The Maine Senate race is far from the first time that an American political party has had to choose between character and power.
In 2017, Alabama Republicans nominated a state supreme court judge named Roy Moore for U.S. Senate. A month before election day, The Washington Post published a report that when Moore was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney, he initiated sexual contact with a 14-year-old girl. Three other women alleged that Moore had also pursued them when they, too, were underage. Asked on Sean Hannity’s radio show whether he had ever dated underage girls, Moore replied, “Not generally, no.” Then a fifth woman stepped forward to accuse Moore of sexually assaulting her in her teens. Four days after the Post story broke, local Alabama media reported that it was common knowledge in the area that Moore stalked teenage girls—so flagrantly that a local mall banned him from setting foot on their property. By Moore’s own account, he had become interested in the woman he subsequently married when she was in her mid-teens and he was in his early 30s.
The allegations created a quandary for Republicans. They had emerged from the 2016 elections with a slim majority in the Senate, just 52 seats. If they lost in Alabama, they would be reduced to 51—meaning that Republican Senate leadership would be utterly dependent on the shifting moods of the Senate mavericks John McCain, Lisa Murkowski, and Susan Collins.
On the other hand, Moore’s reported sexual misconduct not only embarrassed his party colleagues but also threatened to discredit them. The Jeffrey Epstein story was not yet the firestorm it would later become. But newly elected President Trump had already been scorched by allegations of unseemly interest in underage girls. In October 2016, five women told BuzzFeed News that Trump walked unannounced into their changing room during the Miss Teen USA pageant. Trump had told a variant of that story to Howard Stern in 2005. (In Trump’s version, he entered an adult changing room.) Moore’s elevation to the Senate could intensify the association between the GOP and men who once preyed on teenagers.
The first leading Republican to break ranks was McCain. After the Post published its story, McCain described the allegations as “deeply disturbing and disqualifying” and said that Moore “should immediately step aside and allow the people of Alabama to elect a candidate they can be proud of.” Two dozen other Republican senators accepted the allegations as credible and urged Moore to step aside if the claims proved true. When the second round of reports appeared on November 13, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell said he believed Moore’s accusers and demanded Moore end his run.
Moore refused to withdraw. His party then took an even more radical step: Two weeks before the December 12 special election, Moore’s prospective Alabama Senate colleague, Richard Shelby, told reporters that he had cast an advance ballot against Moore. “No, no, no, I voted absentee. I didn’t vote for him. I voted for a distinguished Republican write-in.” On December 12, Moore lost the Alabama Senate seat to Democrat Doug Jones by 22,000 votes.
Senate Republicans still played the political game hard and tough. McConnell delayed seating Jones until January 2018, an interval long enough for the Senate to pass the 2017 tax cut with the vote of Alabama’s appointed interim senator, Luther Strange. Everyone understood that Jones’s tenure would be brief: Jones lost his seat in the regular election in 2020 to Tommy Tuberville. Even after Jones was seated, Republicans still succeeded in passing some major legislation, including a partial rollback of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial regulations, signed by Trump in May 2018. Senate Republicans retained enough votes to confirm Trump executive-branch and judicial appointees, including Supreme Court nominees Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
Not as paragons of moral virtue but as pragmatic politicians, the Senate Republicans of 2017 made and executed a calculation: We are better off sacrificing the Alabama Senate seat for three years than enduring Roy Moore as a Senate colleague for who knows how long. If Moore had won in 2017, then gained reelection in 2020, he’d have been serving that first full term during the congressional Epstein hearings of 2025. How would that have looked for the GOP?
In 2026, it’s the Democrats’ turn for strategic choice. The allegations against Graham Platner differ from those against Moore. As of June 6, Platner stands accused of laying hands on one named woman, and of intimidating behavior against two other women who thus far have not been named. (Platner told The New York Times that he “strongly disputes” any claims of physical intimidation or altercations.) All three accusers were and are adults. No Platner supporter, however, can feel certain that the shocks have ceased. Platner’s own reassurances by now lack credibility, and fellow Democrats express deep unease about his chances in November.
The stakes are high this year. Maine was the Democrats’ brightest hope for a net gain in the Senate. Drawing a route to a Democratic Senate majority that bypasses Maine is difficult, if not impossible.
But sticking by Platner has costs too.
Excluding Maine, the year’s most high-profile Senate races might be Texas, where a Republican impeached by his own party for corruption faces a former candidate for the ministry; North Carolina, where a business-friendly two-term former governor faces a Trump ultra-loyalist who has never won an election to any office at any level of government; and Georgia, where one of the Democratic Party’s most adept communicators faces a bitterly divided Republican Party that has still not united on a nominee.
With Platner, the Maine election will offer voters a contest between a moderate Republican woman who voted to convict Trump at his 2021 impeachment trial and a man who can be plausibly depicted as a violent misogynist whose working-class image is built on fictions and fakes. How much will Roy Cooper, Jon Ossoff, and James Talarico love seeing Platner’s photograph alongside theirs in TV graphics about the 2026 election? Not much, one should think.
To defend Platner, Democrats will have to choose between two strategies: denouncing as liars a possibly growing number of women—or else accepting the stories, but then arguing that twisting a woman’s arm and locking her in a room is not quite the same as beating her. Do they want to haggle over just how inappropriate these romantic relationships were, even as they argue that wearing an SS tattoo throughout most of one’s adult life does not prove that one is a literal Nazi? These are not conversations that Democrats should wish to prolong in a year that might otherwise deal with Trump’s abuses of power, corruption, and economic mismanagement.
A majority of the American electorate is female. Nearly half of American women have suffered some form of intimate-partner violence. Platner’s most fervent supporters seem to be gambling that Democrats can win more votes from men who are sick and tired of women’s bellyaching than they stand to lose from women who might associate Platner with the abusers in their own lives. That seems a long-odds bet. A politician as unsentimental as Mitch McConnell could recognize when it was time to cut loose a moral and political liability. Can the Democrats of 2026 muster equal shrewdness and toughness?
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