother in Missouri. My co-workers wore Tory Burch dresses and talked about vacationing in Europe and Hawaii, while giggling about fighting for student-loan forgiveness on Capitol Hill. I felt profoundly alienated.

Many of the consultants inside Progress, Inc. are highly competent and talented people, including Morris Katz. They are a big part of the reason the Left is now so strong. But they are also part of the reason the Democratic Party won’t reconnect with working-class voters. The establishment has its own problems and is equally out of touch, but shouldn’t the anti-establishment be the solution to this problem, not adding to it?

Which brings us back to Osborn’s border crisis: I thought he represented the unique mix that could become the Democratic Party’s North Star — a bold outsider who leads on populist economics, while eschewing woke themes. While leading a union strike at Kellogg’s in 2022, Osborn even allegedly helped alert ICE when undocumented workers were being used as scabs. But winning back the working class, like Osborn’s candidacy seeks to do, can only be done by offering ideas that appeal to them — and that means championing their views on issues like immigration.

Neither wing of the Democratic Party is giving working-class voters what they really want. That leaves a huge constituency without a political home. Trump’s current doldrums may suffice to clinch the midterms for the Democrats. But that won’t resolve the party’s deeper contradictions. 

While much has been written about the rise of populism from the American perspective, what we are witnessing in the United States is part of a global phenomenon.

Just months before Americans first elected Trump, the British public voted to leave the European Union, a move that had practically no support among media, academic, and political elites. The Populism in Power database shows an approximately fivefold increase in the number of populist leaders and parties ruling over democracies between 1990 and 2019. 

An analysis of six major democracies — the UK, the US, Australia, Germany, France, and Canada — reveals a significant decline in support for traditional center-Left and center-Right parties, dropping from about three-quarters of the vote share in 2000 to just over half in 2024.

Latin America is also seeing one of its perennial populist waves, and populism is even making inroads into Asia. Ruling elites even in nondemocracies, such as Putin’s Russia, are adopting aspects of populist rhetoric as legitimization strategies. 

Beyond how we feel about any particular candidate or party, perhaps the political question of our time is whether we should embrace or reject this trend. Approaching this topic from a social science background, my inclination is to first look for data. Practically all of it points to the lesson that countries should avoid populist leaders if they want to maintain freedom and achieve economic growth. How do we know this? Ideally, you’d have randomized experiments where you assign some countries to be ruled by populists and others by normal leaders. 

Since we can’t do that, we have to go by theory and observation. When theory and observational outcomes point in the same direction, then we might think we know something about the world, though it depends on the plausibility of the theory and the strength of the relevant correlations. There have never been randomized controlled trials establishing that smoking causes lung cancer, but I would bet my life that it does. 

More from this author

Will AI kill off populism?

By Richard Hanania

Before we even begin on this topic, however, the first thing we have to do is ask: what even is populism? The political scientists Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser settle on the definition of “a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite,’ and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.” This seems like it would lead to a lot of debates. Was President Barack Obama a populist because he talked about rich people and the working class? Did he present each class as “homogenous” enough and did he do enough to declare them “antagonistic”? Maybe you can make a case that every major politician this side of retired US Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) is populist according to this definition.

In practical terms, however, when scholars make lists of populist leaders, they basically agree on who qualifies, and examples come from the Right and the Left, which means we can’t tell a simple story of political bias. Trump, former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, and former Bolivian President Evo Morales all count, no matter who you ask. Standard definitions of populism are fuzzy and create edge cases, and often disagree with one another, but this is a common issue in politics, and one can say similar things about concepts like democracy and nationalism. 

“I know it when I see it” can be fine as a standard in social and political analysis. There is definitely an essence that Trump and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, currently in US custody, share, which former US President Joe Biden and current German Chancellor Friedrich Merz do not. Since analysts agree on who populists are, we can undertake observational studies and see whether such leaders being in power is associated with worse outcomes. Perhaps the most comprehensive paper to do this is “Populist Leaders and the Economy”, published in the American Economic Review, arguably the most respected journal in economics. The authors found that between 1990 and 2020, a country being ruled by a populist is associated with a 10% lower GDP after 15 years relative to a reasonable counterfactual.

Left-wing populists do worse, which is not surprising, given that they have a deeply flawed understanding of economics. So ideology as traditionally understood matters a lot, but populist rule still has its own independent negative effect. 

What about non-economic indicators? Here the news seems to be even worse. In a report for the Tony Blair Institute, journalists Jordan Kyle and Yascha Mounk investigated the period from 1990 to 2018. Populists over that time degraded checks and balances, and were four times more likely than other leaders to preside over democratic backsliding. In fact, of the breakdowns of democracy that the world has seen since the end of the Cold War, excluding those involving foreign interference or in countries with a GDP per capita of less than $1,000 a year, two-thirds occurred under populist leaders. Such leaders were also bad for freedom of the press and civil liberties. Perhaps most remarkable of all: 40% of populist leaders ended up charged with corruption. This is despite the fact that they often try to stack institutions in their own favor. 

When The Economist made a list of countries with the highest ratio of negative to positive years of growth between 1950 and 2023, the top eight were Libya, Argentina, Syria, Iraq, Chad, Congo, Sudan, and Venezuela. As I’ve previously written, “This is not a list anyone wants to be on. That’s six countries in Africa and the Middle East that have experienced civil wars, and two Latin American nations that did it to themselves through Leftist economic policies.” Venezuela and Argentina have mostly been democratic throughout this time period, without suffering anything close to the level of intrastate violence seen in the other nations on that list. Interestingly, most communist countries have shown a better ability to correct their issues than Venezuela and Argentina. Populist democratic socialism seems to be an unusually good way to keep a country economically dysfunctional in the long term, since communist regimes usually end up collapsing like they did in Eastern Europe or reforming as China and Vietnam have. Of course, when they don’t do either of these things — think North Korea and Cuba — their outcomes are worse than what you get with any form of populism even in the long term. 

Another data point is what has happened in the UK since Brexit. Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom and his coauthors found that by 2025, simulations based on the performance of comparable countries indicate that GDP per capita was 6% to 8% lower in the UK than it would have otherwise been, with investment down 12% to 18%. Firms that were most exposed to European markets were hardest hit. The UK was at about the tenth percentile for growth among the 33 other countries analyzed since the second quarter of 2016. The authors note that their paper likely underestimates harms, since the countries they compare the UK to were themselves hit by Brexit, making the one that actually left the EU look better by comparison. Brexit did not involve the victory of a populist leader, but it was a shock that caused the enactment of a major populist policy, one that had practically no support among traditional elites. The results look similar in kind to what we get when publics elect populists into office.

That’s the empirical evidence. What about theory? It’s much easier to come up with a plausible story of why populism would be bad than one showing why it would be good. Let’s say you believe that elites have made a lot of mistakes. They are self-dealing and corrupt, the media is lazy and has a Left-wing bias, and intellectuals write to impress one another and are cut off from reality. That can all be true. The question is why anyone would think that a leader whose only claim to power is a direct connection to a mass audience would be better. Or that the kinds of people such a leader should be expected to mobilize would be preferable to old elites.

Experts who abuse their authority to push a political agenda should certainly be held to account. At the same time, it is impossible to deny that gatekeepers are usually right. There is a general tendency to focus too much on the man-bites-dog cases, such as claims made by credentialed elites that trans women have no advantage over biological women in athletic competitions, or that the US is a white supremacist nation. Most of the time, media and academic elites are gatekeeping views that are clearly false and often harmful. Among these, to take a handful of examples of beliefs promoted or given a respectful hearing on The Joe Rogan Experience, the most successful podcast in the country, are the following ideas: there is an ancient city beneath the Giza pyramids; HIV doesn’t cause AIDS; there were advanced human civilizations that predated those accepted by archaeologists and historians; 9/11 may have been a government operation; mind reading is real; Covid vaccines are more dangerous than the disease itself; and humans became more susceptible to polio due to vaccination. 

You might oppose elites on completely reasonable grounds, but creating a political culture in which expertise is rejected as a general matter leads to a decline in intellectual and moral standards, as we’ve seen happen in populist movements across the world. 

Sometimes, the elites of a country truly are bad enough to justify grabbing onto almost any alternative. We have seen this in the case of Argentina. It is the one nation that has such a deep history of populism that populists themselves became the establishment. And we have seen the results: a country that, in the early 20th century, was as wealthy as major European powers is now no longer even in the category of advanced nations. So President Javier Milei comes along as a populist with a libertarian agenda, and is probably worth supporting. Even though he is surrounded by the kinds of scandals that dog other populist leaders, the combination of his sensible economic views and the degree to which Argentine elites have failed makes this an unusual case. Populism usually being bad doesn’t mean it is always a negative, and we have to exercise judgment in individual cases. 

Suggested reading

A second Milei rises in Colombia

By Juan David Rojas

More typical than Milei is someone like Trump, whose critique of the establishment of his country is that they are too pro-market and globalist. While Milei slashes tariffs, Trump enacts new ones and goes beyond any previous president in taking ownership stakes in major corporations. Even if Trump enacts more sensible economic policies than his opponents on average, that has to be balanced against the costs of higher levels of corruption and institutional decay, along with generally opening up the government to cranks, from anti-vaxxers to nativists who believe that America belongs to white Christians alone.

Populist movements don’t simply reduce the power of elites, but raise the status and influence of a new group of people. Ten years ago, it would have been rational to criticize The New York Times for getting things wrong and to not worry too much about what conspiracy theorist personalities were saying. Today, the Joe Rogan Experience and other low-quality sources of information have influence comparable to that of the mainstream media. Independent journalist Nick Shirley’s video on Somalis in Minnesota ended up having major policy consequences, leading the Trump administration to open investigations and begin a crackdown on illegal immigrants in Minneapolis. This made little sense as a policy matter, since Shirley’s shoddy reporting had nothing to do with the immigration status of people living in that state, and few Somalis are here illegally. But this is the kind of policy-by-word association you get under populist rule.

The fact that alternative media and influencers are increasingly powerful means that you now have to apply a more critical eye to their beliefs and behaviors. Is US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. more or less important than the American Medical Association? The latter might still matter more in the long run. But their power levels are at least in the same ballpark. Same thing if you are weighing the virtues and flaws of The Wall Street Journal versus political commentator Tucker Carlson, or Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel versus the American Civil Liberties Union. Conservatives could once laugh off these comparisons, adopting the argument that the establishment had more power so its flaws are the only ones that matter — ironic, given conservatives’ hatred of these types of arguments when made by postmodernists. One can imagine them adopting the mantra: “misinformation is poor journalism plus power.” But we’re not in that world anymore, and sometimes populism achieves so much success that its figures must be judged by the same standards we once applied to organic elites. 

We have now arrived at that moment. And the historical record is clear. Whatever problems your country is facing, populist parties and candidates are rarely the answer.

This essay was adapted from the author’s book, Kakistocracy: Why populism ends in disaster, published July 7 by Broadside Books.

The evidence is becoming difficult to ignore. Last week, two Democratic Socialist of America members achieved electoral successes that underscore the movement’s growing ability to outcompete the party mainstream. In Maine, Graham Platner, who has described himself as a DSA member in online forums, clinched the nomination for the US Senate, besting the party’s preferred candidate, Gov. Janet Mills. On the other coast, Nithya Raman, the first DSA member elected to the Los Angeles City Council, advanced to a mayoral runoff against the establishment-backed incumbent, Karen Bass. 

Meanwhile, in New York City, fewer than five months after becoming mayor, Zohran Mamdani is using his newfound political capital not to unify the Democratic Party, but to build a New York-based socialist faction in Congress. In a surprising escalation, he has endorsed the DSA-backed firebrand Darializa Avila Chevalier in her bid to unseat Rep. Adriano Espaillat, and the progressive Brad Lander in his challenge to Rep. Dan Goldman. The Democratic establishment will now be compelled to spend millions to fend off these DSA primary challengers, no small feat for a party that needs significant funding to compete in the battleground races it must win to retake Congress.

The national Democratic leadership seems unwilling to publicly acknowledge the scale of the challenge emerging from the DSA and broader Left-wing movement. 

Unlike previous iterations of the American hard Left, today’s movement has learned to build a durable political infrastructure capable of producing candidates, mobilizing volunteers, and influencing Democratic politics. For more than a decade, this movement has quietly built a political ecosystem that operates independently from the traditional party. Organizations such as the DSA, Justice Democrats, and the older Working Families Party have spent years recruiting candidates, training activists, building donor networks, and developing local power. 

more from this author

Dems are losing a winnable election

By Alicia Nieves

The movement’s success isn’t measured only in the number of candidates it elects. It is also reflected in a growing capacity to shape Democratic politics. Across many cities, self-described progressives and DSA-endorsed candidates have assembled voting blocs on city councils and  successfully pressured moderate Democratic elected officials to slash police funding, ban ICE from city jurisdictions, and expand state and city funding for various social-welfare programs.

No organization has been more central to this effort than the Democratic Socialist of America. With more than 200 chapters nationwide, 100,000 members, thousands of highly motivated volunteers, and a growing roster of elected officials, the DSA has become the backbone of the modern socialist movement. Its greatest strength is the organization’s willingness to adapt its tactics to local conditions, now touting its presence, now deliberately obscuring its involvement when doing so is more electorally advantageous.

The rise of Graham Platner illustrates this point. It is now being revealed that his candidacy was largely manufactured by a handful of DSA members from the same networks that powered Mamdani’s election. Socialist operatives Daniel Moraff and Leanne Fan found Platner through a DSA-affiliated local activist group, but that affiliation never became part of his public profile. Instead, the duo built a carefully curated image of him as a humble veteran and oysterman. 

The operatives also managed to keep several major liabilities from coming to light before the primary, including his Nazi tattoo, allegations of manhandling his ex-girlfriends, and extramarital sexting. Now that Platner is the nominee, these DSA operatives have effectively saddled the Democratic Party with a nominee offering a socialist platform and enough personal baggage to sink its chances in Maine and damage the party’s broader brand heading into November.

If Platner’s campaign showcased the growing sophistication in defeating the party’s preferred picks in a primary, Raman’s challenge to Karen Bass reveals something more fundamental: the radical Left-wing movement will turn on Democratic incumbents — regardless of how much those incumbents have conceded to it. 

Bass wasn’t a moderate figure who resisted progressive demands from city lawmakers or the grassroots. She and Raman had worked closely together on their biggest shared priorities, including the city’s massive homelessness crisis. Bass also had the support of many of her progressive colleagues on the council, who chose to endorse her over Raman. But none of that mattered. The moment Bass became politically vulnerable, as she did after her mishandling of the Palisades wildfires, Raman filed to run against her. This is not a movement that can be appeased into loyalty, it is an insatiable insurgency that views propagating its own power as equally important, if not more so, than securing policy victories. 

Leading into the midterms, the Democratic Party faces the seemingly impossible task of forging a united campaign capable of winning enough moderate votes to flip at least one chamber of Congress, while simultaneously resisting a hostile takeover by a radical movement. Nowhere is the cost of that takeover more visible for Democrats than in Maine. DSA operatives built Platner from scratch and hid his liabilities long enough to push Janet Mills out of the race. Now that Platner is in the hands of the Democratic Party as its official Senate nominee, party officials have no choice but to defend him. Senate Democratic leaders have been forced to publicly rationalize his fitness to the moderate voters they can’t afford to lose. 

And it was the decision by the broader progressive ecosystem to challenge Karen Bass through Raman that helped transform what might otherwise have been a routine municipal election into a national headache for Democrats. It’s true that the DSA has thus far formally withheld its endorsement from Raman, in part over her tepid statements in support of Israel in the aftermath of Oct. 7. Still, there’s hardly any doubt that she can be expected to push city politics closer to the group’s position.

Suggested reading

The hollow campaign targeting Graham Platner

By michael tracey

The entry of television personality Spencer Pratt further amplified scrutiny of blue governance in the city and state, drawing national attention to the party’s failure to deal with homelessness and public safety. Perhaps unexpectedly, the race has also brought attention to California’s unusually slow vote-counting process and permissive election rules, both of which have long raised Republican ire. In that respect, the Los Angeles race has provided Republicans with a highly visible example to cite as they continue pushing the SAVE Act and its proof-of-citizenship voter requirements.

As usual, Democratic leaders have opted for damage control rather than direct confrontation in response to each of these power grabs. This posture of strategic ambiguity reflects a naive confidence that maintaining a peaceful coalition will eventually absorb DSA and progressive officials into the party apparatus and keep them under establishment authority. But that logic is flawed. It doesn’t account for the strength this movement has built at the local level, or its willingness to use local political power to resist submission to national leadership.

The tipping point may already be here. If Mamdani succeeds in helping even one DSA challenger unseat a sitting member of Congress, or if the candidate cultivated by DSA operatives captures the Maine Senate seat, it will demonstrate that the Democratic establishment can no longer protect its own incumbents. Once that assumption disappears, every safe Democratic seat becomes a potential target. Members of Congress will live in fear of the DSA or other Leftist organizations launching  primary challenges against them. The threat itself would become the most powerful leverage the movement has to push the national party to the hard Left. The party’s performance in the midterms, as well as its viability in the 2028 presidential election, will depend upon whether it can confront this threat. 

And so, right on cue, here come the “accusations.”

What are these “accusations”? Good question. “Accusations” would seem to overstate the case, because it’s exceedingly unclear what Platner is even being accused of doing. But since the non-accusatory accusations have been dramatically unveiled by the The New York Times, all keen political watchers must now hold their breath and brace for the fallout. 

The Times’s Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer boast that they “spent months” doggedly reporting on the “complicated history of Platner’s relationships with women.” OK, then — after months of this intrepid investigative journalism, what did the journalists come up with? Reputedly that Platner’s relationship with various ex-girlfriends has at times been “emotionally wrenching.” The dynamic of these relationships, dating back to his 20s, is said to have been “volatile” and even “toxic.” And his behavior? “Unsettling.” 

These are the fruits of a New York Times enterprise project to canvass Platner’s ex-girlfriends, already a creepy enough initiative in its own right — and the worst they could uncover is that a handful of ex-girlfriends use vaguely unflattering adjectives to describe their subjective emotional recollections of certain interactions with Platner, stemming from consensual adult romantic activity a decade or more ago. 

More from this author

Should we believe Virginia Giuffre?

By michael tracey

One ex, Lyndsey Fifield, alleges that Platner grabbed her roughly and, in one instance, “yanked her out of a cab” in the course of “altercations.” Fifield happens to be a long-time Republican operative, having served in multiple GOP political action committees and currently listed as a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative think tank. Her affiliations are alluded to by the Times, which notes that the paper “could not independently corroborate Ms. Fifield’s account.”

If this is what we’re really doing now, why doesn’t somebody go and canvass the ex-boyfriends of Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer? They evidently deem it newsworthy that former love interests of Platner claim to have endured “emotionally wrenching” relationship travails. Given the prominent perches Glueck and Lerer enjoy at the New York Times, certainly they rank high enough on the all-important “power dynamic” pyramid that the public would be similarly entitled to know if anything “emotionally wrenching” or “volatile” might have occurred in their own private lives when they were in their 20s. 

Robust reportorial resources should thus be devoted to explore this harrowing possibility, with any resulting material reframed and reinterpreted many years after the fact to comport with whatever news-cycle imperatives might arise on a given week. New York Times readers have every right to evaluate whether their own unreported romantic histories might be exerting undue influence on their 2026 midterm election coverage. 

God forbid either journalist be alleged by some disgruntled ex to have exhibited behavior that could be retroactively characterized as “toxic.” And if Glueck or Lerer wishes to dispute that characterization, perhaps for a lack of context or any other mitigating factors they may wish to cite, they’re plain out of luck, because everyone knows it’s a lose-lose situation to be rehashing dirty relationship laundry in the pages of The New York Times. The more you talk, the worse you look, regardless of what the truth happens to be.

If by any chance either female journalist has ever had an “off-and-on long-distance relationship” with old boyfriends who may have less than flattering memories of the experience, this is now to be considered straightforwardly reportable information, given the new Platner standard they’ve opted to set forth. Any relevant anecdotes would need to be fleshed out with ambiguously motivated remembrances of the journalists’ past emotional traits, since this is the kind of psychobabble that litters the Platner exposé. (For reference, Katie graduated from Northwestern University in 2012 and Lisa graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001, so those are some decent leads to start with for any shoeleather reporters out there looking to better inform the public about contemporary power dynamics in America.)

Fifield, the flagship “accuser” in this Times story, doesn’t appear to be accusing Platner of anything in particular (though she has since taken to the X app, formerly Twitter, wielding the A word, “abuse”). Lacking anything more tangible to report, the Times is reduced to relaying Fifield’s assessment that Platner is “cavalierly contemptuous of women’s emotions” — whatever the hell that means — which Fifield has extrapolated based on having sporadically dated Platner from 2013 to 2015. 

Seeing his recently discovered archive of Reddit posts, she claims, has “reminded me of just how much he hated women.” Left unexplained is why she apparently dated someone who “hated women” for two years. Or why, after the relationship apparently broke off by 2016, friends sent texts encouraging her to “move on,” implying that she was disinclined to “move on.” Nor do the Times sleuths probe whether her apparent knowledge that Platner was simultaneously seeing other women during their relationship might have been a key factor in generating her negative feelings toward him. Or what she precisely meant in a post-breakup diary entry, purportedly shown to the reporters, in which she wrote that Platner was “the most toxic literally abusive man on earth who destroyed my life.” 

How did Platner destroy her life, exactly? What is the definition of “toxic” in this context? (That word can seem to be quite malleable.) What kind of alleged “abuse” is she talking about here — emotional, physical, or something else? And by any chance, are there additional sentences or paragraphs surrounding the curiously truncated excerpt that might shed additional light on her psychological state at the time, or further elucidate what Platner is even accused of doing wrong, which again remains exceedingly unclear, despite months of intensive investigation by a team of seasoned reporters? 

According to one of her friends in the DC-conservative-blackslapping network, the podcaster and opinion columnist Bethany Mandel, Fifield had already spent the past “many months” on a political mission to inflict maximum political damage against Platner — first by calling attention to his purported “Nazi Tattoo,” which had apparently never alarmed her enough to cease dating him. Then, when that proved insufficient to sink Platner, Fifield went in for the kill with a standard slate of “accusations” pertaining to nebulous intimate-partner improprieties. 

Though, again, to even call these “accusations” wouldn’t be exactly accurate; Platner is accused by no woman in the Times story of doing anything self-evidently illicit. Instead, the article assembles an impressionistic collage of what the Times theorizes is a pattern of “unsettling” behavior. Surely, a stronger adjective would’ve been used for the headline, should any reportorial finding have supported it. Perhaps most bizarre is that Glueck and Lerer, scraping the absolute bottom of the barrel at this point, deem it journalistically crucial to grant anonymity to yet another ex-girlfriend, whom they “asked to sum up how he treated her.” This source said she felt like “collateral damage to the world that is his.” What does this mean? Sounds quite rueful and poetic, sure, but whatever “accusation” it’s supposed to correspond with is shrouded in mystery.

Speaking of the supposed “Nazi tattoo” that is now said to be a singularly defining mark of Platner’s allegedly foul character, it seems rather doubtful that a great many of his fellow Marines circa 2007 — when Platner says he got the tattoo while on leave in Croatia — would have been steeped enough in esoteric pagan iconography to identify the symbol as intrinsically linked with National Socialism. Because to the naked eye, it could easily just appear like a generic “skull and crossbones” symbol that a certain type of military guy in his early 20s would probably think looks cool. Perhaps going forward, all US service personnel should be required to consult the Anti-Defamation League’s “hate-symbols” database before they ink themselves with anything improper. Better yet, they can fax their proposed tat design to Susan Collins for pre-approval.

Earlier this week, a crew of doofuses affiliated with the National Republican Senatorial Committee thought it would be hilarious to gallivant shirtless around Washington, DC, wearing nothing but a white bath towel. This was done to heckle Platner for the supposedly incriminating mirror selfie of his that recently surfaced, in which, yes, the Democratic candidate is pictured shirtless and with a towel around his waist. If that was the extent of the GOP stooges’ stunt, it might’ve been loutish and lame, but forgettably harmless. In the current political climate, however, they of course had to ratchet things up to the most rabid extreme, and wave signage proclaiming Platner a “pedo” — based on absolutely nothing other than that he had apparently maintained a personal account on an app called Kik, which is thought to be inherently disreputable, given the purported connotations of what the app is typically used for. 

Suggested reading

MeToo lost me the love of my life

By Lionel Shriver

It’s of course possible that Platner has done disreputable things on this app — his wife did report to his campaign operatives that he exchanged sexually explicit messages with at least six women earlier in their marriage — but that’s preposterously far removed from Platner doing anything that could be remotely labeled “pedophilic,” besides some vague supposition that the app is populated with minors who circumvent age-verification protocols. There is zero evidence of Platner engaging in any conduct that could conceivably make him a “pedophile.” If the only criteria for earning such a sick designation these days is using a social-media app on which minors might be present, there’s no necessary reason why that wouldn’t also apply to X, on which much of the recent hectoring of Platner has taken place. 

More broadly, it seems to have been collectively decided that in 2026, flippantly declaring one’s political foes to be pedos, or pedo-adjacent, or pedo-complicit, is just standard procedure, with any evidentiary requirement a relic of the past. In addition, certain Republicans have clearly been laboring with pent-up frustration at how Democrats gamely operationalized the Jeffrey Epstein saga against President Trump, who now also gets routinely taunted as a pedophile, despite a similar dearth of credible evidence. 

As such, vengeful has-beens like Ari Fleisher have proposed an inventive new angle of attack for their all-hands-on-deck offensive to preserve a slim Republican Senate majority: “Platner is Epstein without the island,” the former George W. Bush press secretary proclaimed. Why? Because, again, a selfie has emerged of Platner wearing a bath towel, and the selfie appeared on an app that Fleisher and others claim is “targeted to teens,” though they cite no empirical basis for this inference — much less any basis for assuming that Platner himself has “targeted” anything untoward at any teen. 

But it doesn’t matter anymore. American political conflict is now a rolling cacophony of everyone and their mother calling each other a pedophile. Republicans, cruising for a midterm bruising, should at least be thankful that Platner’s improbable ascent has enabled them to savor a moment of temporary catharsis, as they pretend to be enthusiastic about re-electing Susan Collins to a sixth dreary term.

It’s the kind of no-nonsense language that the Democratic grassroots have been demanding in recent months. Polling shows that an overwhelming majority of Democratic voters have swung wildly against Israel, with younger Independents and Republicans also trending in the same direction. According to one poll, only Russia scored worse than Israel when it came to the negative views among young Democrats (even Iran outscored the Jewish state). 

It would seem, then, that Platner and likeminded progressive office-seekers around the country have hit upon a winning issue. But it’s one thing to adopt more Israel-critical policies in response to popular opinion — and quite another to transform the party into a singularly Israel-obsessed vehicle: one in which opposition to the Jewish state functions as the main priority, a source of factionalism, and an ideological purity test. 

That way lies marginalization, a fate not unlike that of ex-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his Your Party in Britain. This, just when Democrats are poised to re-emerge from the political wilderness amid President Trump’s historic unpopularity and a faltering GOP majority in Congress.

The danger for Democrats doesn’t lie in the shift itself — a recalibration in America’s relationship with Israel is overdue, as voters across the spectrum are emphatically telling pollsters. The real threat, rather, is in the way an intensified focus on a single foreign-policy issue risks pulling the party off course, leaving it vulnerable to a vocal activist subset that doesn’t necessarily reflect broader public opinion on other questions. 

More from this author

Graham Platner, gentry liberal

By James Billot

Corbyn offers an instructive cautionary tale. After being expelled from Labour in 2024, the 76-year-old socialist went on to co-found a Left-wing breakaway party the following year. Your Party — the name itself was a magnet for ridicule — promised to be everything that Labour wasn’t: an unapologetically socialist outfit that would tax the rich, nationalize utilities, defend the National Health Service against privatization, and, most importantly, take a strong stance against Israel. During its first week, the party attracted hundreds of thousands of voters disillusioned by the Starmer government, as well as a former Labour member of Parliament and four independent Muslim MPs who were elected on pro-Gaza platforms. 

Yet within days, problems emerged. Before it had even officially launched, a leadership fight between Corbyn and another MP resulted in a mini-schism. What was ostensibly a disagreement over the party’s internal structure quickly spilled into a chaotic membership drive, generating as many factions as it did representatives. The bigger problem, though, was the ideological division between its MPs. Unsurprisingly, Your Party’s socially conservative Muslim MPs took a very different view on issues such as gender identity and trans participation in women’s sports, which ultimately contributed to the departure of two MPs. 

The inherent tension in the “rainbow-and-crescent” alliance of progressive activists and Muslim social conservatives is a problem for Democrats, too. Over the last few years, clashes between Muslim-American parents and local Democratic leaders over school curricula have spilled into courtrooms and onto the streets, largely driven by Muslim opposition to LGBTQ content. For the most part, however, the alliance has been held together by a shared opposition to Israel.

Similarly in Britain, Israel was the centripetal force around which Your Party’s members revolved. Or so they thought. Instead, it turned out to be another source of division. Zara Sultana, Your Party’s erstwhile co-leader, came out as strongly as an anti-Zionist, whereas Corbyn refused to use the term. The result was an ironic dynamic in which Corbyn, long one of Britain’s most prominent critics of Israel, was denounced by elements of his own movement for insufficient purity on the issue. Now, the party can barely muster enough candidates to represent it in next month’s local elections.

The United States has a different party and electoral system than Britain’s, but the parallels are clear: Left-wingers’ competitive signaling on Israel incentivizes candidates to adopt maximalist positions, alienating supporters and cannibalizing other issues in the process. In San Francisco’s House race, for example, Scott Wiener, a liberal Zionist, has faced sustained criticism from activists for refusing to describe Israel as an apartheid state or characterize its military campaign as genocide. Several debates were interrupted by pro-Palestine hecklers, which ultimately led to Wiener resigning as co-chairman of the state’s Jewish Caucus before leaving it altogether.

It made little difference. Wiener’s progressive rival, Saikat Chakrabarti — who has embraced the term “genocide” and called for a ban on both defensive and offensive weapons transfers to Israel — is within striking distance of him in the polls. Meanwhile, in Michigan, Senate candidate Abdul al-Sayed, who has shared a stage with Hasan Piker and talked openly about how Israel is “just as evil as Hamas,” is now tied for first in the polls to secure the party nomination. Similar dynamics have unfolded in Illinois’s and New Jersey’s special elections, too, which became as much a referendum on the Israel lobby as on any local issue.

None of this is to suggest that Democrats should maintain the status quo on Israel. Under Netanyahu, the Jewish state has become more aggressive and unrestrained in its conduct across the Middle East, not bothering with the pretense of a two-state solution. The Jewish state has rarely stopped to weigh even the costs of wielding the power of life and death — in perpetuity — over some seven million Palestinians. 

But, again, there is a difference between treating Israel as one foreign question among many, on one hand, and turning it into an ideological litmus test that supersedes everything else, on the other. This has created a purity spiral in which Democratic candidates across the country are jumping over each other to prove their pro-Palestine credentials — or at least, to ward off any hint that they are “soft” on the issue. Even Gavin Newsom, ever the tumbleweed in shifting winds of public opinion, went so far as to compare Israel to an apartheid state (a remark he later walked back). 

Suggested reading

Bibi’s ‘existential’ obsession

By Amir Tibon

One major reason for this drastic shift is the rise of independent media. As the influence of traditionally pro-Israel legacy outlets has waned, a new ecosystem of progressive streamers and online platforms has filled the space. These outlets will approvingly repost clips of, for example, Graham Platner calling the US’s relationship with Israel “shameful,” while castigating moderate Democrats for equivocating on the issue. 

For influencers and outlets like Zeteo, the Young Turks, Majority Support, and Hasan Piker, Israel is a near daily fixation (to say nothing of Tucker Carlson and other podcasters on the Right), which creates what Cass Sunstein and Timur Kuran call an “availability cascade”: a self-reinforcing feedback loop, in which constant mention of an issue makes it seem more important, urgent, or widespread, thereby further increasing its visibility.

Today, the question of whether Israel is committing genocide has the same political potency (and clippability) as “what is a woman?” for progressives and “did Trump win the 2020 election?” for Republicans. In just the last week, it has been asked of former President Barack Obama all the way down to Kennedy scion Jack Schlossberg in the New York 12th district contest. And every podcast, speech, and special election primary in which a candidate’s position on Israel determines their standing only reinforces that dynamic at the national level. As a preview of what’s to come, earlier this month, the Democratic National Committee weighed a proposal at its spring conference to condemn the “growing influence” of money in primary elections, with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee singled out in the debate; the resolution was ultimately rejected. Without any kind of counterweight in the party, expect more resolutions like these to emerge.

In Britain, Your Party’s launch was meant to signal a new moment of unity for Left-wing dissidents from the Labour mainstream. Instead, it exposed how little consensus there was beneath the surface. Democrats should be wary of repeating the same pattern. Primary season is already drifting into an anti-Israel spectacle; if that dynamic accelerates, Democrats risk a Corbyn-style implosion that hands Republicans an unforced advantage in 2028.

Deep in rural Maine, more than 100 miles away from the state’s verdant coastline, Graham Platner is holding court. In a state with one of the largest per-capita veteran populations, the Democratic Senate contender’s antiwar message carries a particular potency — and it shows. As of this writing, the 41-year-old Platner has raked in nearly $10 million in campaign money, mostly from small donors; signed up some 15,000 volunteers; and clinched endorsements from Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Ruben Gallego, and Martin Heinrich — all progressive stalwarts. Even a steady drip of negative stories in recent months about his spicy Reddit history and a since-covered Nazi tattoo has barely dented him. Polls now show Platner ahead of Democratic primary rival, Gov. Janet Mills, and narrowly edging Susan Collins, the Republican incumbent, in a general election matchup.

It would be tempting, then, to cast Platner as the face of a renewed Democratic Party — a working-class tribune with crossover appeal. But the more revealing question is how deep, and how broad, his support really is. For all the campaign’s talk of winning over Trump voters and bringing back the popular classes, his coalition is composed mostly of #Resistance liberals, college students, and crunchy retirees. That may be enough to win the primary, and perhaps even the general. But it shouldn’t be mistaken for a durable re-realignment, or evidence that Democrats have rediscovered a winning formula for 2028.

“A lot of folks I know who voted for Donald Trump wanted an end to overseas wars,” Platner tells me in a husky voice. “But those people are beginning to realize that this was all nonsense, that they were lied to, and they were swindled. We have had tons and tons of Republicans come to these events to say just that.” 

Here in Trump-supporting Greenville, though, I couldn’t find any Republicans in our midst. Everyone I spoke to was a lifelong Democrat, their first rally likely predating Jimmy Carter. They were less worried about finding common cause with the other side than about Trump putting them in concentration camps. Others even asked Platner, hopefully, if the army might consider mutinying. “The military is not going to save you,” Platner responded. “We are the only ones who are going to save ourselves.” (A strong answer.)

More from this author

The trouble with Tucker Carlson

By James Billot

Platner likes to present himself as a gruff, no-nonsense prole who, like Cincinnatus abandoning his plow, felt compelled to enter the race by the sheer weight of national misery. After bouncing between several schools in Maine, he enlisted in the Marines in 2004 and served in Iraq and Afghanistan. A brief spell at George Washington University, a stint tending bar, and another War on Terror tour (this time with the private military company formerly known as Blackwater) followed before he returned home to become an oyster farmer. It was only after Democratic consultants “discovered” him — in a video for a local group opposing a Norwegian company’s plan to build a large salmon farm off his hometown of Sullivan — that he entered the political arena. 

What tends to be omitted from this narrative is that his upbringing wasn’t quite so hardscrabble. Platner’s grandfather was a renowned architect, known for his work in modernist interior design; his father, Bronson, is an Ivy-educated lawyer and Democratic donor; his mother, Leslie Harlow, is a local activist and entrepreneur runs a restaurant in Bar Harbor, which happens to be the main client for Platner’s oysters. Thanks to the family largess, he enrolled at the elite Hotchkiss School before moving to another private school six months later — a fact he tries to play down. 

Still, even some Republican operatives concede that Platner has a good story. “His introduction is quite powerful,” Steve Bannon, the podcast firebrand and ex-Trump consigliere, tells me. “He’s got an opening pitch about being in the Marine Corps. And then he’s got a punch line: ‘what was it worth?’ before getting into his populist takedown of the American ruling class.” But, Bannon adds, Platner “still carries the same cultural baggage as the rest of the Democratic Party.”

The baggage in question includes Platner’s calls for abolishing ICE and support for gender care for kids, and his dismissal of the trans-athlete debate as a “billionaire-funded distraction.” While such positions play well with the base, they remain unpopular with the state at large, which may explain why Platner is struggling to make inroads with Maine’s rural and working classes.

According to a survey of likely voters by Pan-Atlantic Research, Platner leads Janet Mills 56% to 32% among those earning more than $100,000, while the race is essentially even among those below that income threshold. The regional split mirrors that pattern: he is ahead in the more urban and affluent First District, while Mills leads in the rural, working-class Second District, which has backed Trump in the past three presidential elections. 

“I do not really trust polling in Maine, even when it says nice things about me,” says Platner. “We have a ton of just regular working folks showing up to my speeches. But I also think there is an access problem. The only way to actually go talk to working-class folks is to go talk to them in their communities, which is what we’re doing.”

To see how Platner’s message was landing in these communities, I drove an hour west to Jackman, a town 15 miles from the Canadian border. Once a hub of the cross-border timber trade, Jackman’s economy was hollowed out by global competition, accelerated by NAFTA and subsequent trade agreements. A former Democratic stronghold, the town abandoned the party during President Barack Obama’s second term and heavily backed Trump in the past three elections. If Platner wanted to make inroads with the state’s working class, this was a good place to start.

At Jackman’s town hall, Platner came with the same message he delivered in Greenville: the system is rigged, working people are being robbed, and the billionaire class is running roughshod over the social contract. It was the sort of populist messaging Trump himself might have shared 10 years ago. The trouble was that only about 10 people were in attendance. And of those, only a few were from the area (one attendee told me that she’d driven four hours to see him). By contrast, thousands had shown up to listen to Platner and Sanders in Portland, a much bluer (and admittedly more populous) city three hours’ drive to the south.

Suggested reading

Inside the Democratic identity crisis

By Ryan Zickgraf

I ask Platner to explain this disparity. “Look, it takes time,” he says. “This is a long-term project. We have to connect with these folks directly, or else you’re just this amorphous thing. And I think as the war in Iran gets worse, and as the incompetent authoritarianism of the Trump administration gets worse — because it will — that’s going to continue alienating more folks.”

This may turn out to be true. With 13 American soldiers confirmed dead and the prospect of boots on the ground growing by the day, even the most die-hard MAGA supporters could begin to waver if the conflict spirals. But that day has not arrived. The MAGA base is still standing by its man, and there is very little to suggest that that might be changing.

It might not matter. The political landscape in Maine strongly favors Democrats, making a win likely regardless of who is on the ballot. Susan Collins is the last Republican senator in a blue state that Kamala Harris carried comfortably in 2024, and she is now facing her toughest battle yet to hold on to her seat. After five terms totaling nearly three decades, the appetite for something new is strong among the Democratic grassroots, which may be enough to push the state into the blue column. As a political neophyte, Platner will likely benefit from this enthusiasm; his primary opponent, 78-year-old Mills, challenged reporters to check her “lipid profile.”

It would be easy, then, to read too much into a Platner win. But even if the oysterman looks, sounds, and campaigns like a working-class reset, his coalition suggests otherwise. I saw as much when I visited the Four Seasons diner in Jackman, one block from the town hall, where a Platner ad flickered on the TV. “I know what it feels like to give everything to this country,” one veteran says, “and come home to feel like it’s giving nothing back,” adds another, before the shot cuts to Platner in fatigues. “Graham Platner knows that feeling, too,” the voiceover concludes.

I turn to the man beside me, who works at the logging-mill down the road, and ask what he thought. “Who’s that?” he grunted.