Democrats have just surrendered to progressives in Maine, signaling that the party leadership is starting to make peace with the populists. Governor Janet Mills dropped her gubernatorial bid on Thursday, all but ensuring that Graham Platner will be the party’s nominee.

Platner’s candidacy caused months of hysteria from establishment Democrats. In a basic sense, the Maine contest reflected some of the same dynamics seen in the race between Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo in New York City: a centrist governor who assumed an easy win and an upstart socialist with a rough social media history.

Mills believed she could coast by picking all the low-hanging fruit from Platner’s unearthed Reddit posts. It did not work. Platner kept drawing big crowds around the state and leading in the polls. Mills’s attacks couldn’t overcome his populist economic messaging.

After Mills dropped out, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who backed the governor’s bid, spoke by phone with Platner. A source familiar with the call told the New York Times that the two men “agreed that Democrats needed to win Maine and take back the Senate majority from Republicans”.

Mills and Schumer read the writing on the wall. Voters, even outside New York City, are willing and even eager to accept Bernie Sanders-style populism, from economics to foreign policy. That shift has been rapid. Only weeks ago, Platner was a long-shot candidate, openly mocked by Democratic elites. Now he represents something closer to the party’s direction of travel.

Unlike Andrew Cuomo, who pressed on even after losing his primary, Mills’s decision to drop out suggests something different: not denial, but accommodation. But conceding rhetorically is not the same as governing differently. When Joe Crowley was blindsided by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in one of the biggest upsets of the 2018 midterm elections, AOC spent years carefully managing her relationship with party leadership, including Nancy Pelosi — to the point that some on the Left now question her populist credentials.

That raises a more pointed question. If Democrats are willing to accept populist primary victories, is this a genuine ideological movement — or a strategic adaptation? Are they embracing insurgents, or simply absorbing them to preserve their own hold on power?

The Trump movement, for instance, has seen MAGA populists in the House Freedom Caucus face choices between leaving Congress, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, or facing off against the President’s anti-populist turns on war, the Epstein files, and Big Tech. Institutional trust is low, but party apparatuses are still powerful in Washington.

For populist Democrats, it may just come down to a numbers game. AOC and the Squad have bided their time as a small but growing band of rebels, playing nice with leadership when necessary to survive. What happens when democratic socialists start flowing into both the House and Senate? Leadership will try to corral them, but it’s clear who has the momentum.

---

Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington correspondent.

emilyjashinsky

---