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Bernie Sanders Advises Graham Platner to 'Step Aside'
The senator said he spoke with the Democratic candidate "about the best path forward for Maine" and recommended that he leave the race.
Jul 07, 2026
US Sen. Bernie Sanders, among the earliest and most prominent congressional backers of Graham Platner's campaign to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins, has joined growing calls for the Maine Democrat to exit the race following sexual assault allegations.
"I have spoken with Graham Platner about the best path forward for Maine," Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a Tuesday statement. "In light of these very serious allegations, I have recommended that he step aside."
Jenny Racicot initially told The New York Times that Platner's behavior was "reckless" and "unsettling" during their on-and-off relationship in 2019-21, and that she cut off contact after he came to her Maine home drunk despite being told not to around five years ago. Politico reported Monday afternoon that the 41-year-old said he sexually assaulted her that night. Later Monday, Racicot appeared on CNN and said he "absolutely" raped her.
Platner, in a Monday video, denied "any accusation of nonconsensual behavior," but also said that his campaign was "taking the time to reflect on the best path forward" given "the political reality" resulting from the reporting—which followed other controversies, including offensive Reddit posts, a tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol, and allegations of physical aggression that he also denied.
After months of campaigning on progressive policies, the oyster farmer and combat veteran won last month's primary by over 50 points, beating Gov. Janet Mills, who remained on the ballot despite suspending her campaign in April. After Racicot's assault allegations broke, numerous groups and individuals—including other members of Congress who had endorsed Platner—called on him to immediately withdraw.
In a Tuesday statement revoking the Sierra Club's endorsement, political director Sarah Burton said that the green group's "thoughts are with Jenny Racicot for courageously sharing her story. Victims of sexual violence must be listened to and provided our caring and support. Their lives are not for political gamesmanship."
"Upholding basic standards of integrity, decency, and ethics is not a qualification to win the American electorate's trust; it is a requirement," Burton continued. "In light of yesterday's horrific and disturbing allegations, the Sierra Club has rescinded its endorsement of Graham Platner and calls on him to withdraw his candidacy.”
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani had not endorsed Platner, but some of his top aides played key roles in the effort to elect the Mainer. The Sanders-backed democratic socialist mayor told reporters on Tuesday that "I believe that it's time for him to drop out of the race."
According to Politico, when asked if he is concerned that the collapse of Platner's campaign could negatively impact the left more broadly, Mamdani responded, "I think the focus of today should be on the campaign coming to a close, and I think there will be many more days to have conversations about what it means beyond that."
Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas), who previously backed Platner, said late Monday that "I am horrified by the allegations against Graham Platner. He should drop out of the Senate race. Maine Democrats should replace him with an inspiring candidate who can best represent them."
Racicot told CNN and Politico that she didn't publicly accuse Platner of rape earlier in part because she agrees with his politics—and some progressives who previously supported the candidate have warned the Democratic establishment that "this is not your opening," as Our Revolution executive director Joseph Geevarghese said in a Monday statement calling for his withdrawal.
If Platner withdraws by July 13, he can be replaced on the ballot, and the Maine Democratic Party would have until July 27 to come up with a name. Already, Democrat Troy Jackson, a former Maine Senate president who campaigned for governor this cycle with Platner and Sanders, has filed paperwork.
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Chin Up: The Left Has a Bright Future
We can safely predict that the Democratic Party, as it exists today, is doomed. What comes next for progressives and working-class politics will be much more interesting than what we've suffered over recent decades.
Jul 07, 2026
Historically, periods of widespread economic suffering have often seen a surge of left-wing organizing, and even notable victories. In 1789, desperation among the peasantry and urban working class helped catalyze the French Revolution. The 1880s and 1890s in the United States saw the Farmers’ Alliances and the People’s Party sweep the interior of the country, in a vast movement to overcome the exploitation and poverty of farmers and workers. During World War I, the miseries of the Russian peasantry and industrial proletariat provided the context for the overthrow of Tsardom and then, months later, the overthrow of an ineffectual parliamentary government. The Great Depression of the 1930s saw, in the US, the birth of the welfare state and the triumph of industrial unionism.
It is no surprise, then, that the suffering of a large proportion of Americans today is helping to bring forth a new left, which has lately been seeing electoral and policy victories. In just over a year, Zohran Mamdani has become a figure with national name-recognition, but it might not be long before more people have heard of Chris Rabb, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America in Pennsylvania who is headed to Congress this year; Janeese Lewis George, a DSA member who is set to become mayor of Washington, DC.; Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Claire Valdez, New York leftists entering Congress; Nithya Raman, a socialist who might be the next mayor of Los Angeles; Melat Kiros, a socialist from Colorado who won her primary; Abdul El-Sayed, a leftist who may soon be the newest senator from Michigan; and others.
There isn’t anything like a French Revolution or a Russian Revolution on the horizon, but in the coming years, as the American economy continues to leave working people behind, it is certain that we’ll see more left-wing victories. By the 2030s, the stagnant center will be in dire condition, faced with a well-funded far-right and a left stronger than at any point since the 1960s.
What are the economic trends that forecast such an outcome? Some of them are almost universally acknowledged. Most obviously, inequality continues to skyrocket. Even before Elon Musk became a trillionaire—a fact, incidentally, that itself proves the insanity of American capitalism—the top 1% of American households owned 32% of all US wealth, about equal to the bottom 90% combined. America’s billionaires own more than $8 trillion. The income of the richest 1% averages to more than 100 times that of the bottom 20%. It is hardly surprising, then, that among peer countries, the US has the highest rate of poverty, the highest rate of infant mortality, and the second lowest life expectancy. Nor is it a surprise that a majority of Americans think a middle-class lifestyle is out of reach, or that less than half of families were able to afford medical expenses in 2025.
The picture is clear. There are good reasons that Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist, is consistently one of the most popular politicians in the country. Mainstream liberal commentators fret that running leftist candidates may cost the Democratic Party votes, but such commentators are evidently far out of touch with voter sentiment. According to polls, three quarters of Americans think the country’s political and economic system needs major changes. The Democratic Party is viewed unfavorably by 59% of adults (not much different from the Republican Party’s 58%). Chuck Schumer, a veritable symbol of the centrist status quo, is disliked by 68% of voters. Left priorities like Medicare for All, a substantially higher minimum wage, strengthening unions, raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy, increasing affordable housing, doing more to protect the environment, and cutting the military budget regularly poll well.
Far from the left’s ascendancy being a threat to the Democratic Party’s power, it is more plausibly seen as the best way to save the party. From Franklin Roosevelt to Bernie Sanders, populism, especially economic populism, is popular. It is a little odd, therefore, to see a party’s leadership consistently doing everything it can to harm its own electoral prospects, by trying to crush populist insurgents and suppress a populist message.
Longer-term trends, too, look good for the left. It isn’t often enough remarked that the US is in many respects in a situation comparable to that of the late 1920s, just before the Great Depression. The soaring inequality is one parallel, as is the soaring stock market. It has become commonplace to observe that the AI boom has features of a bubble. Another parallel is the extreme weakness of organized labor both today and in the late 1920s. Actually, the union membership rate in the private sector today, 6%, is even lower than it was in 1929, about 10%. The weakness of unions has contributed mightily to the stagnation or decline of wages among the working class, and thus to the low purchasing power of consumers. In the 1920s, a huge expansion of consumer credit, such as installment buying, was necessary to maintain the economy’s rate of growth, because millions of people simply weren’t making enough money to buy the things they wanted. Today, likewise, total household debt is at a record level, over $18 trillion.
In fact, the top 10% of earners now account for half of consumer spending—which is reminiscent of the late 1920s. The economy, therefore, faces serious problems of aggregate demand. Altogether, these are ominous tendencies. Particularly because one of the major priorities of the Trump administration has been to accelerate the transfer of money from working people to the rich, thus further shrinking aggregate demand in the long run. One method of doing so has been to reduce taxes on the wealthy while increasing them on the lowest-income households. Another has been to slash the social safety net, for example SNAP and Medicaid benefits, which causes low-income households to cut back on their spending. Attacking unions and laying off hundreds of thousands of federal workers has been a third way Trump is harming the prospects of sustained economic growth. And the list goes on.
In short, it is virtually certain that in the not-too-distant future, very hard times are coming. Such times, of course, provide an ideal opportunity for left organizing and left politics. Millions of people will get “mad as hell” and they “won’t take it anymore.” A populism of class struggle will rise to the fore again, since it will resonate with people’s experiences and grievances. Organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, the Working Families Party, and Justice Democrats will continue to cultivate a new generation of left leaders, doubtless with ever-greater success. Far-right populism will probably see victories too, and it’s impossible to predict how the conflicts between left populism and right populism will play out.
But what we can predict is that the Democratic Party, as it exists today, is doomed. The era of Clintonite centrism is passing, at long last. The future is much more interesting than that.
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The GOP and the Corporate Dems Can't Red-Bait Their Way Out of a Reckoning
Tuesday's New York primary results are the latest sign that Americans are sick to death of a rigged economy and of billionaires buying their elections.
Jun 26, 2026
On Tuesday night, the establishment wing of the Democratic Party got a message it would prefer to pretend it didn’t hear. In New York, Mamdani-backed progressives swept the congressional primaries, ousting two sitting Democratic congressmen and taking an open seat in a single evening.
Former city comptroller Brad Lander beat Rep. Dan Goldman by more than 30 points. A 32-year-old democratic socialist named Darializa Avila Chevalier knocked off five-term Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and state Assemblymember Claire Valdez won the seat Nydia Velázquez is vacating. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (a recipient of dark money and AIPAC money) campaigned hard against all three and watched all three win anyway.
As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) put it afterward, the message is pretty clear: Americans are sick to death of a rigged economy and of billionaires buying their elections.
The corporate press and just about every Republican in the country will tell you these candidates are “socialists,” and they’ll spit the word the way you’d say “arsonist.” A little history clears the fog.
This is what oligarchy looks like, and the people feeling it in their bank accounts, student loans, and their doctors’ offices understand it far better than the idiotic (or bought-off) Democratic National Committee consultants who keep telling Democrats to move to the “center.”
When a young public defender in upper Manhattan or a state assemblywoman in Brooklyn calls herself a democratic socialist today, she isn’t talking about Havana or the old Soviet Politburo (the way Republicans and much of the press want you to think). The three who won in New York ran on Medicare for All, affordable housing, stronger union protections, and an end to US military support for Israel’s assault on Gaza.
Strip away the scare word and what’s left is far more truly and anciently American than frightening: a country where a person who works 40 hours a week, no matter how complicated or how humble that work might be, can afford a home and a car, take the family on a vacation every year, put the kids through school and college, see a doctor without going bankrupt, and retire with dignity.
That’s the entire “radical” program that Republicans, corporate Democrats, and our billionaire oligarchs are so flipped out about.
Americans have wanted those things for a very long time. More than 120 years ago, Teddy Roosevelt stood up and called it the Square Deal: a fair shot for the worker, the consumer, and the “honest businessman” against the trusts and the railroad barons who’d swallowed the economy whole.
Franklin Roosevelt built the scaffolding of it with the New Deal, Lyndon Johnson finished the second story with the Great Society, and for about three decades we actually had it. The middle class in the postwar years grew faster and richer than any middle class in the history of the world. By 1980, it was two-thirds of us with a single paycheck (it’s about 41% now, and takes two paychecks to get there).
I grew up inside that promise. My father came home from the antifa war (aka WWII); got a job in a unionized tool-and-die shop in Michigan; and on that one paycheck he and my mother raised four boys, bought a house, kept a car in the driveway (new every three years), had a pension when he retired that let him travel the world, and never once feared that a hospital bill would take the whole thing down.
Nobody we knew was rich, but almost everybody we knew was secure. That security was the whole point, and it didn’t happen by accident. It happened because the country decided, through its government, to make it happen.
And then it was taken apart on purpose. As I lay out in The Hidden History of American the American Dream, the dismantling of that middle class wasn’t an unfortunate side effect of globalization or robots or some impersonal economic weather. It was a deliberate Republican neoliberal project that began with Ronald Reagan imitating Maggie Thatcher and following Heritage’s A Mandate for Leadership in 1981 and has been carried forward by both parties ever since.
The tools were straightforward. Going back to Taft-Hartley in 1947 and the spread of “right-to-work-for-less” laws, Republicans and their corporate funders handed states and giant companies the power to strangle unions, and a worker without a union is a worker without leverage.
They froze the federal minimum wage at $7.25 an hour, where it has sat untouched since 2009. America’s oligarchs fought, decade after decade, to keep the United States the only wealthy nation on Earth without national healthcare, herding us instead into the arms of insurance conglomerates and hospital and physician monopolies, more and more of them now owned by private equity firms that treat a sick patient as a line item to be squeezed.
The result, as the nonpartisan RAND Corporation recently calculated, is that roughly $79 trillion has been pumped upward from the bottom 90% of Americans into the money bins of the morbidly rich top 1% since Reagan, and the middle class has sunk below 50% of us and is hanging on—now requiring two paychecks—by its fingernails.
In that same span the share of national income going to the bottom 90% fell from about two-thirds to less than half, we’ve watched the largest upward transfer of wealth in the history of the American republic all the way back to George Washington, and every dollar of it was a choice some oligarch or his wholly-owned politician made.
The one fully socialized, fully government-run healthcare system we do have in this country, the Veterans Administration, works so well (it has the highest happiness-approval rating of any other healthcare system in America) precisely because it isn’t run for profit, which is exactly why the Republicans are now busy gutting it.
And during the George W. Bush years they took a run at Medicare itself, creating the Medicare Advantage scam through the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act and handing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to private insurers to “manage” the care of our parents and grandparents.
We can see now how that’s going. A federal watchdog reported this month that the biggest for-profit insurers are denying pre-approval for post-hospital care at rates between 51-80%, with more than a third of those denials reversed the moment somebody appeals, which tells you the care should have been approved in the first place.
A Senate investigation found those same insurers overcharged taxpayers by $83 billion in a single year while denying sick seniors the rehabilitation they were promised. But the health insurance industry oligarchs made out like bandits; several are now billionaires or worth hundreds of millions.
And now the administration is importing that very same denial machinery into traditional Medicare through a “test” program in six states that literally pays contractors a bounty for every claim they refuse.
This is what oligarchy looks like, and the people feeling it in their bank accounts, student loans, and their doctors’ offices understand it far better than the idiotic (or bought-off) Democratic National Committee consultants who keep telling Democrats to move to the “center.”
Forty-five years of this has produced a country where, thanks to the Supreme Court’s corrupt Citizens United decision, with on-the-take Justice Clarence Thomas the deciding vote, billionaires can legally own politicians outright. And that’s exactly what they’re doing: Just look at the billions that flowed to President Donald Trump and the GOP in 2024 and ask yourself who that government really works for.
Oligarchy, as history teaches and as I write about at length in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, is never a stable form of government. It’s a transitional stage because sooner or later ordinary people figure out they’ve been stripped of any real say, and they rebel.
When that moment comes—and, frankly, it’s here now in America—the oligarchs and the politicians they own face exactly two choices:
- They can pull back and let the people back in, the way America’s elites grudgingly did in the face of the Republican Great Depression when they swallowed the New Deal in the 1930s.
- Or they can stomp the middle class rebellion flat with an iron fist via police, the courts, and lawsuits against the media and those who speak out, the way Vladimir Putin did in Russia in the early 2000s.
Donald Trump and the lickspittles who work for him have very plainly chosen the iron fist.
His Department of Justice (DOJ) is prosecuting anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protesters in Minnesota on conspiracy charges while the federal agents who shot and killed two American citizens during that same operation walk free, and a jury in Texas just handed protesters 50-100 years in prison on “terrorism” charges.
His DOJ even tried to drag Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reporters before a grand jury to force them to burn their sources, backing off only after the papers fought back in sealed court filings, an effort that can be reissued the instant he wants it back.
The blueprint for all of it, Project 2025, is the latest plan to drag America back to the dog-eat-dog, mostly poor and powerless country we were before Franklin D. Roosevelt, when the middle class was a sliver rather than a majority and the rich owned everything and made most of the decisions.
What the overpaid corporate Democratic Party consultants miss, and what Trump’s own pollsters figured out years ago, is the shape of the actual American electorate.
Political scientists who map voters find that the single largest bloc of white voters is neither “conservative” nor “liberal,” but both. As Trump’s former PR guy Anthony Scaramucci told us all a few months ago:
Trump told me something once that I haven’t forgotten. He said, "You Wall Street guys are imbeciles. You’re socially liberal and fiscally conservative. You know what MY base is? Socially conservative and fiscally liberal.”
A meaningful share of white voters (probably a bit over half, looking at Trump’s two successful elections) carry real prejudice—hate—against either non-whites, queer people, or both, which is precisely why Republicans run almost entirely on trans panic and on demonizing Black “welfare queens” and brown immigrants, because those are about the only issues left on which they’re aligned with that bloc.
On the economics, though, as Scaramucci and Trump noted, that same white voting bloc wants the FDR-Truman-Eisenhower-JFK-LBJ-Nixon-Ford-Carter-era middle class back, the secure one we had before Reagan started tearing it all down in 1981.
That’s why Republicans have to scream “socialism” at any candidate whose actual platform is “rent you can afford” and “a doctor you can see when you need to without going broke.” They can’t argue the economics (and their billionaire donors won’t let them even if they wanted to), so they change the subject to fear.
But the American people aren’t buying the GOP’s oligarchic bullshit anymore. The GOP got crushed in last year’s off-year elections on the simple issue of affordability—which I read as blowback against oligarchy—and Tuesday in New York the floor under corporate Dems who’re still singing the Reaganomics song gave way again.
And it isn’t only New York. Progressives took a House primary in Pennsylvania last month, swept races across Los Angeles and the District of Columbia, and on Tuesday night knocked off four incumbent state legislators in New York alone, while Bernie Sanders kept drawing the biggest crowds of his life on what he calls his Fighting Oligarchy Tour.
So we’re watching two parties move in opposite directions at once.
What these voters keep saying they want is fighters against neoliberalism, fascism, and a return to the New Deal and Great Society.
The Democratic base is trying hard to pull its party back toward its FDR and LBJ roots, away from the Clinton-era deals with Wall Street and the Davos set, away from Barack Obama’s bargain with the insurance giants, away from the bipartisan habit of bankrolling distant wars, including the weapons still flowing to Israel’s assault on Gaza, because people here can’t make rent, go to college, or see a specialist without a three-month wait and a homelessness-threatening bill.
Opposition to that war inside the Democratic coalition has gone lopsided, and the base has noticed that its leaders—mired in big money—missed the moral question entirely. What these voters keep saying they want is fighters against neoliberalism, fascism, and a return to the New Deal and Great Society.
The Republican Party, meanwhile, is bowing and scraping lower and lower to Trump, Project 2025, and their neofascist agenda.
Just look at the last two days: On Tuesday the Senate found the spine to pass a war powers resolution reining him in on Iran, and by Wednesday night, after Trump reportedly screamed at Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) in a closed-door lunch, the Senate turned right around and reversed itself when Cassidy lost his spine and flipped his vote and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) ducked into a cowardly “present.”
November will tell us which direction the majority of Americans actually want to go, assuming Trump’s many efforts to rig the outcome don’t all succeed (and I’ll get into those efforts in detail in a future piece).
For now, though, we all should understand what these primaries and the wins that are shocking the Schumer-Jeffries crowd actually represent.
After 45 years in the wilderness, Americans are reaching back for the Square Deal that Teddy Roosevelt promised and the New Deal and Great Society that FDR and LBJ delivered, and no amount of red-baiting about Havana is going to talk them out of it.
We’ve been here before, and now at the end of the third of these 80-year cycles, Democrats must choose to kick the oligarchs out and let the people back in. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again, this time with Zoomers leading the way.
If any of this matters to you, don’t just nod and scroll. Call your senators and representative through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them where you stand on healthcare, on the minimum wage and free college, and on the right to protest.
Make sure you and everyone you know is registered and ready to vote in 2026 at vote.org, and find out who’s on your state and local ballot at openstates.org, because the people rigging the game are counting on you staying home.
And if this piece helped you see the pattern a little more clearly, share it, forward it, post it, and consider subscribing at hartmannreport.com so we can keep doing this work together.
Democracy, as Bernie used to say every Friday for 11 years on my radio program, isn’t a spectator sport, and the next three years are, I believe (if we all work hard enough), going to prove it.
Tag, you’re it!
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