In today’s edition … Democratic gubernatorial candidates are running on personal working-class stories … Trump says the Iran ceasefire is over … but first …
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And just like that, Graham Platner’s Senate campaign in Maine is no more.
The populist political newcomer whom Democrats had hoped could flip a critical Senate seat in Maine ended his campaign Wednesday night with a bitter, defiant and, frankly, conspiratorial video after a woman he previously dated publicly accused him of sexual assault. The video did not suggest that Platner was in a moment of kumbaya with the Democratic Party, which could prove an issue for Maine Democrats who want to hold together the grassroots movement that sprang up around him.
“We believe for the movement to continue, it can’t be me and for that reason, we are suspending campaign operations,” Platner said Wednesday night in an 11-minute video posted to social media. He blamed the “political establishment” for putting “structural pressure” on his campaign. “They are going to take everything away from us,” he says about “those in power.” Platner continued to deny the allegations against him in the video, and at no point did he take any personal accountability for what has happened to his campaign.
You can read all about Platner’s campaign suspension in a story I wrote with Alexei Koseff.
What comes next remains a bit of an open question. Charlie Dingman, the chair of the Maine Democratic Party, and other party leaders met with more than 100 state committee members on Wednesday. They said the group voted to “hold a nominating convention to choose a new nominee if there is a vacancy to fill,” but Dingman did not provide many details on what that would look like. Maine Democrats have roughly two weeks to find a new nominee.
Ben Binday has a good list of possible replacements. But I worked with Ben on a piece about how Platner will hang over the rest of this race, even if every possible candidate we spoke to said they would decline a Platner endorsement.
Democrats have struggled to win over some working-class voters — especially working-class white voters — since President Donald Trump’s first presidential run in 2016.
In response to those issues, the party has looked to recruit candidates who not only speak to issues that impact working-class voters but also embody their story and present as working-class themselves. See: Platner, who has been making a striking amount of news lately.
(That strategy, as evidenced by Platner, can come with complications, as we have written about before.)
Now a number of Democratic candidates in key races, especially for governor, have working-class roots, something Democrats with eyes on flipping and holding governor’s mansions nationwide are pushing candidates to highlight as often as possible in an election that will likely turn on the state of the economy.
“We have governors who can uniquely relate to those issues,” said Meghan Meehan-Draper, the executive director of the Democratic Governors Association. “It’s very important because it’s authentic to who they are and affordability, we know, is the main issue in the election right now.”
Take a look at this dynamic among gubernatorial candidates:
Here is the tension within Democratic politics: Because of voters’ assumptions about what pro-working-class politicians look and sound like, none of these candidates, despite their backgrounds, overtly read as working-class heroes.
Some have been in office or in politics long enough to become part of the political establishment; others carry themselves in vastly different ways from people like Platner, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania) and other candidates who, while running for office, have been touted as the antidote to the Democratic Party’s issues with working-class voters.
Meehan-Draper argued, however, that each of these candidates’ ability to authentically question Republicans’ economic record — already a focus for Democrats — will be core to this election.
“It’s a good contrast‚” Meehan-Draper said of Democrats’ ability to “communicate honestly” about their “really unique stories about how they overcame poverty or relied on benefits,” when compared with Republicans’ economic record.
Of course, Republicans push back against this notion.
“Democrats are completely out of touch with working-class Americans. Despite their past, these candidates continue to push policies that raise prices on working families, destroy good-paying jobs, and make it harder for working families to own a home,” said Kollin Crompton, spokesperson for the Republican Governors Association. “It’s just lip service.”
And then there is the Trump of it all. It’s not like the president has ever personally embodied a working-class story, either. He was born into wealth, had a television career that highlighted that wealth and ran for president as an unabashedly wealthy businessman who promised to use his experience with wealth to better the country.
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And yet exit polls in 2016 found Trump won all non-college-educated voters by 7 percentage points — and white voters without a college degree by a 36-point margin.
In the aftermath, Democrats hoped that 2016 go down as a rare low point for the party with non-college-educated voters — often a stand-in for working-class voters. But exit polls found Vice President Kamala Harris lost voters without bachelor’s degrees by 13 points in 2024, up from a two-point deficit in 2020 when Joe Biden defeated Trump.
Harris’s performance was the party’s worst showing with non-college-educated voters since President Ronald Reagan’s landslide reelection victory in 1984.
All of this will matter greatly in the fight for governors’ mansions nationwide this year. Thirty-six gubernatorial offices are up for election this year, and most political handicappers have around a handful of races that are toss-ups or slightly lean Democratic or Republican. Democrats, who currently control 24 governors’ offices, are hopeful that they can win a majority of those positions this year, the first time since before the 2010 midterms.
According to Trump, the ceasefire between the United States and Iran is over.
Yesterday we raised that possibility, given that the United States carried out military strikes overnight, as our colleagues Dan Lamothe and Victoria Craw reported.
But while attending a meeting of NATO leaders in Turkey on Wednesday, the president put a finer point on it.
“I think it’s over,” Trump said about a June ceasefire agreement.
Our colleagues Michael Birnbaum and Victoria Craw in Ankra reported that Trump used a news conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to say the U.S. hit Iran “very hard last night” and would “probably hit them hard again tonight.”
All of this, obviously, throws into chaos whatever is left of the ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran. Of course, this has real international implications, which were, in part, the focus of the meeting in Turkey.
But there are also widespread political ramifications, too. The stock market plummeted on the news, and, according to experts, gas prices are expected to rise.
Republican candidates and operatives have been clear for months that while they may support the war in Iran, it is critical to get the economic uncertainty that has been caused by the war — namely gas prices — under control before Republicans face voters in November.
Our colleagues Amy B Wang, Praveena Somasundaram and Amber Phillips have a great look at this dynamic.
“If the Trump Administration doesn’t get the cost of gas lowered, there’s not enough redistricting that can be done to save the House GOP majority,” a Republican operative working on House races told me in May.
Two months later, and very little has changed.
Oil City News (Wyoming): We are in the middle of fire season in the West, and we have seen reports of large fires across the region in recent weeks, including one on Tuesday evening on Interstate 25 east of Casper. The news is particularly worrying because of drought conditions across the West.
San Joaquin Valley Sun (California): Rising gas prices are not only impacting drivers — they are directly cutting into the costs of America’s airlines. Airline fuel bills, according to this report, surged by $3 billion in May, jumping 85 percent since the same time last year.
Atlanta Journal Constitution: Sen. Jon Ossoff (D) is getting most of the 2028 presidential speculation out of Georgia, but the paper notes that Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) is quietly sparking even more chatter because of his “biography, fundraising prowess and expanding national profile.”
Today, we wrote about Democrats looking to win back working-class voters in gubernatorial campaigns. We have a seemingly simple question today: Who counts as working class? Is it an issue of background, style, or both? Is there a candidate that you think embodies the kind of person who can win over working-class voters? Let us and your fellow Early Brief readers know at [email protected].
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Thanks for reading. You can follow Dan on X: @merica.
