Graham Platner, Jon Ossoff and the New Rules of Political Attention

Produced by Rollin Hu

Graham Platner, Jon Ossoff and the New Rules of Political Attention

This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

How did Graham Platner, a political unknown a year ago, come from nowhere to so thoroughly dominate a primary in which his opponent, Janet Mills, the sitting governor of Maine, suspended her campaign, and didn’t even come back in, even as Platner was rocked by even more scandals?

The answer is that Platner had the most important political resource right now, and Mills was not able to grab any of it.

That resource is attention. It’s a constant theme now for me on the show — that you need to see attention as its own substrate of American politics.

Attention is working in really unusual ways this year. In the Michigan Democratic primary for Senate, where Abdul El-Sayed is now in the lead. In Texas, where James Talarico, another person people hadn’t really heard of a couple of years ago, is now the Democratic nominee for Senate. In Los Angeles, where we actually saw all the attention fail in the mayoral candidacy of Spencer Pratt. And in what’s happening with Jon Ossoff and the sudden rise in interest in what he’s doing. All of these cases contain lessons for how attention is working right now in American politics.

To help me unpack them, I wanted to have on my favorite person to talk about this particular topic with: my friend Chris Hayes. He’s the host of “All In With Chris Hayes” and the author of a great book on attention in the modern moment, “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.”

Ezra Klein: Chris Hayes, welcome back to the show.

Chris Hayes: Always great to be back.

I wanted to have you here for one of our every-so-often check-ins on how attention is working in American politics. I want to start with a Wall Street Journal interview with the people who recruited Graham Platner.

Archival clip:Interviewer: How did you find Graham Platner?Recruiter: Well, we went through thousands and thousands of prospects. We went through a number of means, we assessed just a huge amount of people. Then Leanne pulled up this video of this guy with an oyster farm.Clip of Graham Platner: My name’s Graham Platner, and I live in Sullivan, Maine, the owner of Frenchman Bay Oyster Company.Recruiter: And then she pulled up his F.E.C. history and saw the money he’d given to Bernie Sanders and some other people. And that was enough information to know that we had the best prospect that we’d maybe ever seen.

Interviewer: How did you find Graham Platner?

Recruiter: Well, we went through thousands and thousands of prospects. We went through a number of means, we assessed just a huge amount of people. Then Leanne pulled up this video of this guy with an oyster farm.

Clip of Graham Platner: My name’s Graham Platner, and I live in Sullivan, Maine, the owner of Frenchman Bay Oyster Company.

Recruiter: And then she pulled up his F.E.C. history and saw the money he’d given to Bernie Sanders and some other people. And that was enough information to know that we had the best prospect that we’d maybe ever seen.

I want to flesh this out because I’ve been told the story of how this played out by multiple people.

This group, they were like: Who could run in Maine? A lobster farmer, oyster farmer, some kind of fisherman.

And so when he says: We looked at thousands of people — the computer looked through occupational and other forms of records. It was like: Who has donated to a populist candidate?

Which is to say that we normally think of candidates as being recruited because they’re important in their communities: They’re a lawyer, they run a hospital, something like that.

A lot of people grow up wanting to run for office. But Graham Platner was cast, right? It was like Hollywood was looking for somebody to fill a role.

There’s a long history there. The Democrats are running someone in Tom Kean’s district — who’s a former Navy helicopter pilot. Mikie Sherrill was a helicopter pilot. [Laughs.] That’s a bio that’s ——

Abigail Spanberger was a former C.I.A. officer.

Exactly. So that part of it is an interesting version of a grass-roots, lefty, populist group doing what the D.C.C.C. will do, or the D.S.C.C.

But the reason this worked was because of the charisma. I do think there’s a kind of full-circle thing happening in politics, which is that, of course, charisma is important to politics. But I think particularly at the level of scale. There was a period where the formula really didn’t take into account charisma.

It was like bio, social capital, connections, ability to raise money, all that stuff. Then we’ll cut some ads for them, we’ll get them a good team, and they’ll be fine.

I think charisma matters much more now because attention matters more, and charisma is the talent for grabbing and holding attention.

I want to hold on what you just said about the D.C.C.C., because I think we both know a fair amount about the way they recruit.

And one of the grim realities of how they recruit is they very heavily emphasize how much money you can raise. One, they will force you to sit on the phone six hours a day, and they will punish you if you don’t. You want to be on things like their red-to-blue lists.

So I know candidates who are just browbeaten into being on the phone raising money for hours and hours and hours a day. And the D.C.C.C., which is the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, isn’t doing that because they’re cynics ——

Or they have a fetish for it.

Or they love money. You need money. But the thing money is buying, largely, is attention. It also buys field and organizing and other things. But it buys attention.

The biggest thing is it buys TV.

So what this group is doing when they cast Platner — he’s not a person who you go to and think: Can you raise the money to buy attention? He’s a person you go to and think: Can you unleash the charisma to earn attention?

Which then will bring in money.

But even if it doesn’t, attention.

This is the point. You have to have a theory of attention for a successful campaign right now, in a way like when that formula was as dead set as it was in the high point of broadcast TV ads — raise as much money as possible, hit the airways with a ton of broadcast TV. And that’s the recipe. That’s 90 percent of a campaign.

As broadcast TV and broadcast TV ads decline in their salience, you have to have some alternate theory of how you’re going to get to people.

In some places, like in North Carolina with Roy Cooper, everyone in the state knows who Roy Cooper is. He doesn’t have the same problem. The guy has been elected statewide, I think, five times at this point, or something like that. So he doesn’t have to do that.

But if you’re running another race, you do have to come up with some theory of how you’re going to do it. In this case, it was casting, and then it was finding a person who genuinely has real, obvious raw political talent and charisma.

OK, but we’re underselling here the accomplishment of Platner, because they are running in a race, ultimately, against a Roy Cooper-like figure in Janet Mills.

This is not a situation where there is an open primary of nobodies. It’s not a situation where they’re going into a place like Nebraska, where they recruited Dan Osborn, the independent who ran a cycle ago and is running again this cycle.

This is a situation where Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee had a candidate in mind. They have a Democratic governor of Maine, and they’re going to run the Democratic governor of Maine against Mills to pick up that seat.

And what happens very, very, very quickly is that Platner squeezes Mills out attentionally. Just the charisma gap between them and the ability that he has to command attention, particularly online, that then translates into all other forms of attention. The newspapers follow it, the cable news follows it. He’s on your show.

He knocks out a sitting governor.

The other part of it is he out-campaigns her in that state on the ground. It’s not just the online part of it. And again, this is part of attention, too, particularly in a small state.

Maine is a state where Susan Collins, at this point, literally knows a shockingly high percentage of Mainers. It’s just the way it works when you’re an institution like her. It’s the kind of state where you can make inroads in retail politics in a way that you can’t in the California governor’s race.

So part of it, too, is that he just outworks her.

He’s also much younger than she is. Mills is a 78-year-old candidate.

I think there’s actually an interesting relationship here between attention and risk appetite, because I think the two are so related. I think a lot of the things that have guided Democratic politics around attention have also related to risk aversion.

Don’t get negative press. If you’re choosing between no press and negative press, minimize downsides. Other people could have run in that primary.

They knew that Schumer was trying to recruit Mills. She actually got in after Platner, officially. Almost all of the big-name politicians in the state of Maine went for the governor’s race, which was going to be vacated, it wasn’t going to have a sitting incumbent, and you weren’t going to take on the electoral colossus of Susan Collins. That’s a lower-risk choice.

Platner made a high-risk bet, and I do think there’s a relationship between risk appetite and attention that’s very much part of Democratic politics, which is there is an institutional low-risk appetite.

I want to pick up on the word “institution” there. The Democratic Party — the Republican Party pre-Trump is like this, too — chooses people who succeed in institutions.

If you think about the candidates after Barack Obama: Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden. In a different way: Kamala Harris. They were not electoral juggernauts. Clinton lost to Barack Obama, but she was beloved within the Democratic Party at that time. Joe Biden was Barack Obama’s vice president, and it goes down like this.

I think that there is an inverse relationship between the personality type that succeeds institutionally and the personality type that succeeds attentionally.

Yes. That’s often true.

And I think it is related to what you’re talking about with risk.

But I think it has created an almost structural problem in party recruiting. Because parties, as you were noting, look for all these signals that are fundamentally signals of institutional capacity: social capital, ability to raise money, jobs that tend to have risen through the institutions.

Platner is a downwardly mobile oyster farmer whose oyster farm doesn’t really make money and sells to his mom’s fancy restaurant. You wouldn’t just look at him and think: That guy is the most impressive person in Maine.

It’s not like Mikie Sherrill as a Navy pilot.

But the people who succeed in institutions often do not have personalities that are spiky in the way the attentional moment currently rewards.

I think that’s true. I think there are a few things going on. One is we should talk about success in institutions and credentialing, which are sort of two different things.

It means a lot in the world of Democratic progressive politics if someone went to Yale Law. So there’s the credential part of it, there’s actual success in institutions, there’s relationships to those institutions, and then there’s the kind of personalities that succeed in those institutions.

The old term that you would use in the ’50s and ’60s, in a different era, was a “company man.” And a company man is someone who gets along well with others in an organizational setting, doesn’t make waves, doesn’t upset people.

I think the idea of a company man is what has been the template, almost necessarily. As you said at the beginning of this part of the conversation, the Democratic Party is an institution.

One thing that Platner is able to carry, in a way that feels authentic, is a genuine feeling that the system is hollow at its core ——

Which is not a put-on with him, which is the key part of this.

Yes, I think that’s important. You can say a lot about his life and what he has done or has not done — and we’ll talk about some of that, too. But he is somebody who believes the institutions have failed because they have failed for him, and he has failed out of them. The hostility is authentic.

And when you listen to him on the stump, more than he is carrying a message about single-payer health care or a Green New Deal, he is carrying a message about — in a very different way than Bernie did, but using similar language — an unspecified political revolution.

He’s carrying a message that this is all wrong somehow.

What you need is somebody who fundamentally believes it is all wrong somehow.

Archival clip of Platner: The world that we live in today is not natural. We do not live in a political and economic reality that is organic.It is a system that is built by policy decisions, policy that is written by establishment politicians in Washington, D.C., at the behest of their donors and their supporters, and it is a system that was made to make sure that no matter how hard you work, you will never feel like you have power.Power is for these people, and they’re up there. They’re qualified. They have the pedigree. They have the background. They’re the ones that are allowed to make decisions for us. Don’t worry ourselves. Let them take care of it.Well, I’m going to tell you right now, that story is [expletive].

Archival clip of Platner: The world that we live in today is not natural. We do not live in a political and economic reality that is organic.

It is a system that is built by policy decisions, policy that is written by establishment politicians in Washington, D.C., at the behest of their donors and their supporters, and it is a system that was made to make sure that no matter how hard you work, you will never feel like you have power.

Power is for these people, and they’re up there. They’re qualified. They have the pedigree. They have the background. They’re the ones that are allowed to make decisions for us. Don’t worry ourselves. Let them take care of it.

Well, I’m going to tell you right now, that story is [expletive].

You can look across a lot of the candidates who are succeeding right now — here, I do think Mamdani fits in. We’ll talk about Abdul El-Sayed. Donald Trump was obviously like this.

A large number of the candidates who have broken through are breaking through with a message, more even than with an agenda, of genuine disillusionment and anger.

Yes. I think there are a few related questions.

One, I think people use the term “populism,” which gets probably as close as any to what we’re describing as a tendency — disillusionment, frustration with the failed status quo, elite failure, particularly.

So there are a few interesting questions that flow out of that. One is: Does that have a specific ideological valence? Can you be a moderate populist?

Another interesting question is: Can you be a centrist populist? Another is: Can you channel the attentional politics when you are suddenly in the incumbent position?

I want to pick up on something you said about being a moderate populist. You can be a moderate populist, and you know how we know that? Because there was one in Maine.

The Democrat in the House representing the reddest House seat held by a Democrat is Jared Golden. He’s a Maine member of Congress. He’s a populist. He was a Bernie Sanders supporter. He is also a moderate.

He famously wrote this Op-Ed about how Donald Trump wouldn’t be the end of the world. He supported Donald Trump on tariffs, but he is also very, very pro-labor. He’s very disgusted with politics. And he has existed in a politically miserable existence.

He’s been holding a seat probably no other Democrat could hold.

And, in fact, he’s leaving now.

This year, he is getting primaried from the left, and he decided: I’m done. I’m retiring. You could have imagined a world where the Democratic Party fell in love with this guy, embraced him and elevated him to run against Susan Collins. And in that world, I’d be like: Susan Collins is gone.

But I think the issue you see with Jared Golden and moderate populism is that you become very vulnerable in primaries. The right but now on the left — the polling on this is really fascinating — if you look at the number of Democrats who said they were very liberal in 1995, most Democrats were not liberal or very liberal in 1995. They self-described as moderate.

Now it’s liberal and very liberal. It’s very hard to survive, and it’s also just very unpleasant.

Yes. That is a big part of it.

Even if you can survive the day-to-day of being yelled at by the advocacy groups on your side, by your own friends. But the thing that you cannot seem to do right now is hold that together with being a successful candidate in primaries where you’re having to appeal to a high-attention electorate with very, very, very sorted political opinions.

Right, particularly in this nationalized attentional atmosphere. That’s part of it, too. In another universe, no one online is paying attention to what Jared Golden is doing. You could be Jared Golden for your district, and the local news would cover you. The local TV news, the newspapers, maybe some nerds would read about you in “Roll Call.”

Because we’re all operating in one attentional sphere, there’s less and less room for that sort of variation that used to just come about because people just didn’t pay attention to what the Maine 2 congressional candidate was doing.

This brings up some of the flip side of Platner. One reason I think Platner is such an interesting figure to start with is he represents both sides of the gamble being made. The high-risk, high-attention charisma on the one hand. On the other hand, the point of getting this high-risk candidate with an anti-institutional life story is you’re not getting somebody who has been watching his step for a long time, and you’re getting somebody who has maybe misstepped quite a lot.

You’ve got the Nazi Totenkopf tattoo on the chest and this pulsing question about whether or not he knew about that. I’m honestly a little skeptical that he did not know about it for as long as he says he didn’t.

I share that skepticism.

You have him sexting what seems like about a half-dozen women during his marriage — or at least, texting with them in an effort to set up some kind of relationship.

Also you have the recent claims from an ex-girlfriend, the one who works in Republican politics, that he was borderline abusive when they fought.

I’ve had this trouble with Platner because, on the one hand, he’s very........

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