Not long after governor Janet Mills had effectively dropped out of the primary race, a storm grew around Platner’s campaign. Rightwing operatives and liberal media mouthpieces started singing in unison that Platner was unfit for office, flimsy allegations poured in accusing the candidate of all sorts of alleged misconduct with former girlfriends.

Chris Hayes, of the uber-liberal MS NOW network, questioned whether Platner was going after underage girls. Not to be outdone, Mika Brzezinski of the same network compared his behavior with that of Jeffery Epstein. All of this after an earlier campaign that claimed the former Marine’s tattoo was indicative of his secret affection for Nazis.

Despite it all, Platner won his primary with 72% of the vote.

Now, without much of an opponent to run against, those numbers don’t mean that Platner will sail to victory in November, but they do suggest that many Democrats, true-blue liberal primary voters, in the Pine Tree state really hated the liberal smear campaign against him. They also resent those in the Democratic “shadow party” that conducted that campaign with a ruthlessness usually reserved for the Republican party.

In other words, the attacks didn’t just fail, it may have even backfired.

Elite Democrats have become accustomed to accusing their rivals of all sorts of evil sorcery: racism, sexism, Nazism, chauvinism, you name it. Anything to avoid a real debate about policy; about what’s wrong with the country and how to fix it.

The reigning expectation on the left was that such accusations could make good liberals have second thoughts about any candidate, no matter their political program. No decent progressive ought to vote for a deplorable.

For a while, this strategy worked. Since at least 2016, bogus accusations of racism and sexism against candidates such as Bernie Sanders have been an efficient way to defang........

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