Photographs by Cassandra Klos
Kathie Purdy doesn’t mind the phone calls. And there have been a lot of them—producing a sustained buzzing from her iPhone throughout the nearly two weeks since Graham Platner announced that he would drop out of the Maine Senate race. At one point, Purdy’s device grew so hot that she had to take it out of its case to let it breathe. But that was okay, she told me. As chair of the York County Democratic Committee, it was her job to help guide Mainers through this confusing moment.
What Purdy did not appreciate was the insinuation—from other Democrats, from members of the media, from online trolls—that the process to replace Platner was somehow undemocratic. “This is what I’m talking about,” Purdy told me on Sunday, showing me a text from a voter asking whom “leadership had picked” for the nomination. It was early afternoon in the Sanford Performing Arts Center, and we were sitting side by side on the stage, looking out over the democratic process in action. Purdy rolled her eyes, exasperated. “Actually, right now we are conducting the caucus-type meeting in Sanford where the participants vote for a group of delegates,” she replied, using voice-to-text. “That’s the folks who’ll be voting for your Senate candidate.”
Choosing those delegates was not a tidy affair. All morning, the room had been crowded, even though the state party had urged people to please consider voting from home. Mainers who wanted to be delegates and Mainers who came to meet delegate candidates and campaign volunteers proffering lists of allied delegates wove in between the aisles of red-upholstered chairs, shaking hands and arguing and complaining about various parts of the process in which they were taking part. Some struggled with the Wi-Fi. Occasionally, Purdy took the stage to make an announcement: We found a pair of car keys. Please come to the stage if they’re yours!
Looking around, I imagined that, somewhere a few hours north, Susan Collins was rubbing her hands together with delight. Maine Democrats have failed to unseat her for nearly three decades, and there’s plenty of reason to believe that in three months they’ll come up short again. Zoomed out, the situation is, objectively, ridiculous. Maine Democrats nominated Platner despite a bouquet of red flags, including a Nazi tattoo and allegations of volatile behavior from past girlfriends. Now that an accusation of rape has toppled Platner’s candidacy, the Democrats who selected him are desperately trying to pick up the pieces of a race that might be their party’s best shot to take back the Senate.
[Read: Platner just made things harder for Democrats]
Yet the predictable conclusion—that the Democrats are once again in disarray—could not be drawn, at least not fully. Because ultimately, after all the hemming and hawing and arguing and complaining, the Democrats of York County sat down and voted. Totals were reached surprisingly quickly. Only a few hours after most attendees had arrived, Purdy was reading out the names of the 84 delegates and 17 alternates who would go to the party’s nominating convention in Bangor.
Plenty of people were frustrated with the results, which, across Maine, were very good for Troy Jackson, a progressive former state legislator. Others had issues with the process itself. But “that’s democracy,” Purdy told me. So far, in Maine, it’s going pretty well.
In the days after Platner announced that he was dropping out of the race, there was much consternation about how the Democrats would replace him. The party wouldn’t have time to conduct another primary. But if state Democratic leaders simply chose a new nominee on their own, voters might be indignant. Much of Platner’s support, after all, had come from people exhausted with the so-called establishment.
The Maine Democrats had settled on a compromise: They would hold a convention on July 25, where 601 delegates would choose Platner’s replacement. Before that, each county would have an election to choose its portion of delegates. People were not exactly pleased about this. Whereas independent Mainers had been able to participate in the June primary, only registered Democrats were allowed to select the replacement nominee. “As an independent you’re saying my vote doesn’t count now,” one commenter on the York County Democratic Committee Facebook page wrote. (Much of the debate has played out on Facebook.) Another self-proclaimed former Democrat weighed in: “If you believe primary voters should choose nominees, not party insiders, consider whether your party registration still reflects your values.”
Meanwhile, the county committee chairs—who, as volunteers, are paid precisely zero dollars for their work—were under a lot of stress. No one from the Maine Democrats returned any of my calls or emails. Purdy was begging people to be kind. “I would really appreciate some respect,” she wrote on Facebook. “Please stop the snark.” Joseph Zamboni, the chair of the Cumberland County Democratic Committee, seemed on the verge of tears when I spoke with him on the phone about where and when the nominating meeting would take place. In one of his many lengthy social-media updates, Zamboni tried to shed some light on the stressful decision-making process. “Nobel Prize–winning scholar Herbert Simon, whose work transformed the fields of economics, psychology, and administration, argued that people rarely make perfectly informed or ‘optimal’ decisions because none of us has unlimited time, information, or mental capacity,” he wrote.
So I did not know what I would find on Sunday. But when I arrived at the auditorium in Sanford at 9 a.m. sharp, I was greeted with a dozen volunteers and a box of donut holes. In the parking lot outside, supporters held a rally for Jackson while, inside, dozens of people were already circulating. “Usually, when we hold a convention, we have to go begging” for delegates, one county committee chair told me, “Right now we’re fighting ’em off.” (In York County, more than 400 people had applied to fill 101 positions.)
For two hours before voting began, people made the case for their candidates. Most were either supporting Jackson, a logger and former state-Senate president, or Nirav Shah, the former leader of the Maine CDC, who has since dropped out of the race. Jackson’s supporters said they liked him because his positions are most closely aligned with those of Platner, and he could, they believe, more easily inherit Platner’s movement. “We’ve lost a lot of momentum, and he has the best chance of keeping them engaged,” Reed Gordon, a 29-year-old delegate candidate, told me. The case for Shah was that he is slightly more moderate and might, therefore, be an easier sell for independent and moderate Mainers. Platner was too aggressive, Paula Busby, a 62-year-old from the town of Lebanon, told me. “We need to stand up against” President Trump, she said, “but we have to be measured.”
Because the Democrats at these county meetings were choosing delegates rather than voting directly for candidates themselves, campaigns had made lists of allied delegates ahead of time and passed them out. Delegate selection was, basically, a proxy election: If you wanted Jackson to win, you’d vote for Jackson’s slate. This was upsetting to the Mainers who’d hoped that the people sent to the convention would be impartial. “This isn’t the way I’d have done it,” Julian Rogers, the former vice chair of the Maine Democrats and a delegate candidate himself, told me. “Rather than sort of coronating one person, I think we need to hear from these other people and have a little more balance.”
Leah Macomber, a game developer from Saco, was also on the ballot to be a delegate, but she didn’t know anything about the slates until Sunday morning. “I was so pissed off,” she told me. “I’m a Mainer, and I don’t like being told what to do, or especially who to vote for.” So she made a T-shirt reading Vote Independent Thinker and wore it to the event. She also handed out lollipops labeled Susan sucks to try to stand out to voters. Neither she nor Rogers were selected as delegates.
[Read: Can Democrats salvage their chances in Maine? ]
Still, even they were impressed at how quickly the process had been put into place, and how clear the communication had been from the state and county parties. It was preferable, some Mainers told me, to the 2024 process to replace Joe Biden, which was ultimately an anointing of Kamala Harris. And it was obviously better than powering through with a toxic nominee.
The Democrats got a redo, a freebie, to try again and get someone better. “I was so disappointed when Platner dropped out,” Diana Garry, a retired nurse from Shapleigh, told me. “I was so discouraged. But now I’m thinking it’s a blessing.”
By 11:15 a.m., people were in their seats, with their phones and iPads open, ready to vote. “It’ll all be electronic, so it’ll be fast,” Purdy said from the stage. I wondered whether she was tempting fate. The Democrats, after all, do not have the best track record when it comes to using technology to facilitate important elections. And when Purdy began reading out instructions for voting through the link sent via email—“To edit your submission, hit ‘Continue,’ then ‘Edit,’ then ‘Continue’ again”—a feeling of dread came over me. It was not assuaged by the line for technical support that quickly formed down the center aisle of the auditorium.
But my concerns proved unfounded. The vote was going smoothly. An hour in, all of the people in line had been helped. Some Mainers had left; they’d see the results posted online. Soon, Purdy was onstage giving a 10-minute warning. “Can I get a ‘yay’?” she asked the now-dwindling crowd. “Yay!” people replied, more enthusiastically than I’d expected.
She sat back down next to me. “I’m proud of what we’ve done,” she said, looking relieved. “We had a very short time to do something herculean.” Thanks to Sunday’s elections, next weekend’s convention will be pretty straightforward. The question now is whether Purdy and all the rest of Maine’s Democrats can pull off something similarly herculean in November.
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