Following Graham Platner’s swift exit from Maine’s Senate race last week, Democrats are rushing to determine who will face off against Republican incumbent Susan Collins. Despite the scramble, the upcoming Convention provides a second chance for Maine voters to make their voices heard — a chance that many felt they didn’t get the first time around with Platner.
Joe Lockhart sat down with Tim Dickinson to share some inside baseball on how candidates like Platner are hand-picked by Washington and how Maine can capitalize on the progressive appetite stirred up by Platner’s campaign.
Joe Lockhart is a former White House Press Secretary under the Clinton Administration. He has served in senior roles in political advising, consulting, and public affairs communications.
The following transcript has been edited for formatting purposes.
Tim Dickinson
Hey, this is Tim Dickinson for The Contrarian. Our guest today is Joe Lockhart, who is best known as a Clinton press secretary. But Joe is now in Maine, where he's had a front row seat of the Graham Platner fiasco. Joe, how are you doing?
Joe Lockhart
I'm doing great. I'm doing great. It's fiascos not quite done, but I have hope that it'll be over soon.
Tim Dickinson
Well, so, back us up and give us the main frontline view. I mean, people have been watching this, what seems to have been, for me, like a slow-moving train wreck from back, you know, in the fall, but what has been your perspective about how this whole thing has unfolded and why it unfolded the way it did?
Joe Lockhart
Yeah, it's, you know, it's, I think oftentimes people will take an issue in a state and say it is an example of some broader, bigger problem in the country. And most of the times it's not true. This time it is, and it has to do with the Democratic Party. And I think the best way to make that point is we were simultaneously having a gubernatorial primary and a Senate primary. The gubernatorial primary, that no one outside of Maine cared about. I mean, I think the person who raised the most money was a million and a half, as opposed to the hundreds of millions that all get spent here. There was no interference from outside the state, and we fielded six incredibly good, attractive candidates. It was people that I talked to, everybody was having a hard time deciding who.
Tim Dickinson
Who?
Joe Lockhart
Go over to the Senate race, where, everybody in Washington, D.C. was obsessed with this, and had their hands in it, and in fact, the two candidates who were in the race were hand-picked, not in Maine, but in Washington. And it was a mess, and it was a mess from the beginning. And it was a mess from the beginning because it was done by people who had interests other than the people of Maine.
Tim Dickinson
Hmm. Expand on what you mean by that.
Joe Lockhart
Well, again, we had great crop of people for governor. If you look at, what I view as a big problem in the Democratic Party, you know, Republicans are captive to a… they're a cult. They're captive to Donald Trump. Democrats are captive to what I call the “consultant class.” It's this group of people who don't ever appear on the ballot box, and I have to raise my hand. I used to be one of them.
Tim Dickinson
Mea culpa.
Joe Lockhart
I was for it before I was against it. Or did Kerry say it the other way? But… You know, and it's… This is an example here. And I know there are going to be my friends on the progressive side who say, oh, no, no, no, it's just the institutional party that's in class. But peel back a little bit and you'll see. It's the same thing. Graham Platner, who no one in this state knew who it was, he's not like he was a local community organizer, he had not made a name for himself, was recruited by consultants for an organization backed by Bernie Sanders. Now… I truly believe that what Bernie Sanders professes, he believes and thinks is great policy. I think there's a lot of great ideas in there, I don't agree with all of them. But I don't think it's the… I don't think the, the people who are behind him really understand how this part of his organization works. They come up here, they interview a bunch of people, they find someone who on paper and on video looks good, they take it to some marketing people, and then they serve up the candidate. They go to him. It wasn't a candidate going to a consultant. On the other side, we had, sort of the Senate Democrats senatorial committee they decided that they had to put a candidate in the race and their candidate was Janet Mills now Janet Mills has been a good two-term government, but if you had your ear anywhere near the ground here in Maine the one thing you wouldn't do. Absolutely wouldn't do is try to nominate someone who was 77 years old to run against Susan Collins. Is the overwhelming particular… I'm in the southern part of the state, near Portland. Right. Very young, very progressive, and… Talk to anyone and they sort of the the litmus test is. “Are you over 50? And if you're over 50, you're a little old, but I might think about you.”
Tim Dickinson
The broke…
Joe Lockhart
The broader point is, and this is what I think permeates and what brought us Platner, is that the system is so broken, you have to blow it up to fix it. So you can't have anyone from within the system to help fix it. And oddly because all politics, you know, is a spectrum which is circular. That's the Trump appeal. Right. Trump is saying, you have to blow up the entire government because the swamp is so thick, you know, while he's… drain the swamp right into his bank account, and, you know, you've got, you know, sort of the same thing going on here. So you had, again, to come back to my original point, which, if I can remember it, you had one political experiment, which was just Mainers deciding about Maine, then you had another political experiment that had outsiders deciding about Maine. One was, you know, a paragon of democracy. The second was a disaster.
Tim Dickinson
Now the Platner thing, you know, I think has… they found somebody who looked… was coded in a certain way, right? Here's a guy who's an oyster farmer, his bristly beard, he talks gruff, and along with that, from the beginning, was an acceptance that this guy might not have the standard political vetting or the standard political, you know, niceties, right? This is a guy who's uncouth, and so we're gonna accept the MAGA coding, and maybe we'll accept some MAGA morality to go along with it. What's your perspective about how that played out? I mean, he certainly excited people. But in the end, this just bit Democrats in the butt.
Joe Lockhart
Yeah, I mean, I think… If you think of this, you know, as kind of a Hollywood production, the movie star looked great. But unfortunately, we're not making a movie. We're electing someone, and there are people who are going to dig in, find these things, and then expose it to the public. But it does, there, there, there is a legitimate, I think, important question of, well, why were so many people attracted to that kind of guy? And it's… it… it is a, I think, a reflection on the overall political climate in this country, and gives you some clue about why Trump got a second term, and why Graham Platner was able to come in here. Because this… this myth that gets developed around someone is enough in some cases to get someone elected. But but, you know, in practice, you know, ignores a whole panoply of moral failures. And I think for Democrats, this is where I'd say for Democrats as a whole in Maine, not just progressives who were behind him from the beginning, and some are still behind him. We're so frustrated, with being out of power. We're so frustrated with people like Susan Collins, who many of us see as one of the weakest people, you know, we've ever encountered in politics, that we're willing to stomach a lot in order to go forward. And, but then it turned out to be too much. I remember talking to people and saying, “I just, and this was before the last thing, I just don't know if I can vote for the guy.” Yeah. “But, but when push comes to shove on election day. I guess I will because I feel very, very strongly about the destructive impact of Susan Collins on the entire country, and her style of politics,” you know, which is use one hand to put your finger up to the wind and put the other hand to invite a camera in front of you. And that's her philosophy that, yeah, I was working my way towards being okay. I wasn't going to write him a check. I wasn't going to do anything for him. But I think, you know, it just became, It just became impossible. Now, it does… point out a difference, because much worse things came out on Trump, and Republicans, MAGA Republicans, never got to this point.
Tim Dickinson
Right, right.
Joe Lockhart
It was always that “it’s okay, it's okay, it's okay.” But, you know, I think. You know, this… This story primarily tells a story about what's going on with Democrats.
Tim Dickinson
But I do think there's a way in which Democrats have gotten more comfortable with moral failings, right? That you don't have to be a saint to run for office.
Joe Lockhart
I feel like I have something to do with that.
Tim Dickinson
That's right.
Joe Lockhart
It's the person who, it's the person who set up and kind of did the whole, “what's wrong with what he did? What he did? We're doing a good job in the country.” I think that's true. I think it's… I think it's, you know, Democrats, I think, are kind of living in the… refined degradation of morals, as opposed to Trump's degradation. We still feel like we're better than what they did, but there is a limit, you know, and it's, and we found it, you know, here.
Tim Dickinson
And the trouble with Platner, it seemed to me, just watching him from afar, right, is that there's this narrative that's like, oh, this, he did all this stuff when he was young and irresponsible, and he's gotten into therapy, but that clarity… what was missing from that narrative was what was the actual pivot point? Where did he actually start behaving like a…
Joe Lockhart
Yeah, the… There's a lot of us, like, what's called in the business, uncomfortable facts and timelines here. And you know, I think part of the problem here was that, you… no matter what he is, you still need to honor his military service and the commitment he made to the country. But there was nothing after that. There was no… he wasn't in the state doing things To, you know, to promote anything in his community or being involved. you know, he feels like someone who… you know, he's a candidate that was, like, one of the equivalent of American Idol for politicians, and he won in front of these, like, silly people. I don't… I don't know if you've seen it or I've seen it, but I watched over the weekend the two people from the Sanders organizations who vetted him, and they thought this was funny. I mean, when they were pushed on this in vetting, they giggled. And when they said, well, who was vetting them? And they sort of said, well, that was the marketing department. You know, it's, I mean, that tells you a lot.
Tim Dickinson
That was one of the more revealing things. It seems sort of like the Sam Bankman-Fried kind of stuff. It was just sort of like unserious people who had foisted this whole experiment on the country, you know, on Maine, for the most critical Senate seat, perhaps, out there, and they just seemed profoundly unserious and unremorseful.
Joe Lockhart
Yeah, a little bit. And, you know, it is definitely rolling the political dice. you know, it feels like the process was the… somewhat the same in New York with Mamdani, and that one seems to be working out. I mean, if you judge him on his popularity.
Tim Dickinson
Right, right.
Joe Lockhart
He's done it. But up here, it was a complete failure.
Tim Dickinson
You know, Bernie's not even a Democrat, and so, you know, his… roiling the pot here isn't sort of unexpected or even very surprising, and he's got a stubborn streak, so of course he sort of stuck with Platner ‘til the bitter end there. I do wonder about Democrats like Chris Murphy and Elizabeth Warren, who really got on this train early and stuck with it sort of long beyond the fact that he's using the R-word, and he was sexting people who weren't his wife, and, you know, it's just these candles beyond the, you know, the Totenkopf tattoo, like this, you know, there just seemed to be so many disqualifying things, and people just sort of stuck with him beyond the sell-by date. I wonder… does that have a lasting impact on the progressive wing of the party?
Joe Lockhart
Well, I mean, I mean, that, that is a really interesting question, and it's one that, you know, they're going to have to answer. I think it's… the script was so compelling on paper for them, that they stuck with it long after they should have. And it is the kind of candidate that they see, that they believe the party needs. I mean, it's, you know, the people that you mentioned, while they're all polite to each other. are not going to cry any tears, if the Senate Majority Leader, Minority Leader, is not the Senate Minority or Senate Majority Leader next time. In fact, the kind of litmus test, and I saw some of the candidates up here now falling into this, is I'm… I'm from Maine, I'm not gonna vote for Chuck Schumer for a leader. Right. You know, but that's, you know, and I think that Murphy, Elizabeth Warren, and others are not happy with the leadership. And again, it's just another example of things that are going on outside of Maine having an outsized influence on what's going on in Maine.
Tim Dickinson
This is like the play within the play in the Senate Democratic Conference.
Joe Lockhart
Yeah, and it's just… it's like, I don't… it's unfortunate, because everybody's nice up here, and the odd thing is, I was in D.C. for a day last week. I probably had 10 times the number of conversations about this issue in a day then I've had in the last month with people who live here. It is just, it is like one of those things where it's, “isn't this crazy? Boy, what a mess.” And then right to, “boy, I hear it's gonna be hot tomorrow,” you know.
Tim Dickinson
That's funny.
Joe Lockhart
Hot up here, it's 85, so. It's really, really hot. I'm in DC, and I couldn't move from one part of the office to the other without someone grabbing me and wanting to talk for 15 minutes about it. I have not had more than a 5 minute conversation with a single person in Maine about this, because they're not… they see it for what it's supposed to be, which is a candidate from Maine who failed, we need to get another candidate from Maine, without paying attention to, understanding, or even knowing all of the nonsense that's driving this underneath.
Tim Dickinson
Well, so now, now it looks like we've got, or you, Maine, has got a convention coming up, sort of a 12 days, I guess, to sprint and get this all sorted out. Do you think the state is going to care forward with someone who sort of fits that Platner or working-class background progressive champion, or are we likely to see somebody who might be more of a synthesis candidate?
Joe Lockhart
Yeah, my guess is, and it's still a little bit unclear on how it all works. How do you get to become a delegate? I got a text yesterday from one of the candidates who ran for governor, and the great thing in the text was, it wasn't really from her, it was from… you know, some machine someplace, saying, “you were with me in the governor's race, now I need you again.” And I was like, no, I was with someone who ran against you. But that's okay, but asking me to run to be a delegate. So I think it's a little… I think it's a little unclear. I will say this, there are enough, good candidates, I think, in this race who can take on the mantle of Washington is broken, the system is rigged. we need… we need to bring change, you know, for the people of Maine as a campaign theme, and can do it legitimately, who do not have the, personal baggage that, main voters, convention voters, will have a choice. But it's very, very hard. I read something yesterday that one of the DC election experts called Troy Jackson the odds-on favorite. I'm not sure how he knows that. I really don't, and it's someone who I highly respect.
Tim Dickinson
Sure.
Joe Lockhart
So I didn't think he was making it up. I'm thinking he knows something I don't know. I don't know how you know. Beyond, you know, Jackson's got a compelling reason, which is his, when he ran for governor, they said, “Troy Jackson, the Bernie Sanders endorsed candidate.” That's what is… you know, signs that road signs said.
Tim Dickinson
Right, right.
Joe Lockhart
So he's very associated with that. But I don't know that that translates into, you know, electing delegates, going to the convention, doing the sort of inside game you have to play. So, so I don't know. I will say, I hope… that it's a candidate that reflects as much of that as you can, that candidate that Bernie Sanders is comfortable with, that Elizabeth Warren is comfortable with, because otherwise, I think you're going to have… the energy in the party is there right now in Maine, young progressives who want big change. If they lose that enthusiasm, we're looking at 6 more years of Susan Collins. So I think, I think the hope is that, you know, whether it's whether it's Jackson, whether it's, Bellows, whether it's, you know, my friend and the guy I'm supporting, Dan Kleban, you know, Dan's a great example of, here is a story about a guy who's a small businessman, he's now one of the most successful beer manufacturer's, Maine beer company. You find it now wherever you go. But he's run his company from the beginning as sort of one of these very social conscious, you know, you go and they all get healthcare and salaries, and they encourage you to tip, but let you know that the tips don't go to the employees because they have what they need. It goes to an environmental organization, you know. So he's got the bona fides there. But none of the nonsense or the baggage. So I think there's enough there that… that the… the party, the people, whatever you want to call them, can thread the needle and come out of this actually stronger. You know, relying on… the, now, national, lack of a habitual short attention span of everyone in this country, that in a month from now, it'll… this will be forgotten, and we will have a good progressive candidate who has no baggage. And that's a stronger candidate against Susan Collins.
Tim Dickinson
You think so?
Joe Lockhart
Because you will not have voters like me. Who will be sitting wringing my hands for 2 months saying, can I do it? Can I stay? Should I just stay home? I… any of the people that I've seen… I know most of them. There's a couple that are wild cards for me, because I just don't know them. But the ones that I know, there's 5… at least 5 of them. Happily vote for. Enthusiastically vote for. I'll give them money, go out and do anything they'd want me to do, if anything. That's very different than getting into the fall with Platner. Even if nothing else had come out.
Tim Dickinson
Right.
Joe Lockhart
Even if nothing else would come out, you know, the… I don't know, maybe you could believe… the tattoo stuff, but the misogynistic behavior toward women. That doesn't help. That comes from someplace that doesn't get healed. You know, because it's election by November. You know, I'm not saying that, you know, through lots of work, you don't work these things out, but there's no indication that any of that stuff has happened with him. And his, his getting out of the race video reassured me that I'm absolutely right about him.
Tim Dickinson
I mean, I think that it goes to the general point about him is that he, with each revelation, it wasn't that he was contrite or that he recognized that he had caused pain. It was just sort of peevishness that he was being called to account for any of it. “It's not true, not me and I'm not that guy and...”
Joe Lockhart
“…I earned the right to be a horrible person. Now get off my back.”
Tim Dickinson
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well listen, do you have any other closing thoughts that you want to leave us with? Some, parting insights about… What the what the how whether whether voters will be confident, I guess, in this process. I mean, you know, the 2024 presidential race obviously had something kind of similar. I just wonder, does that leave a bad taste in voters mouths? Or do you think that this is going to be a process with integrity and transparency that's going to leave people feeling confident?
Joe Lockhart
Yeah, here's the big difference, I think, between 2024 and now, which is in 2024, people were engaged in the Trump reelection from the day. you know, Trump announced. This was all… any race that Trump's in both is about Trump and garners lots of attention and focus. People were not paying attention to this race up here. I mean, we've only just started the barrage of ads. It's like every ad that's on now is, you know, you either love Susan Collins, you either hate her, most of the ads are about her. So I think that you're not asking people to completely reorient themselves because they haven't you know, totally tuned in. So, but you've, you've put your finger on the, the main issue, which is the main issue, no pun intended there, the, the primary issue, which is: will voters come out of the convention convinced that their voice was recognized and heard? And my guess is in the few weeks afterwards, that won't be the case. The question will be a month out, you know, as we get towards Labor Day and even beyond, will everyone get comfortable? With, because I think, you know, with Kamala, I don't. I don't remember people being that uncomfortable with the way it was handled. I think everyone was like, okay, that kind of — maybe that's just me and my friends. I guess that makes sense. Better than some sort of free-for-all. It just was as the campaign went on. you know, her inability to, you know, rise to the moment became a problem. My last thought is something that I wrote to my friends on Facebook: Please, please, please, in Washington for the next 2 weeks. Stay out. Leave us alone. We're fine. But two weeks from now, we need your money. And please get involved and start sending that money back in here, because we can't beat her without it. I mean, it's like one of those great… like, I'm so totally convicted on keeping people out of here, and I so completely understand that we can't… you know, this… There is a, it is impossible to beat someone in this race without national involvement. We just need it the right way.
Tim Dickinson
Right, right. Well, Joe, thanks so much for your time and your insights. It's been a great conversation.
Joe Lockhart
Okay. Thanks, Tim.
Tim Dickinson
Take it easy. Bye.
