Note: This account of the Platner debate in Maine DSA has not been authorized by Maine DSA. The views I present below are my own. I’ve tried to protect the anonymity of as many people as possible. Whether or not an individual is discussed using their real name or a pseudonym should not be read as an indication of whether they were a supporter or opponent of Platner. In order to support my account of events, I will be producing public and private documents which sometimes bear people’s real names. Some people, whose real names appear in the documents we produce, may still be discussed under a pseudonym in other parts of my account of events in order to protect their anonymity as much as I can. I also do not wish for my disputes with Todd Chretien in the Platner Debate to negatively impact any of his political pursuits. He remains highly respected in the socialist movement for good reason, and I continue to hold him in high regard. To the extent that there is any difference between him and I, it is a difference of degrees. I sincerely hope he wins his Portland City Council race.

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already[.]”

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852

Introduction

The sudden collapse of Graham Platner’s senatorial campaign amid credible allegations of sexual assault has sent shockwaves through the whole country. Due to the opportunity to unseat the important Republican Senator Susan Collins, the race had taken on national significance, closely watched by the entire United States.

Platner’s left-wing populist rhetoric, in combination with the help of alumni of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign in New York, allowed him to quickly capture the attention of the public in Maine. Platner seemed to have it all; the activist community generally liked him; the trade unions adored him. In all of my political and labor activism, I encountered volunteers for his campaign. His rise was so sudden and seemingly out of nowhere that it felt divinely ordained. His only critics, it seemed, were establishment shills who thought Platner was too radical, and fringe left-wing radicals who believed that Platner’s military service disqualified him from being a spokesman for progressive politics.

Platner’s senatorial campaign was never without scandal after mid-October of 2025, but the nature of the conversation around him has changed substantially since the implosion of his campaign. With even his most fervent public supporters abandoning him, people have begun asking how Platner ever could’ve become so prominent in the first place. The support for Graham Platner was so broad that almost no progressive politician or organization in Maine has not been tainted by their association with him during all their campaigns.

While individuals and groups associated with the center and right wing of the Democratic Party have tried to use the downfall of Graham Platner as an opportunity to attack left-wing Democrats and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), people who have actually bothered to look into Maine DSA’s position on Platner have quickly discovered that he was never endorsed by Maine DSA.

For those with political literacy and journalistic integrity, it’s hard to overstate how shocking it is that Maine DSA never endorsed Graham Platner since it seemed like he was designed in a laboratory to be the platonic ideal of a “DSA candidate.” This has led many to ask why Maine DSA didn’t endorse Platner when virtually all other progressive organizations in Maine—and even some national organizations—did endorse him. Maine DSA’s decision not to endorse Platner appears all the more confounding given that we did endorse Troy Jackson—whose personal politics are very close to Platner’s, and who was reliant on association with Platner in order to draw attention to his gubernatorial campaign.

While the position Maine DSA ultimately took on the Platner and Jackson campaigns may appear confounding at first glance, I will show in the following article that this position did have a logical foundation grounded in strong socialist principles. I should know, since I played a decisive role in much of the Platner debate within Maine DSA.

This is the story of how it all happened.

Platnerites and Anti-Platnerites

Despite Graham Platner’s sudden rise to public attention, I was personally slow to learn who he was. My first exposure to him was seeing footage of a speech he gave somewhere outdoors in mid-August of 2025. Having been a marshal at several outdoor protests, I assumed that the footage of Platner’s speech was from one such event. I assumed he was just some local figure, from some local organization, who had been contacted to give a speech at a local protest, not someone running for a national Senate seat. Having seen my share of good and bad protest speeches, I thought that Platner’s speech was strong overall, but it didn’t personally move me enough to catch my attention. So I did not look into him any further until later.

I did not actually find out who Graham Platner was until I saw people criticizing him online, saying that his service in the US military and the notorious defense contractor Constellis—formerly Blackwater—disqualified him from being supported by progressive organizations. I found the criticisms of Platner to be very weak overall, but they were enough to make me look into who Platner was, and it allowed me to put a name to a face. As it turned out, this “Graham Platner” was the very person whose outdoor speech I had scrolled past on Instagram a couple of weeks earlier.

At the same time that I saw people criticizing Platner on social media, I saw some of my dear friends—whom I consider to be radicals like me—defending Platner from criticism. I was more sympathetic to their defenses of Platner since I’m generally someone who believes in the concept of rehabilitation, but that didn’t mean I necessarily entirely agreed with them. The fact that my second-best friend named Platner as one of their own friends was something I found greatly distressing, and drove me to keep an eye on Platner and the discourse around him.

I wasn’t planning on criticizing Graham Platner at this time. I’m constantly reading and writing, and I resent having to interrupt projects I’m already deeply invested in. What made me decide to add my voice to the discussion around Platner was hearing several important members of Maine DSA talking about endorsing Platner in public. One of these comrades was a city councilor in Portland, Maine, and the other comrade was, at that time, the co-chair of Maine DSA. By then, I had learned enough about Platner to know that he was unfit for endorsement, but I also knew that nobody else in Maine DSA would be able to argue compellingly against endorsing him.

One thing that was interesting, at this early stage, about the pro-endorsement faction of Maine DSA—who shall henceforth be referred to as the Platnerites—was that it crossed the usual divide between moderate and radical members of the organization. The anti-Platnerite faction of Maine DSA consisted of only a portion of the radical Maine DSA members, and they were failing to persuade the radical members of the Platnerite faction to break rank.

The reason for the rhetorical impotence of the anti-Platnerites, in my opinion, was their total reliance on moral appeals and leaps of logic as the basis for their anti-endorsement arguments. Their argument was essentially that Graham Platner previously served in the US military. Therefore, Graham Platner is currently a bad person who is unfit for endorsement.

This general line of argumentation was never going to appeal to any of the Platnerites because their position was not based on moral convictions, but on political calculations. Their argument for endorsement was essentially that Platner’s personal character is unimportant; he is fit for endorsement because he is advancing a policy agenda that aligns with the policy goals of Maine DSA.

In order to at least stall the endorsement of Graham Platner by Maine DSA, I had to accomplish several things simultaneously in my criticism of Platner. Firstly, I had to show the anti-Platnerites the inherent impotence of the arguments they’d been making up to that point, and arm them with arguments that directly challenged the position of the Platnerites. I felt that it would not be possible to break the Platnerite faction without first reconstituting the anti-Platnerites.

The second half of stalling the endorsement process would be to break the existing Platnerite faction by demonstrating that endorsement would mean a betrayal of fundamental socialist principles. I knew that this would be enough to make the real radicals in the Platnerite faction break rank and join the anti-Platnerites. But it was an open question as to how long this could stall the endorsement process since the real radicals in Maine DSA are small in number compared to the moderates. All that could be said with certainty was that the endorsement process would proceed without any impediment unless I created the impediment.

Though Maine DSA can suspend its endorsement rules in order to endorse a candidate the organization really likes, this is generally avoided in order to maintain organizational discipline and avoid making a habit of breaking the rules. The procedural Maine DSA candidate endorsement process consisted of the following steps at the time: 1) endorsement is requested by the candidate who wants to be endorsed by Maine DSA; 2) Maine DSA members collaboratively create a questionnaire that is personalized to the candidate requesting Maine DSA’s endorsement; 3) once the candidate questionnaire is created, it is sent to the candidate who has requested endorsement so that they can answer Maine DSA’s questions; 4) Maine DSA uses the answers to the candidate questionnaire to inform their final decision on whether or not to endorse the candidate who has requested endorsement.

In the case of Graham Platner, it was simply assumed, at this early stage, inside and outside Maine DSA, that the chapter would endorse him eventually, so the chapter began working on a questionnaire for him despite him not having requested Maine DSA’s endorsement. Since I had resolved to stall the endorsement process as long as possible, I decided to participate in the debates over the contents of the questionnaire. I was unable to do much in these debates due to having to participate over Slack, and the debates on the contents of the questionnaire devolved into personal attacks between me and another Maine DSA member I had been frustrated by since before I joined the chapter.

The questionnaire debates ultimately proved inconsequential because Platner never requested Maine DSA’s endorsement, so the questionnaire was never sent to him. It was only ever used by me in my critique of Platner as proof of how far the endorsement process had progressed within Maine DSA without any external impetus.

Like That

I began writing my critique of Platner on September 3, and researching his policy platform to build the strongest possible argument against endorsement. On September 19, I published the rough draft of my critique of Platner on my Substack. I believed that I would ultimately fail to prevent Maine DSA from endorsing Platner. My primary goal in criticizing Platner was to fulfill what I understand to be the basic task of all communists: to fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; while, in the movement of the present, also representing and taking care of the future of that movement. My primary goal was therefore achieved simply by publishing my critique of Platner. And by publishing my critique, I created the possibility whereby the eventual betrayal of the working class by Platner could be used to advance the consciousness of Maine DSA and the working class more generally.

The first half of my critique of Platner was a sustained attack on the anti-Platnerites given in the positive form of a defense of Platner. I could not attack the Platnerites without first acknowledging the many genuinely good things that attracted people to Platner in the first place.

The second half of my critique of Platner was where I delivered my real criticism of his policy platform, thereby also attacking the basis of the pro-endorsement position of the Platnerite faction. Due to my desire to end everything as quickly and decisively as possible, I did not criticize every item of Platner’s platform, instead focusing only on the items which I felt were most clearly antithetical to a genuinely socialist program.

The main thrust of my criticism was that despite the progressive items of his policy platform, Platner’s rhetoric and policies were very clearly those of a nationalist, and that this could not be reconciled with the internationalist orientation of any genuinely socialist organization. I doubled down on emphasizing the irreconcilability of nationalism and internationalism in a shorter article published on October 6 in Pine & Roses, the official magazine of Maine DSA, which was also edited by the Platnerite co-chair of Maine DSA.

Since my criticism of Platner was focused on his nationalism, I began my campaign against endorsing him by circulating my articles in Maine DSA’s internationalism working group, which already consisted of a number of anti-Platnerites.

What made my criticism of Platner unique from the other anti-Platnerites was the absence of moral appeals in my arguments. At no point in my defense of Platner did I claim that he is a “good” person. Likewise, in my criticisms, I never argued that he is a “bad” person. Neither did I ever suggest that Platner’s intentions were anything other than noble. My criticism was solely focused on the contradiction between Platner’s policy platform and a genuinely socialist program. This was sufficient to polarize all the real radicals in Maine DSA to a principled anti-Platnerite position.

At the same time, the position I ultimately took in my critique of Platner was explicitly conciliatory with the Platnerites. While there were parts of Platner’s policy platform that were unambiguously irreconcilable with socialism, it could not be denied that there were other parts of Platner’s platform that were in alignment with a socialist program. I therefore concluded that the only tenable position on Platner would be one of critical support, which, in this case, meant allowing our members to volunteer for his campaign—which they were already doing—but refusing to endorse Platner unless he changed his platform to correspond to socialist principles. This is why my article in Pine & Roses explicitly advances a slogan of “support without endorsement.”

All of the events discussed so far happened before October 7, 2025, so none of the scandals that had tarnished Platner’s public image had occurred yet. While I never felt the need to change my position in response to the scandals that plagued Platner’s campaign from mid-October and onwards, the scandals certainly worked in my favor. While I had converted most of the radical Platnerites to anti-Platnerites as far as I was aware, the Platnerite faction was still large, unified, and well-organized prior to the first scandals of his campaign. I am doubtful that all my efforts would’ve been successful in preventing Platner from being endorsed by Maine DSA if his scandals had never occurred.

I caught my first lucky break on October 7, 2025, when Platner’s social media accounts released a statement condemning the actions taken by militant Palestinian liberation groups on October 7, 2023. This instantly caused several of the remaining radical Platnerites to turn against Platner due to their own commitments to Palestinian liberation. Several Maine DSA members, myself among them, had been very involved with the Maine Coalition for Palestine since 2023, and had little tolerance for any criticism of the Palestine liberation movement. Overall, however, the Platnerite faction of Maine DSA remained large and unified, and would remain as such for a couple more weeks.

It was roughly around this time that Platner’s old Reddit comments were leaked by a mysterious source that was likely working for the Janet Mills campaign. This scandal had predictably little impact on the Maine public’s support for Platner since 1) he was clearly no longer the same person who made these comments; and 2) Platner himself did not make any excuses for them. Instead, Platner acknowledged that they were wrong, that he was not proud of them, and that he was trying to be a better person. To most people in Maine, this was an extremely graceful way of handling a very silly controversy, and everyone moved on as if nothing had happened. Platner’s Reddit comment scandal was universally ignored by basically every faction of Maine DSA.

Platner’s next scandal was far more serious, and it was one that he ignited himself. On October 20, 2025, in an interview with Pod Save America, Platner revealed an old video of himself drunkenly singing Miley Cyrus’ Wrecking Ball at the wedding of one of his relatives. What was scandalous about the video was not Platner’s drunkenness or his singing, but the fact that a tattoo which was virtually indistinguishable from a Nazi totenkopf was clearly visible on his chest. This naturally raised the question: is Graham Platner, the progressive democratic senate candidate, secretly a fascist? Platner’s answer to this question was that he was not secretly a fascist, and that he didn’t know what the tattoo was when he got it as part of a drunken bender in Croatia, and had gotten the tattoo covered with a new tattoo after the controversy erupted. For most Mainers, this was a satisfactory answer since most of them didn’t know what a totenkopf was. I also believed that Platner didn’t know what the tattoo was when he got it. My research for my critique of Platner led me to believe that he was prone to acts of profound stupidity, but I refrained from saying anything of the sort in my critique of him since I was not interested in evaluating Platner’s personal character, instead focusing quite stubbornly on Platner’s policy platform.

For the reasons explained above, the tattoo scandal never hurt Platner’s public approval. The Midcoast Villager, for example, reported after the scandals that they had “been unable to find a single Platner supporter who has abandoned him over the controversies, after speaking to more than two dozen voters.” Polling released in December 2025 also showed no discernible drop in Platner’s public approval after the tattoo scandal.

The story was quite different within Maine DSA. The tattoo scandal sent a shockwave through the Platnerite faction from which they never recovered. They were caught so off-guard by the scandal that I do not recall a single one of the Platnerites even trying to spin the tattoo scandal as a positive example of why it’s productive to deradicalize fascists! Instead, the Platnerite faction of Maine DSA panicked and contracted in size. From this point forward, the Platnerite faction of Maine DSA was no longer large enough or unified enough to make a serious push for endorsement, but as I will soon discuss, the remaining Platnerites were still vocal in their position that Maine DSA should endorse Platner.

For my part, the tattoo scandal never changed my position of critical support for Platner. As I’ve already stated numerous times, my criticism of Platner was never based on his personal character. I treated it as a purely political matter: Maine DSA should support Platner in the same way that a rope supports a hanged man, meaning that we do not make excuses for any of Platner’s offenses, we do not endorse Platner, or publicly associate ourselves with him. But as long as he remains the strongest candidate in the race, we will not dissuade anyone from voting for him, and we will permit our members to volunteer for his campaign. And the moment the public turns on Platner and/or a better Senate candidate emerges, we cut all ties with Platner and wash our hands of him. It was a simple, pragmatic, and cut-throat position: Graham Platner is not a friend of Maine DSA, but as long as there is some overlap between our agenda and his platform, he is not our enemy either. Hence, I never wrote any new articles about any of Platner’s scandals. The position I took in the articles written before Platner’s scandals was simply reinforced by each successive scandal.

I cannot accurately retell the story of the Platner debate within Maine DSA without acknowledging how the tattoo scandal definitively shifted the balance of the debate in favor of the anti-Platnerites. I had been successful in stalling the endorsement process up to that point, but I am doubtful that I could have delayed endorsement indefinitely if the scandal had not broken the Platnerite faction the way that it did.

The remaining Platnerites were still committed to trying to salvage the effort to endorse Platner, and released articles of their own to try and reclaim control of the debate.

The first article in Pine & Roses from the Platnerites was written by then-cochair of Maine DSA, Todd Chretien, and published on October 26. It attempted to individually criticize the various anti-Platnerite positions in Maine DSA. Chretien is a very astute Marxist, and editor of a popular annotated edition of Lenin’s State and Revolution sold by Haymarket Books, so I was fully prepared to take his criticism of the anti-Platnerites very seriously. It was clear to me upon reading Chretien’s article, however, that it could not withstand being read alongside either of my articles criticizing Platner, and on this basis, I felt, and still feel, that Chretien’s article did not warrant any response from me.

The fact that I was the only anti-Platnerite Chretien criticized by name told me everything I needed to know. It confirmed not only the strength of my argument, but also my singularity among the anti-Platnerites. The anti-Platnerites could not stand without me, and as such, my argument had to be given special attention by Chretien.

If I had to guess, Chretien probably did not intend to start a polemic battle in Pine & Roses between Platnerites and anti-Platnerites. If he did, then he failed since no polemic battle ever materialized. Chretien also certainly did not intend to write my next article for me, but we will talk about that in the next section of this article.

Those who do bother to read both mine and Chretien’s articles might say that I should have responded to Chretien’s criticisms in an article of my own, since Chretien’s interpretation was not only erroneous, but singularly erroneous among those whom I know to have read my articles about Platner. I feel, however, that Chretien’s misinterpretation of my argument was not completely without basis since he could not have known my position on Troy Jackson, which I would not publish until after Chretien criticized me, thus explaining why Chretien wrongly accuses me of opposing endorsing Jackson, when I was actually always in favor of endorsing Jackson.

My notion that Chretien was the only Platnerite that could’ve rebutted me was confirmed when another Platnerite, writing under the pseudonym T. Sinclair, decided to pen an article.

Sinclair’s article was not directed at anyone in particular, nor did it even mention Graham Platner. Instead, Sinclair tried to impress readers with a fantastic new idea: revolutionary forgiveness—which, in this context, essentially means unconditional rehabilitation. The relevance of Sinclair’s article to the Platner debate is more obvious once it is understood that it was the very next article to be published after Chretien's critique of the anti-Platnerites. At this time, Platner’s tattoo scandal was still fresh news and fodder for debate, so while it was not explicitly stated, it was heavily implied who Sinclair was revolutionarily forgiving. But if Chretien’s critique of the anti-Platnerites was weak, Sinclair’s defense of Platner was feckless. At no point did Sinclair ever mention Platner or attempt a proper analysis of his scandals. The resulting defense of Platner was far weaker than the one I made as part of my critique of him.

What was also pathetic about Sinclair’s defense of Graham Platner was that it contrasted sharply with Platner’s own handling of the tattoo scandal. As mentioned above, Platner was responsible for igniting the scandal himself. He always maintained control of the narrative. He barely made an excuse for the tattoo. He apologized and moved on. The Maine public largely did the same. As mentioned earlier, they forgave Platner and moved on. This was also the position that Chretien took in his defense of Platner: confronting the scandal and moving past it. This simple task was apparently too difficult for Sinclair. At no point do I recall any of the Platnerites adopting the slogan of revolutionary forgiveness. Sinclair again tried to advance the forgiveness slogan in relation to Platner’s tattoo scandal in a conversation with a fellow Maine DSA member, which was transcribed and published in Pine & Roses on March 6, 2026, only to be refuted again. Sinclair’s slogan was revolutionarily ignored.

At this point, the Platner debate in Maine DSA had assumed the form in which it would remain for the rest of Platner’s senatorial campaign. The Platnerites could no longer unify around the idea of endorsing Platner because the majority of them saw Platner’s scandals as a political liability. Many of them began invoking the fact that Platner still had not requested endorsement as a way of quickly shutting down the endorsement debate within Maine DSA. Only the most committed Platnerites, like Chretien and Sinclair, continued to vocally support endorsing Platner. The anti-Platnerites had taken the upper hand in the debate. Though they did not speak in a unified voice, the anti-Platnerites could boast of holding a position that was actually grounded in long-established socialist values of internationalism, anti-fascism, and anti-tailism. The anti-Platnerite position was also better suited to the post-scandal situation, since the anti-Platnerites were not opposed to supporting Platner’s campaign through volunteer work—although I personally never volunteered for Platner’s campaign—but only argued that support for Platner should not include endorsement. After Platner’s scandals, the anti-Platnerite position was implicitly recognized as the pragmatic position that it always was, since it allowed Maine DSA to avoid becoming publicly entangled with Platner, while also facilitating the use of his campaign by Maine DSA as a tool to awaken the consciousness of the masses.

Though the Platner debate would not progress past this stage within Maine DSA, it would also be inaccurate to say that the Platnerite campaign to endorse the campaign was definitively dead. On the contrary, I would knowingly risk reinvigorating the endorsement campaign with my next move.

The Legitimate Son of Maine

My position on Troy Jackson’s gubernatorial campaign developed in parallel with my position on Graham Platner’s senatorial campaign.

I first heard of Troy Jackson a couple of months after the 2024 US Presidential election. One of my DSA group chats was having one of the usual “what do we do now?” conversations, and the comrade whom I would eventually get into a personal argument with during the debate on the contents of the candidate questionnaire for Graham Platner said, “Troy Jackson is drawing large crowds.”

Since Groundwork is this comrade’s favorite DSA caucus, hearing them speak positively about Troy Jackson was enough to make me dismiss him for the time being.

My proper introduction to Troy Jackson happened at the 2025 Maine AFL-CIO summer institute, when he gave a speech that he would also give at Bernie Sanders’ Labor Day rally in Portland, Maine.

Without going into the details of Jackson’s speech, I will say that I was completely won over by him. I realized that he was no ordinary progressive politician. Unlike other politicians who merely “come from working-class families,” Jackson actually spent years traveling for work as a logger, struggling to support his family. Jackson had witnessed labor strikes throughout his life and participated in them himself. His early experiences with labor organizing taught him the importance of working-class solidarity and the strength that workers can have when they act collectively. And, lastly, Jackson’s experience in the Maine state legislature had taught him that the class background of politicians matters, as Governor Janet Mills consistently vetoed the pro-worker legislation of her own party. And while Jackson’s personal politics would be best described as eclectic, he consistently showed that he would defer to the preferences of working people and the labor unions when it came time to support or oppose legislation. Aside from the fact that Jackson was not running on the ticket of an authentic workers’ party, he was the ideal working-class political candidate in every respect. Jackson was a tribune of the proletariat.

While there are still many criticisms I could make of Jackson as a politician, I determined that my criticisms were outweighed by Jackson’s general working-class credentials. The fact that Jackson was running for governor also mattered greatly to me, as it would allow a working-class person to exercise veto power over bourgeois legislation—something that could not be said about the Senate race since senators do not have individual veto power over legislation.

Before I had any idea who Graham Platner was, I could see that Troy Jackson’s gubernatorial campaign had immense practical implications for the working-class movement, inside and outside Maine. If Jackson could win the gubernatorial race, then it would allow the proletariat to gain experience wielding executive power, but within the limitations of bourgeois government institutions. Since Jackson’s campaign opened the possibility for the working class to subordinate capital to the interests of the workers, if only to a limited extent, I believed that it was worth supporting Jackson’s gubernatorial campaign to the hilt, since, with careful agitation, the experience of having a working-class governor could help the working class realize the necessity of the full conquest of political power to enforce their class interests.

Therefore, before I ever knew the name Graham Platner, I knew that I needed to try to get Maine DSA to support Jackson’s gubernatorial campaign up to and including endorsement. I might have accomplished this task sooner were it not for the sudden rise of Graham Platner demanding my immediate attention.

Despite the numerous similarities in the personal politics of both Platner and Jackson, I always saw Jackson as a stick with which I could beat Platner over the head. I felt that this was reflected in the policy platforms of each candidate. Where as Graham Platner styled himself as a middle class messiah for the working class, with a policy platform whose nationalist content ran explicitly contrary to the interests of the working class, Troy Jackson’s policy platform was assembled from the survey responses of working people inside and outside the labor unions—survey data which I partially helped to collect—about what policies they wanted to see advanced by their representatives in government. While it is true that Jackson, the working class of Maine, and the American working class more generally, can often be very nationalistic, this was not reflected in Jackson’s platform—which contained no nationalist content—because nationalism is not a bread-and-butter issue for the Maine working class.

After briefly getting distracted by the sudden rise of Platner, and after I had published my views on his senatorial campaign, I returned to my focus on how to spur Maine DSA to support Jackson’s gubernatorial campaign. By this point, Todd Chretien had published his criticism of my polemic against Graham Platner. While I still feel that Chretien failed to refute any of my main points about Platner, he made several secondary points I fundamentally agreed with, although unlike Chretien, I did not believe any of these points applied. I also had little interest in indulging in a polemic battle with Chretien, since my first response to him would consist mainly of quoting his criticisms of my articles about Platner, then citing the relevant sections of my articles about Platner where I anticipate the criticisms made by Chretien. I was not interested in repeating myself. Instead, I decided to subsume aspects of Chretien’s criticism of me, and use Chretien’s points in my article The Case for Troy Jackson.

For example, in Chretien’s criticism of me, he wrote:

As [Lenin] once said, ‘Propaganda and agitation alone are not enough for an entire class, the broad masses of the working people, those oppressed by capital, to take up such a stand. For that, the masses must have their own political experience.’(Pine & Roses)

I then deliberately make the same fundamental assertion as Lenin and Chretien in my own article, writing the following:

The organized and disorganized sections of the working class cannot be won over with argument alone, but must arrive at our conclusion themselves. Socialists need to aid this development by engaging in struggle and agitation alongside the workers and their representatives in the unions. To argue otherwise is to essentially insist that the working class must come to us socialists for our support. (Pine & Roses)

Even as I appropriated Chretien’s criticism of me for my own purposes, I maintained that my points made in support of Jackson do not extend to Platner, writing:

What makes Troy Jackson’s gubernatorial campaign qualitatively different from those of other reform candidates is this: unlike other mainstream reform candidates like Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, and Graham Platner, all of whom demand systemic reforms which would benefit the working class while leaving intact the system that dominates the working class, Troy’s campaign is actually demanding worker control over the levers of political power, albeit still within the bounds of the existing political system. In doing so, Troy has actually fused the economic side of the struggle for working class emancipation with its political counterpart, as opposed to “lending the economic struggle a political character” (Cosmonaut Magazine). In this regard, Troy stands leagues above every mainstream reform candidate in my opinion, even above Sanders, who Troy names as one of his personal influences. It is for this reason that I think Troy is worthy of endorsement by all self-described socialist and/or communist organizations. (Pine & Roses)

My main point about Troy Jackson was that despite the similarities between his and Platner’s personal politics, the differences between the two men and the offices for which they were running rendered Troy Jackson a revolutionary candidate, and Graham Platner a counterrevolutionary one. Jackson’s gubernatorial campaign represented the “conscious self-activity of the working class advancing its own interests in the political arena”; Platner’s campaign did not, in spite of his support from the labor unions. Jackson’s gubernatorial campaign allowed the working class to gain practical experience in advancing its own interests, and this would’ve continued at a higher level if he had won the gubernatorial election. Platner’s campaign did not allow the working class to gain experience in advancing its own interests because its platform did not advance the class interests of the proletariat.

With the Platnerites left rudderless and in disarray by Platner’s tattoo scandal, I saw an opportunity to reorient Maine DSA to supporting Troy Jackson. My article The Case for Troy Jackson was the first step in accomplishing this task. Published on November 8, 2025, it was the next Pine & Roses article to be published after Chretien and Sinclair’s articles in defense of Platner. I therefore seized the narrative around the 2025/26 elections at the exact moment that the Platnerites lost the narrative.

I then appeared to lose all momentum in the two weeks following the publication of The Case for Troy Jackson. I argued to several senior members of Maine DSA that endorsement of Troy Jackson should be treated as an absolute imperative by the organization, but everyone rebutted me. They said that while Jackson was very much their favorite gubernatorial candidate, they were not convinced that he had any interest in being endorsed by Maine DSA, nor had he even requested an endorsement. They also argued to me that associating with socialists could be politically detrimental to his campaign, so it might actually help Jackson more if Maine DSA avoided endorsing him—never mind that many, though not all, of these same people argued in favor of endorsing Graham Platner, even if it meant suspending Maine DSA’s endorsement rules.

Unhappy with Maine DSA’s internal response to my argument for endorsement of Troy Jackson, I decided to force the issue by contacting Jackson’s campaign to encourage him to request Maine DSA’s endorsement. But they never returned my emails or phone calls. It now appeared as if Maine DSA might take the worst possible positions on the Senate and gubernatorial races: endorsement for Graham Platner, and no endorsement for Troy Jackson. Such a position would’ve badly damaged the credibility of Maine DSA when Platner would inevitably do something that would have immediate and unambiguously negative consequences for the working class. It was a situation from which I could still individually emerge unscathed, but which would very badly damage the socialist movement. So I began to despair that all my efforts up to this point had only been for my own good, until I caught a short succession of lucky breaks in the last eight days of November 2025.

My first lucky break happened when the Hancock County chapter of the Maine Democratic Party shared my article about Troy Jackson on Facebook. This came as an extreme surprise to me because the article was written from an unabashed communist perspective and explicitly argued that Jackson’s campaign was a step towards a workers’ party independent from the Democratic Party. The surprise was a welcome one, though, as it would draw attention to my writing, and increase the odds that it would have some small influence on both Jackson and Platner.

My second lucky break came only days later. After the Hancock County Democrats shared my article about Jackson, a friend in the Maine Labor Climate Council (MLCC) invited me to a small press conference happening on November 24 at the Western Maine Labor Council (WMLC) building where Troy Jackson was going to be speaking. I had no involvement with the subject of the press conference; I simply interpreted the invite as a pretext to get me in a room with Jackson. At this time, in November 2025, I was installing solar panels on the roofs of elementary schools during the day and taking the AFL-CIO’s Organizing 4 Power course in the evening. The WMLC press conference did not conflict with my existing schedule, and I wouldn’t have wasted an opportunity to talk to him anyway. I went directly to the press conference from work. After the press conference had officially ended, my friend from MLCC introduced me to Troy Jackson. To my pleasant surprise, he had actually read my article about him.

I spoke frankly with Troy Jackson, explaining that I meant what I said about him being a transformative political candidate, but that he faced an uphill battle to the governor’s office due to his lack of name recognition—a fact which, to me, further bolstered my argument that his political activity was not oriented towards the accumulation of personal status, but towards public service to the working class. I then raised the possibility of a Maine DSA endorsement for his campaign. This caught Jackson by surprise, since he didn’t seem to think that DSA endorsed non-socialist candidates. I explained that DSA’s endorsement process is much more nuanced, and varies greatly between chapters, but that there were many people within Maine DSA who would like to endorse him—which was true. I also explained that I could not promise him a Maine DSA endorsement. The fastest way to start the endorsement process would be for Jackson or his campaign to request the endorsement themselves. I explained further that while a Maine DSA endorsement would not guarantee a victory for Jackson in the gubernatorial race, it would help his chances by enlarging the number of people volunteering for his campaign. He indicated that he could use more volunteers in the Portland and Brunswick areas, which I explained were areas where Maine DSA had many members who were active in local politics. I stressed that there was very little that I could do for Jackson if he did not take the first step towards a Maine DSA endorsement himself, though, and we ended the conversation on that note.

At this point, I felt that I had done everything I could do as an individual to influence the course of the Platner/Jackson debate within Maine DSA. I had theoretically dismantled the entire basis of the Platnerite position and thrown their criticisms of me back in their faces. I allowed Platner’s public scandals to do the rest of the work for me. But I did not have the ability to individually impose my position on Maine DSA. The position taken by Maine DSA was always going to be decided collectively. I believed that I had done everything I could to individually influence the decisions made by Maine DSA in the senatorial and gubernatorial races, but I could not make the organization’s decisions myself. I therefore resigned myself to practical work. I put my money where my mouth was when it came to supporting Jackson. I donated money to his campaign, collected signatures, and knocked on doors for his campaign in Portland, Brunswick, and Auburn.

During this time, I was occasionally contacted by people wanting to tell me that my critique of Platner had helped them focus their own thoughts about him. One of these individuals claimed to be in an unofficial Discord server for Platner’s volunteers. I never requested any inside information or access to the server, as I always maintained that the strength of my criticism of Platner was that it refused to resort to muck-raking or mud-slinging, and that such tactics could only cheapen my criticisms.

I would also visit my friend in the Revolutionary Communists of America (RCA) and talk about everything happening in the Maine socialist movement. Even though our conversations remained on politics and could even be somewhat confrontational, I always found them refreshing and clarifying. She would say things like “I don’t know how you can support Democrats,” and I would respond that I wasn’t supporting any ordinary Democrat; I was supporting Troy Jackson. And while I fundamentally agreed that the Democratic Party was not capable of serving the interests of the working class, it was also impossible to completely avoid a minimum level of engagement with Democratic Party politics as long as the labor unions—the most advanced section of the working class—remained supportive of the Democratic Party. A worker’s party in the US will not have a basis without the support of the labor unions. My position was and remains that communists must, therefore, work towards a worker’s party by splitting the Democratic Party, which, in my calculation, will be accomplished by running union members on pro-labor platforms on a Democratic Party ticket. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer recently declining to endorse Jackson as Platner’s replacement for the Maine Democratic Senate nominee serves as proof of the potential of my strategy to split the Democratic Party.

As the months passed and the years changed, I had become disengaged from Maine DSA’s internal politics. Believing I had done what I could to stop an endorsement of Platner and make an endorsement of Jackson happen, I resolved that I would participate in any meetings where endorsement might be on the agenda, but I otherwise felt that I didn’t have anything to contribute to the organization.

Unbeknownst to me, a petition urging Maine DSA to consider endorsing Troy Jackson had been circulating since the end of March 2026, and its coauthor was T. Sinclair. I was not given the opportunity to sign the petition myself—proof of the extent of my disengagement from internal DSA politics—but seeing who had signed the petition told me a lot about the Jacksonite faction within Maine DSA.

As was the case with the Platnerite faction, support for endorsing Troy Jackson, while not ubiquitous within Maine DSA, crossed the usual divide between radicals and moderates in the organization. What was also unique about the Jacksonite faction of Maine DSA was that it consisted of both Platnerites and anti-Platnerites. As mentioned above, the petition encouraging Maine DSA to consider endorsing Jackson had been co-written by the revolutionary apologist T. Sinclair, but the petition had also been signed by people who had personally told me that they thought my critique of Platner was “brilliant.”

I always understood that endorsing Troy Jackson might set a precedent that would make it easier for the Platnerites to endorse Platner, especially since endorsing Jackson almost certainly meant suspending Maine DSA’s endorsement rules because Jackson did not identify as a socialist. It was a risk I was willing to take and Jackson was worth that risk. As far as I was concerned, I could continue to stall the endorsement of Platner since I believed all my criticisms of him still applied.

There was also an anti-Jacksonite faction within Maine DSA. Unlike the anti-Platnerites, the anti-Jacksonites mostly liked Jackson and wanted him to win the gubernatorial race. They weren’t even necessarily opposed to endorsing Jackson. What the anti-Jacksonites opposed was suspending Maine DSA’s endorsement rules in order to endorse Jackson—for the radical anti-Jacksonites, this was likely due to the concern that suspending the rules to endorse Jackson would facilitate a future endorsement of Platner.

The decision on whether or not Maine DSA was to endorse Jackson would take place in a two-part meeting—the first part was a question-and-answer session with Jackson himself, while the second part consisted of a debate that Jackson was not allowed to witness or participate in. Before the meeting, I shared my Pine & Roses article about Jackson in the general discussion channel of the Maine DSA Slack, where the article received a large and positive reaction.

I observed but did not participate in the question-and-answer session with Jackson. I did not feel like I had any questions to ask him that were not asked by anyone else. In the following debate, I only raised my voice to say that it’s a testament to Jackson’s credibility that he won me over the first time I heard him speak, whereas I had always found Platner to be “repulsive.” Todd Chretien was also at the meeting and argued in favor of endorsing Jackson.

The collective argument made by the Jacksonites won the day. The meeting’s attendees voted first to suspend Maine DSA’s usual endorsement rules, then voted to endorse Troy Jackson in the gubernatorial race and form an ad-hoc Jackson canvassing committee. Maine DSA announced the endorsement on instagram a couple of days later, on May 7th, 2026.

A renewed push to endorse Platner never materialized within Maine DSA, and I continued to volunteer for Troy Jackson’s campaign for the remainder of the time leading up to the primary elections in Maine. I was not surprised to see Platner win the senatorial primary by an overwhelming margin, and I was disappointed, but not surprised, to see Jackson lose the gubernatorial primary election. What pleasantly surprised me about Jackson’s performance in the gubernatorial primary was that while he finished in third place overall, he won the cities of Portland and Bangor. This was significant because Jackson came from an extremely rural part of Maine and represented this area during his time in the state legislature. But winning two of Maine’s largest urban centers, where capitalist exploitation is most clearly defined, confirmed to me that the platform Jackson ran on was fundamentally a proletarian platform in its essential elements. It reminded me of the 1917 Russian provisional government elections, in which the Bolsheviks were beaten overall by other parties, but won in all the major urban centers of Russia, thus showing the Bolsheviks that they would be able to transfer political power from the bourgeois parliament to the government of workers councils.

I ended my article The Case for Troy Jackson by saying that the working class would take a step forward whether Jackson won or lost the gubernatorial election. His performance in the gubernatorial primary confirmed this for me. It was working people who supported Jackson and volunteered for his campaign: they supported him because he fought for their interests, and as a result, Jackson won the parts of Maine where capitalist exploitation is most clearly defined. I believe that I witnessed the beginning of a genuine proletarian movement in spite of his electoral defeat. I could not have anticipated what would come next.

Icarus and the Phoenix

The end of Graham Platner’s campaign would be just as sudden as its beginning. After dominating the Democratic Senate primary in June 2026, Politico published an article on July 6 containing credible allegations of sexual assault against Platner.

A massive chain reaction followed. The mainstream media seized on the allegations against Graham Platner just like they did with all of his other scandals, but the severity of the sexual assault allegations made them the straw that broke the camel’s back, and Platner’s army of volunteers finally deserted him. Platner denied the allegations against him, but still dropped out of the Senate race. Republicans and moderate Democrats then attempted to use Platner’s downfall to go on the offensive against DSA. As mentioned earlier, it was assumed by everyone inside and outside DSA, ourselves included, that Maine DSA would eventually endorse Platner in the Senate race because he appeared to be the platonic ideal of a DSA candidate. His downfall also occurred at the same time that several political candidates endorsed by Zorhan Mamdani and DSA had won races in New York. The establishment political milieu therefore wanted to use Platner’s downfall to slander the entire left-wing progressive movement.

There was a big problem, however, with the establishment political milieu’s attempts to tie Platner to DSA: Platner had not been endorsed by any DSA chapter, nor had he requested endorsement at any point as far as we are aware. Not only was there never even a vote to endorse Platner within Maine DSA, the candidate questionnaire Maine DSA made for Platner also was never sent to him.

At the same time, those with the ability to read took note of the fact that Maine DSA did endorse Troy Jackson in the gubernatorial race.

I considered the endorsement of Troy Jackson and the snubbing of Graham Platner as the best-case scenario for the end of the Platner debate within Maine DSA, but it was a scenario that I never expected to materialize. I considered it the ideal scenario for several reasons. Firstly, it makes Maine DSA appear to be incredibly principled and politically savvy. Maine DSA was one of only a few progressive organizations that did not endorse Platner. Maine DSA, therefore, does not share in Platner’s downfall.

Secondly, snubbing Platner and endorsing Jackson showed that Maine DSA actually stood with the working class. It would’ve been easier for Maine DSA to remain agnostic on the gubernatorial race since Jackson, the labor candidate, stood little chance of winning. Instead, Maine DSA chose to stand with the real working-class candidate in one race, while snubbing the middle-class poser in the Senate race. Maine DSA was happy to share in Jackson’s gubernatorial defeat because his defeat did more to advance the working-class movement than Platner’s senatorial victory would have.

Thirdly, snubbing Platner and endorsing Jackson helps advance the working-class movement and raise the consciousness of the working class. Since everyone assumed that Maine DSA would endorse Platner, they will be curious about why the endorsement never materialized. This will eventually lead them to the Pine & Roses articles that were part of the Platner/Jackson debate. Though my articles were by no means the only articles of the Platner/Jackson debate, they are unambiguously the strongest, and they represent the position that ultimately won out in practice. The message of my articles, which events have rendered the de facto position of Maine DSA, was that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself—win or lose, the working class must struggle for itself to advance its own interests. Only by placing themselves in service to the working class can members of other classes become revolutionary. Even bourgeois commentators have managed to grasp this message to a certain extent. Soon after Platner dropped out of the senatorial race, I saw multiple pundits touting Jackson’s Maine DSA endorsement as a reason why he would be the best person to replace Platner as the Democratic senate nominee. I’ve even seen people articulate in their own ways that Jackson is the working-class candidate that Platner was simply pretending to be.

I understood something that nobody else seemed to understand: the nationwide implications of the senatorial race’s outcome meant that national attention was on Maine. This should have been obvious to everyone when Bernie Sanders, one of the faces of mainstream American progressivism, came to Maine in support of Platner and Jackson’s campaigns. This meant that any decision Maine DSA ultimately made in regard to the Senate race would have national consequences. I calculated, correctly, that with its temporary national platform, Maine DSA could therefore make a much larger statement on a national stage by snubbing Platner than by endorsing him. The immediate aftermath of his downfall appears to have proven me correct.

I prefer to believe that Graham Platner wanted to be the progressive hero of Maine, and may have genuinely thought himself to be that hero, but his platform and his past prevented him from playing this role. Platner was too far left for the Democratic Party establishment, and too right-wing and scandal-ridden for any genuinely socialist organization to support him. The more grassroots support Platner won by challenging the Democratic Party establishment, the more the establishment resorted to muckraking to assassinate Platner’s character. A state of predominantly small proprietors like Maine would probably not support a candidate running on a more radical platform, but Platner’s explicitly anti-socialist platform barred him from being supported by any principled socialist organization. Any candidate in Platner’s position would likely have succumbed to these contradictions, even if they were not as scandal-ridden as Platner turned out to be. The social revolution could only take a step forward once Platner’s style of politics had definitively failed. As long as the masses embraced Platner, he had to fight for them. Hence Platner soldiered on, waging a struggle in which neither victory nor forfeit was an option. Graham Platner was doomed to fly too close to the sun and be sent crashing back down to earth.

Since Maine DSA ultimately took the correct positions on Graham Platner and Troy Jackson, Platner’s downfall has lifted both Maine DSA and Jackson to a higher position. Troy Jackson was recognized as the man that Graham Platner was merely pretending to be, and so he was chosen to be Platner’s replacement as the Democratic Senate nominee by an overwhelming margin at a convention in Bangor on July 25. Maine DSA can now boast of being among the most politically advanced chapters within the foremost progressive organization in the US.

Conclusions

There would be little value in an account of the Platner debate in Maine DSA without a critical analysis of the events that transpired. I have only done so sporadically thus far in this article. I must now make it my main focus.

There will be those who say that I have overstated my role in influencing the outcome of the Platner debate within Maine DSA, and that my own account demonstrates that the final outcome was a fluke born of circumstance. A closer examination of the events as they unfolded tells a very different story. I do not reject the role played by luck in determining the final outcome of the Platner debate, but luck could not have worked in my favor if I had not already positioned myself to take advantage of it.

The essential difference between myself and the Platnerites, which played a consistent role in shaping the Platner debate, was that I was proactive and adaptive, whereas the Platnerites were strictly reactive. I did not wait for circumstances to play out in my favor. My strategy did not depend on waiting until ideal circumstances presented themselves in order to pursue my agenda. Instead, I acted according to the conditions I encountered in the pursuit of a clearly defined goal.

My adaptable and proactive approach is observable from the very moment I entered the Platner debate, and in all of my subsequent actions during the Platner debate.

While I made repeated use of Maine DSA’s official magazine, Pine & Roses, during the Platner debate, this was not how I entered the debate. Since the Platnerites T. Sinclair and Todd Chretien were the two primary editors of Pine & Roses, I determined that it would be better to publish my first article about Platner on my Substack, The Revolutionist, where I could publish my views without fear of censorship. Maintaining my editorial independence during the Platner debate meant that the Platnerites could not define the limits of the debate. Trying to censor my articles against Platner in Pine & Roses, or refusing to publish them altogether, would’ve been an exercise in futility since I could simply publish and circulate my own uncensored versions of the articles within Maine DSA communications networks. Hence, the articles I submitted to Pine & Roses as part of the Platner debate were all published without alteration.

Though I did not start the Platner debate within Maine DSA, I was the first to commit to publishing a thorough explanation of my position. This allowed my criticism of Platner to travel farther and faster than what I could achieve through one-on-one conversations with people. Over the course of the Platner debate, my article in The Revolutionist not only gained sympathizers in organizations like the RCA and the University of Maine Bureau for Labor Education, but even among people claiming to be Platner’s own volunteers. The fact that I was the first to publish my views meant that limits were imposed on my opponents’ ability to misrepresent my position in the Platner debate—of course they were free to write whatever they wanted, and they tried, but they could not stop anyone from discovering my actual position by reading my own articles in my own newspaper.

The next proactive part of my approach to the Platner debate was that I started my criticism of Platner with a defense of him, and in so doing destroyed the original anti-Platnerite faction in Maine DSA while starting my campaign against the Platnerites. My goal in doing this was to take away any rhetorical defense of Platner the Platnerites might resort to in the Platner debate, and show how these defenses ultimately still led to the conclusion that Platner was unfit for endorsement. This strategy paid dividends after Platner’s tattoo scandal, when the Platnerites failed to articulate a defense of Platner equal in strength to the one I included in my criticism of Platner. It was as if I had drawn the Platnerites’ own swords against them without them realizing until it was too late.

By criticizing Platner on strictly political/programmatic grounds, I also directly refuted the basis of the Platnerite position—which was that endorsing Platner would advance the American socialist movement—in a way that had not been achieved by any of the other anti-Platnerites. I never defended Platner on the premise that he was a “good” person, and never criticized him on the premise that he was a “bad” person. On the contrary, it was in my defense of Platner that I said he was “humanitarian in word, but reactionary in deed.” Instead of making unavoidably relativistic moral appeals in my polemic against Platner, I simply demonstrated that his platform was demonstrably anti-socialist, and therefore unfit to be endorsed by any socialist organization, but that a principled refusal to endorse was not prohibitive of other forms of support for Platner since there was still overlap between his platform and an authentic socialist program. At no point in the Platner debate did I ever say that I was opposed to supporting Platner, even after the tattoo scandal. I only argued that support must stop short of endorsement, and this was precisely what the Platnerites could not stand. The Platnerites didn’t just want to support Platner—Platner had supporters among the anti-Platnerites—the Platnerites were defined by their commitment to endorse Platner. Endorsement was what delineated the Platnerites from the anti-Platnerites in the Platner debate. The Platnerite position was always unreasonable and unpragmatic compared to that of the anti-Platnerites because it called on Maine DSA to go out of its way as an organization to erode its own organizational independence from Platner’s campaign and erode the Maine DSA’s ability to distance itself from Platner if it became necessary to disassociate with him.

By being the first to publish my position in writing, appropriating the arguments of my opponents’ in service of my position, and refuting the premise of my opponents’ position, I assumed total narrative control of the Platner debate in Maine DSA—and that was just with my first article in The Revolutionist. When my smaller article against endorsing Platner was published in Pine & Roses on October 6, I was simply running up the score, publishing a compact version of my critique of Platner before the Platnerites could respond to my first article. I remind the reader that at the time, I was not expecting to succeed in preventing Maine DSA from endorsing Platner, I just wanted to make sure that the Platnerites did so with the awareness that they were being opportunists and that the decision to endorse would have long-term negative repercussions for the chapter; I could not have predicted how soon my position would be vindicated.

When the Platnerites made what would prove to be their only explicit attempt at rebutting me, it was predictably impotent. I never rejected the notion that Platner was the strongest candidate in the senatorial race by a wide margin. I never denied that Platner and his platform were broadly popular with the working class. I merely demonstrated that Graham Platner’s platform was unfit for endorsement by any authentic socialist organization. The Platnerite reply to this argument was that his platform, despite its deficiencies, was “meeting the moment”—whatever that’s supposed to mean. I demonstrated that the Platnerites were not interested in being a political vanguard for the working class and were instead interested in tailing the workers. The Platnerite reply was “let us tail the workers; let us stand in the rearguard!” The Platnerites attempted to equate Troy Jackson and Graham Platner and accused me of not wanting to endorse the former. I replied by demonstrating that the Platnerites’ attempt to equate Platner and Jackson with each other was erroneous and false; a serious socialist orientation would guide one toward the correct conclusion that Jackson was a revolutionary candidate who was worthy of endorsement, unlike Platner, who was a counterrevolutionary candidate.

The most comical argument that the Platnerites made against me was that Maine DSA was too small to make a national statement by endorsing Jackson but not Platner. Such an assertion was already transparently false before the implosion of the Platner campaign. Platner had a national spotlight because his Senate campaign had implications for the entire country. In February 2026, in the middle of the Platner debate, DSA reached 100,000 members nationwide, likely making it the largest progressive organization in the country. And it was assumed by everyone inside and outside DSA, myself included, that the Maine chapter would eventually endorse Platner. The conditions were perfectly primed for Maine DSA to make a nuanced argument to a national audience about what working-class electoralism and emancipation actually looks like. If this wasn’t already clear, it has been made obvious by the sudden and explosive end to Platner’s campaign, where many people took note of the fact that Maine DSA never endorsed him.

At every point in my participation in the Platner debate, I kept the Platnerites on their back foot. It was hardly a challenge since my position in the debate was demonstrably the correct position. It was also a demonstrably pragmatic position due to its flexibility. The general anti-Platnerite position of “support without endorsement” didn’t call for Maine DSA to go above and beyond in support of Platner, it didn’t call for the chapter to erode its organizational independence or compromise on fundamental socialist principles.

Though I did not and still do not exercise organizational control over Maine DSA—nor do I aspire to—I had complete control over the Platner debate because I demonstrably had the correct position in the debate, and I knew it the entire time. My first article in the Platner debate ends with the sentence “we have [Platner] in a three-way checkmate, and we know it.” It was precisely because I had already taken the correct position on Platner and Jackson that I was able to catch all the lucky breaks discussed in this retrospective. When each of Platner’s public scandals caused the Platnerites in Maine DSA to retreat, I took a step forward and held my ground.

I also exercised extreme restraint in the Platner debate. I did not fight unnecessary battles, such as indulging in polemical battles with Chretien in Pine & Roses. I did not interrupt my opponents when they made mistakes, such as when Chretien and Sinclair published their articles in defence of Platner. And I did not stop my opponents from giving me what I wanted, such as when the opportunity for Maine DSA to endorse Troy Jackson presented itself.

All of this is sufficient to say that my campaign to stop Maine DSA from endorsing Graham Platner did not simply succeed due to dumb luck. Had I done nothing and kept my mouth shut about Platner, Maine DSA might have endorsed him by the end of September 2025. Instead of sitting in place, I intervened forcefully and decisively in the Platner debate and played subsequent events to my advantage.

I must also be very clear that nothing I have discussed in this article reflects negatively on Maine DSA. As far as I am concerned, one has to be completely naive to organizational work to argue otherwise. The Platner debate is a microcosm of the debates that happen in all socialist organizations. The debate is a symptom of having a group of people at differing levels of theoretical and practical understanding trying to work towards a common goal under a given set of definite conditions. This will always produce factions according to the various practical and theoretical disagreements that arise out of pursuing goals under definite material conditions. The presence of debate, including intense debates like the Platner debate, is not a bad thing, but a sign of a healthy organization.

Furthermore, while the Platnerite faction of Maine DSA was very vocal in advancing their position, Maine DSA never actually came that close to endorsing Graham Platner. Platner never requested Maine DSA’s endorsement. Maine DSA’s endorsement rules were never suspended for Platner. The candidate questionnaire made for Platner was never sent to him. No vote to endorse Graham Platner was ever held within Maine DSA. Maine DSA never endorsed Platner because the anti-Platnerites managed to win the argument. And while it’s true that I played a decisive role on the side of the anti-Platnerites at the beginning of the debate, I cannot claim sole credit for stopping the endorsement. My participation in the Platner debate within Maine DSA is essentially limited to the period of September 19 to November 24—the period starting with the publication of my critique of Platner in The Revolutionist and ending with my conversation with Jackson at the WMLC building. After November 2025, I hardly participated in internal Maine DSA activities because my energy was spent on other productive activities. I therefore cannot take credit for anything that happened between December 2025 and July 2026.

Despite all my criticism of Platner, I still have to give him credit where it is due. He genuinely awakened the consciousness of many people in Maine, and helped them believe that change is possible. His message was far from perfect, and he turned out to be a far more imperfect messenger than I originally anticipated, but many people embraced him in spite of his flaws because he demanded a more equitable society. Hence, he could raise an army of volunteers numbering 15,000 strong in a state of only 1.4 million people.

Everyone knows the Washington establishment that worked tirelessly to assassinate Platner’s character never actually cared about anything in his past. If they really cared about Platner having fascist tattoos, they would not have made Pete Hegseth the current Secretary of War/Defence. Nobody believed that the Washington establishment actually cared about the sexual assault allegations against Platner when that same establishment had supported the disgraced Andrew Cuomo against Zorhan Mamdani in New York. Platner’s true sin, the reason for which he was crucified, was that he dared to demand a better world for the working class. That was the reason why the working class embraced him, and that was the reason why the Washington establishment cut him down.

For my part, I always recognized why people liked Graham Platner. I would’ve preferred to love him the way most people did. It brought me no joy to wage such an extended political campaign against someone who was held in such high regard, but I could not turn a blind eye to the problems presented by Platner, even before his public scandals. It would’ve been preferable if Platner’s past had been unblemished. It would have been preferable if Platner’s policy platform could be reconciled with a socialist program. I sincerely wish that I could have written about Graham Platner the way I wrote about Troy Jackson, but I knew I could not do so without betraying the values I stood for. I am certain that the sooner-than-expected downfall of Platner will be good for the working class inside and outside of Maine in the long term, but that does not make his downfall any less painful for the countless workers of Maine who put their faith in him. I stand by my position that a Platner victory in the Senate race would’ve ultimately been a loss for Maine’s working class—and an electoral defeat for Platner also would’ve been a loss for Maine’s working class—but because Maine’s working class embraced Platner, they also share in his downfall. I cannot take any glee in that.

Instead, I have to commend Platner for dropping out of the senatorial race when his campaign was no longer tenable. This is likely to be Graham Platner’s last act as a public figure. He could’ve chosen to stay in the race until the bitter end and refused to let anyone replace him. Instead, he chose to allow for a new senate nominee to be selected while there was still time. And thanks in large part to his volunteers, the correct replacement was chosen, the true tribune of the proletariat—the legitimate son of Maine—Troy Jackson.

Bluebird I,

August, 2026