Lessons from Platner's Victory

Notes for the Democracy Renovation movement

Graham Platner’s victory in the Maine Democratic primary is an important moment in our political evolution in America. His win is both a confirmation that a next-generation politics is real and a demonstration of why it currently rests on a foundation of sand.

What do I mean by next-generation politics? With the exception of a small remaining establishment core — old guard members of both parties — pretty much everyone in America agrees that our politics are failing to deliver on the promises of democracy. Our system is leaving too many people disempowered, trapped, exhausted, alienated, and angry. All meaningful political efforts are now directed at tapping into or overcoming this problem — from Trumpism, to the Sanders/AOC/Mamdani/Platner/DSA/Working Families Party movement, to the Democracy Renovation movement.

Platner’s win in the primary, despite serious personal liabilities, confirms irrevocably that the Working Families Party umbrella is a real political force in American politics.

How do the three movements relate to each other? The first two are already transformational forces in electoral politics. The third plays on a different field — ballot initiatives, and municipal, state, and federal legislative reforms to our institutions.

Honesty requires acknowledging that this third movement has not been transformational yet. There have been some victories — ranked-choice voting in New York City, Maine, and Washington, D.C. All-party primaries plus ranked-choice voting in Alaska. Twenty-five state legislatures, including most recently Oklahoma and Idaho, have passed resolutions calling on Congress to introduce the For Our Freedom Constitutional Amendment, undoing Citizens United. The introduction in Congress of bills to increase the size of the House of Representatives and establish proportional representation.

An asymmetry separates the two electoral movements and the democracy renovation movement. The first two efforts have a view about substantive policy. Trumpism says: Close the border and enforce tariffs, and you’ll lift the economic fortunes of working Americans. Working Families Party progressivism says: Tax the rich, provide universal health care and a green transition, and you’ll lift the economic fortunes of working Americans.

The third movement takes a different tack: Put control of our institutions back in the hands of the American people, and over time you’ll get policy that supports working Americans — and all Americans. How do you put institutions back in the hands of the whole American people? Root out corruption and restore a meaningful vote to all Americans. As scholars like Daron Acemoglu and Jim Robinson have shown, eras that have seen democratizing reforms of this kind have been followed by egalitarian policy.

What will that egalitarian policy look like? The Democracy Renovation movement doesn’t want to deliver that answer. It wants to create the conditions for having that debate. For instance, on economic fairness, maybe it’s a wealth tax, a revamped inheritance tax, mark-to-market taxation of capital gains, or a land value tax. Or maybe it’s predistribution rather than redistribution: baby bonds, a sovereign wealth fund paying citizen dividends, employee ownership and sectoral bargaining, a first jobs guarantee. Or maybe it’s an abundance agenda — zoning and permitting reform, occupational licensing reform — that attacks the artificial scarcities driving up the cost of housing, energy, and entry into good work. These are the debates a healthy democracy should host — but cannot currently, because small, unrepresentative slices of the electorate settle them in advance.

The Democracy Renovation movement is committed to two central goals for our political institutions: root out corruption and broaden the suffrage. Members of the Loyal Opposition — those committed to freedom and equality through constitutionalism and legislative supremacy — have to stay laser-focused on these. That might look like a weakness, but it’s a path to legitimacy.

The weakness of the two electoral movements is that they too often depend on the hollowed-out state of our party system and on capturing political institutions through low-turnout party primaries.

Platner’s win yesterday looks decisive when it is described as winning 72 percent of the vote. But look at the absolute numbers. Platner secured about 150,000 votes out of the 948,734 registered voters in Maine, or 16 percent. He won fewer than half of just registered Democrats, who number 343,488. Donald Trump’s rise and current lock on political institutions similarly depend on needing percentages of the electorate no larger than this to secure political control. Small subsets of the electorate establish the menu of options for the rest of the electorate. When everyone else joins in in November, they hold their nose and vote for the least bad option.

These kinds of results are a recipe for instability. In the short term, they seem to gain power for a political agenda, yes, but they also bake in dissatisfaction and alienation. The results bring about an experience of necessity for voters, not choice; of regrettable entrapment, not legitimate direction. Policy-making authority won this way is a house built on sand.

The democracy renovation movement instead seeks to ensure that every winning politician will have the solid foundation of a genuinely majoritarian mandate, not one artificially created by means of a set of bear traps for the voter.

The agenda-driven electoral movements will be constantly tempted into short-term gains for the sake of immediate power. They will be tempted to oppose democracy renovation efforts that require office holders to win authentic majorities. Such opposition is a mistake, for it undermines the path to the legitimacy any movement will need to secure its gains for the long term.

The good news for Maine and for Platner is that the state does use ranked choice voting to require that candidates achieve a full majority, so a victory in the general will carry legitimacy just as Mamdani’s majority victory in New York did, even though Maine’s primary system is afflicted by the same low turnout problems as everywhere else.

What is the lesson in all of this for the Democracy Renovation movement? Is it that we need to work harder to find candidates who can carry the reform agenda into the current electoral environment? Do we need to ask our currently reigning next-generation pols, and those who support them, whether the candidates who benefit from minority-rule mechanics would be willing to dismantle them? Or do we need to create more space for that much needed wide-ranging debate on policy choices to get us out of our current mess so people can see what is being foreclosed? I’ll come back to this in a next column.