Graham Platner talked with Becky O’Keefe of Gouldsboro at an Ellsworth cafe in January. (Photo by Tristan Spinski via The Maine Monitor)
ELLSWORTH — A bagpiper led Hancock County Democrats into the middle school gymnasium where they would elect delegates for a convention to replace Graham Platner. Not just any bagpiper: the one who played at Platner’s wedding reception.
The music from David Weeda’s Scottish Highland woodwind set a merry tone for a Saturday meeting quickly arranged to help give Democrats a fresh Senate nominee. But more complicated feelings lurked barely below the surface on Platner’s home turf.
“It’s shameful that our political process allows such venomous treatment of brave people who run for office,” Weeda, a 67-year-old Bucksport resident, said, tearing up in reference to Platner’s exit from the race under intense pressure from his party following a rape accusation he denies. It reminded Weeda of the 2016 Democratic National Convention, where he served as a delegate and Hillary Clinton “stole the nomination” from Bernie Sanders, he said.
In coastal Hancock County, home to Acadia National Park, roughly 750 Democrats picked a crew of 23 delegates for next weekend’s convention in Bangor to replace Platner on the ballot. Twenty-two of those ultimately elected were touted by Troy Jackson as allies of the former Maine Senate president — an early sign of strength for his campaign to challenge Republican Sen. Susan Collins. Jackson, a fellow Sanders-style progressive, was closely aligned with the former nominee: He was Platner’s top pick in the June gubernatorial primary.
But here, the politics of Platner’s extraordinary rise and fall feel personal. Democrats at Ellsworth Elementary/Middle School on Saturday morning grappled in his absence with the relentless scrutiny he faced after making his nearby town of Sullivan and oyster farm in Frenchman Bay famous to observers of American politics the world around.
Some participants in the meeting stopped by a table with large pieces of paper to write notes to Platner and his wife Amy Gertner, who faced the harsh national spotlight herself after it emerged that she had warned his staff about sexual messages he had exchanged with several other women during their marriage.
“Thanks for getting people to believe again,” one note said.
Marcia Myers, the county Democratic committee’s chair, opened the official proceedings around 10:15 a.m., in front of a gym wall declaring “Ellsworth Middle School” and, using the same first letters, “Effort Makes Success.” She read a letter from the state party chair saying Democrats’ energy in the special nominating process “bodes very well for our prospects this November” against Sen. Susan Collins. Myers remarked that “democracy can be an adventure.”
Others were less sanguine or less enthusiastic — or downright confused — about the multistep procedure to replace voters’ overwhelming choice of Platner in the June 9 primary. One of the roughly 200 delegate candidates arrived thinking that she already was a delegate and would be voting directly for a Senate nominee on Saturday, rather than seeking votes to do so. (She was not chosen.)
Candidates seeking to secure a convention full of their faithful told their supporters to close ranks around slates of delegate candidates in each county, lists of whom were posted on their websites. Former Maine CDC Director Nirav Shah, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows and former congressional candidate Jordan Wood mingled with voters and would-be delegates in the school cafeteria before the meeting — then zipped off to other counties.
Each major campaign had a table there for the early-morning retail politics free-for-all in the middle of an eleventh-hour reshuffling of one of the races set to determine whether Republicans will retain a Senate majority for the rest of President Donald Trump’s term.
As light streamed through large glass windows, Jackson’s table offered Skittles and Fig Newtons, while Bellows’ had Doritos and Cheetos. Shah proffered his electability to a tight gaggle of reporters, plus a voter who wanted to press him herself.
Karen and Paul Volckhausen, retired farmers from Orland, said they knew Platner when he was a boy — just yea high, he gestured — and came to the Ellsworth farmers’ market with his mother. The next time Platner appeared to them, it was as a hard-driving progressive populist champion — and “very good speaker” — running for Senate, Paul Volckhausen said. The couple now planned to cast ballots for the full Jackson slate.
“In terms of the issues and in terms of the way Graham was able to reach out to people, I think Graham was stronger in that way,” Volckhausen said, but he thinks Jackson could win much-needed votes in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District with his deep Aroostook County roots.
Some delegate candidates who wanted to head to the Bangor convention with open minds felt boxed out by the competition boosted by the Senate candidates’ slates.
Erin Roy, a 54-year-old retired professor and recent transplant from New York, carried slips of paper with pictures of root vegetables and the slogan “Root for Maine.” She approached the Maine Democratic Party’s vice chair, Imke Schessler, to ask about her concern that the process would underrepresent undecided voters.
Schessler said the party had tried to make the process “as neutral as humanly possible.” As for the campaigns’ slate strategies, she added: “That’s part of the political chess game.”
Soon Schessler, yelling without a microphone, called for the crowd in the cafeteria to follow Weeda into the gymnasium. Amid the processional throng, Dani Robbins, a 30-year-old community organizer in Bar Harbor who was running to be a delegate, said she had looked at Platner with skepticism but voted for him in the primary.
“The betrayal that I think a lot of young people, women, people of color who volunteered for that campaign feel is deep,” she said. “It’s grief.” Robbins voiced support for Bellows, adding that “electability is a misogynistic myth” — but she had not made it on Bellows’ slate. She planned to swap herself in for one of the slated Bellows backers on her ballot.
Ballots went out digitally to 784 voters, many of them not present for the meeting, according to Myers, the county Democratic chair. A sea of largely elderly Democrats looked down at their phones on the middle-school gym bleachers. Some of them lined up at a tech help desk labeled the “Solutions Table” — this was a Democratic Party function, after all.
Most attendees left shortly thereafter, as some straggling voters got help submitting ballots. Roy, about to be overcome in the tabulations by Jackson’s favored delegates, reflected on how politics — inspiring, exhausting, scandal-ridden, spend-a-summer-Saturday-in-a-school-gym U.S. politics — had spit out Platner and Gertner.
“I’m devastated for them as human beings, right? What this has done to them,” she said. “I’m very sad for what this means for people getting into office.”
For all the earlier applause at the prospect of flipping the Senate seat, Roy knows it won’t be easy.
“It’s going to be hard for any of these candidates who couldn’t even win for governor to beat Susan Collins for senator,” Roy admitted. “I hope I’m wrong.”
