The Maine Senate race is far from the first time 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 to the US Senate. One month before election day, 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 claimed that Moore also stalked them when they too were underage. When asked on Sean Hannity’s radio show if he ever dated younger girls, Moore said he answered“Not in general, no.” Then a the fifth woman she went ahead to accuse Moore of sexually abusing her in her youth. Four days after Post it story broke, the Alabama media reported that it was shared knowledge in an area where Moore stalked teenage girls—so violently that one mall banned him from their property. To himself Moore accounthe had fallen in love with the woman he later married when he was in his mid-teens and in his early 30s.
The allegations caused confusion among Republicans. They had appeared in the 2016 elections with a small number of MPs in the Senate, only 52 seats. If they lost at Alabama, they would lose reduced to 51 years—meaning that the Republican Senate leadership would depend entirely on the changing moods of Senate stalwarts John McCain, Lisa Murkowski, and Susan Collins.
On the other hand, Moore’s sexual misconduct not only embarrassed his party colleagues but also threatened to discredit them. The story of Jeffrey Epstein was not yet the firestorm it would later become. But President-elect Trump has already been dogged by allegations of inappropriate interest in underage girls. In October 2016, five women he told it BuzzFeed News that Trump entered their dressing room unannounced during the Miss Teen USA pageant. Trump had told him a different version of the story Howard Stern in 2005. (In Trump’s version, he entered an adult changing room.) Moore’s elevation to the Senate could strengthen ties between the GOP and the men who once bullied young people.
The first Republican to break ranks was McCain. After Post it published his story, McCain described the allegations as “deeply disturbing and unwarranted” and said that Moore “should withdraw immediately and allow the people of Alabama to elect a candidate they can be proud of.” Two dozen other Republican senators accepted the allegations to be credible and to urge Moore to leave if the allegations prove to be true. When the second round of reports appeared on November 13, the leader of the Republican Senate Mitch McConnell he said he believed Moore’s accusers and demanded that Moore end his run.
Moore refused to withdraw. His party then took a more drastic step: Two weeks before the December 12 special election, Moore’s potential Senate colleague, Richard Shelby, told reporters that he had voted early. against Moore. “No, no, no, I voted to abstain. I didn’t vote for him. I voted for a prominent Republican.” On December 12, Moore lost Alabama Senate seat for Democrat Doug Jones by 22,000 votes.
Senate Republicans still played the political game hard and hard. McConnell be late seat Jones until January 2018, enough time for the Senate to pass the 2017 tax cut on the vote of Alabama’s interim senator-elect, Luther Strange. Everyone understood that Jones’ time would be short: Jones lost his seat in the 2020 general election to Tommy Tuberville. Even after Jones sat down, Republicans still won to pass 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’s executive and judicial appointees, including Supreme Court nominees Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
Not as paragons of virtue but as pragmatic politicians, the 2017 Senate Republicans did the math: We would rather sacrifice an Alabama Senate seat for three years than put up with Roy Moore as our Senate colleague for who knows how long. If Moore had won in 2017, then been re-elected in 2020, he would have served that first full term during Epstein’s 2025 congressional hearings. that have you searched GOP?
In 2026, it’s the Democrats’ turn for a strategic choice. The allegations against Graham Platner differ from those against Moore. As of June 6, Platner is standing up the suspect of laying hands on one named woman, and threatening behavior against two other women who have not yet been named. (Platner told it New York Times that he “vehemently opposes” any allegations of physical threats or altercations.) All three accusers were and are adults. No follower of Platner, however, can feel certain that the shocks have stopped. Platner himself assurance they currently lack credibility, and fellow Democrats are expressing concern about it space in November.
The stakes are high this year. Maine was the Democrats’ best hope for an outright gain in the Senate. Charting a path to a Democratic Senate majority that bypasses Maine is difficult, if not impossible.
But sticking with Platner has a cost too.
With the exception of Maine, the year’s top Senate race may be in Texas, where a Republican candidate accused by his party of corruption is facing a former secretary of state; North Carolina, where the business-friendly former two-term governor is facing a Trump loyalist who has never won election to any office at any level of government; and Georgia, where one of the Democratic Party’s most adept communicators faces a deeply divided Republican Party that is still undecided on a nominee.
With Platner, Maine’s election will present voters with a contest between a moderate Republican woman who voted to impeach Trump in his 2021 impeachment trial and a man who can be clearly portrayed as the misogynist on whom his working-class image is built. fiction and fake. How much will Roy Cooper, Jon Ossoff and James Talarico like to see Platner’s picture with them on telecasts about the 2026 election? Not much, one should think.
To defend Platner, Democrats will have to choose between two strategies: accuse a growing number of women as liars—or else accept the story, but argue that twisting a woman’s arm and locking her in a room is not the same as beating her. Do they want to haggle over just how these romantic relationships were inappropriate, even as they argue that wearing an SS tattoo for most of one’s adult life does not prove that one is a real Nazi? This is not a conversation Democrats should want to prolong in a year that could deal with Trump’s abuse of power, corruption and economic mismanagement.
The majority of American voters are women. About half of American women they have suffered some form of intimate partner violence. Platner’s staunch followers seem to be gambling that Democrats can win more votes from men who are sick and tired of domestic violence against women than they can lose from women who can associate Platner with abusers in their own lives. That seems like a long shot. A ruthless politician like Mitch McConnell could recognize when it was time to abdicate moral and political responsibility. Can the Democrats of 2026 muster the same cunning and tenacity?
