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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, a newsletter that can finally stop writing about Graham Platner—for five years, when he will be a first-ballot Surge Hall of Fame inductee.

Most of the Surge this week is about developments in Maine, a once beautiful state that may now have to be domed off in concrete because of what’s gone down in its Senate race. Also: The Texas Senate race, which has taken England by storm, and a glimpse of the next major Democratic showdown in Michigan. We’ll write it all up as soon as we get off a phone call with Mitch McConnell after exactly 20 minutes.

We’re going triple wide for the opening: Who’s to blame for the Democratic mess in Maine?

The principal person to blame for why Democrats are self-imploding in a race that is vital to flipping control of the Senate and applying a critical check on Donald Trump is, well, the principal. No one forced him to have a long history of edgelord posting online, or to get a Nazi tattoo, or to sext with other women while married, or to have had a history of toxic relationships. And this week, a credible rape accusation against him, which he denies, proved to be the last straw. He was dragged into suspending his campaign and has now withdrawn from the race. No one forced him to keep all of this buried and push ahead, assuming that his charisma could pull him through. It couldn’t. This race is the main show of the 2026 midterms, with major implications for Maine, the country, and the world. Nothing was ever going to stay buried.

It’s not hard to see why Platner is so surly in his 11-minute Wednesday video announcing that he would end his campaign. A year ago he was nobody, and now he is nationally famous for a rape allegation. But the video did not advance the overarching goal here: replacing Susan Collins in the Senate. He wallowed in the fact that big, wealthy corporate and donor interests were too frightened of him and his politics to allow him to continue—the sort of conspiratorial thinking that has found a lot of purchase on the left in this year’s primaries. But all that big-money Democratic interests, along with small-money and no-money Democratic interests, want is a chance to beat Susan Collins. They no longer have it with Platner.

That’s a lot of wreckage.

Platner, who had no political experience, was recruited into the race by Daniel Moraff, an Ivy League–educated consultant who served as a headhunter for progressive and unconventional Democratic candidates. While doing some express vetting, he brought in Morris Katz, the young political consultant who’d worked with........

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