Last spring, my mother and I looked for her childhood home on Zillow. She grew up on the Mid-Coast of Maine in a two-bedroom house without a view of the water. My grandparents could just about afford it on blue-collar wages in 1959. Now Zillow said the same house could sell for almost half a million dollars. We stared at my laptop screen, in silence, until my mother ventured the obvious: None of us could buy the place now. When Graham Platner launched his Senate campaign a few months later, I thought about the house and the stories my mother has always told me. What it was like to walk to work and school in a Maine winter because my grandparents were too poor to afford a car for a while. How they would sometimes eat popcorn for dinner because they’d run out of groceries. All the relatives who worked in the mills and on the water; who cleaned the summer homes of the out-of-state rich; who barely managed to stay in a place they all loved.

Within weeks, Platner became a national sensation. (I interviewed him, too.) Polls and reporting kept adding up to one conclusion. People were angry, far angrier than the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has ever understood. A cost-of-living crisis has hit Maine hard, as my family can attest. A large number of hospitals are in danger of closing. Climate change threatens fisheries and the lobstering industry, and there aren’t enough nursing-home beds to serve an aging population. Platner got that or seemed to. He’d enlisted in the Marines and started an oyster farm and called himself “a working-class guy that lives a working-class life.” He spoke of rising housing costs, the exorbitant price of health care, and the relentless, stupid cruelty of our forever wars. The platform rejected anti-trans bigotry and the border mania of centrist Democrats. Perhaps there was an alternative to politicians like Gavin Newsom, a viable challenger to Susan Collins, a champion for Mainers like my relatives. Then came the Totenkopf tattoo and the Reddit posts, in which he urged people to “just take some responsibility for themselves” so they don’t end up “in a comprising [sic] situation,” like assault. Ex-girlfriends accused him of aggressive and intimidating behavior. By the time a credible rape allegation sank his campaign, the Platner brand was in tatters.

Some ideologues are........

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