WHICH IS THE PARTY OF DEMOCRACY? Under wildly different circumstances, Democrats in Maine and Republicans in South Carolina face the problem of finding a new nominee to run for the Senate this November. They are handling the situation in remarkably different ways.
Start with Maine. Last week, nominee Graham Platner finally succumbed to the long list of scandals that had plagued his campaign — Nazi tattoo, Reddit posts, sexting, and all that. Now, Maine Democrats have until July 27 to choose a new candidate to run against long-time Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
A few days ago, the party announced that this coming weekend, Maine’s 16 counties will hold meetings at which Democrats will select 500 delegates to a convention to be held on July 25. Another 101 delegates will be members of Maine’s Democratic State Committee. So a total of 601 delegates will meet to select the new Democratic nominee for the Senate.
Only registered Democrats can become delegates or vote to select the delegates at the county meetings. Then, the party has specified that for “safety reasons,” “only credentialed delegates, credentialed press, and staff will be permitted to attend [the convention] in person.”
It will be a pretty insular affair. “That process will be dominated by die-hard Democrats, many of whom skew left, rather than the broader primary electorate,” political analyst Mark Halperin wrote recently. “Candidates seeking support from several hundred party leaders and activists may naturally emphasize priorities that resonate inside Democratic politics instead of appealing to general election voters.”
In the June 9 Maine Democratic primary, Platner won with 156,084 votes — not just registered Democrats but independents, too. Second-place finisher Janet Mills received 41,644 votes. Those votes no longer count. The next Democratic candidate will become the nominee by winning a majority of 601 Democrats, a number of them party officials, at a convention that only a small number of Democrats will be allowed to attend.
There is a simpler, more democratic way to do this, and that is to vote. Hold another primary election and have the party’s voters choose the next nominee. That is what will happen in South Carolina, where stunned party leaders and state officials are planning a special primary after the death of Sen. Lindsey Graham.
Graham won the June 9 Republican primary with 264,091 votes. Second-place finisher Mark Lynch received 134,360 votes. In all, a total of 465,076 South Carolina Republicans and others voted in the GOP primary, which was an open primary and held on the same day as the Democratic primary, which was also open and in which 367,411 South Carolinians voted.
Now there will be a new, special Republican primary election on August 11. The candidates are not yet known; by law, they have until July 28 to enter the race.
There is a controversy at the moment over who will be allowed to vote on August 11. Some want it to be an entirely new, entirely open election, like the June 9 primary. That would mean that people who voted in the June 9 Democratic primary would be able to vote in the August 11 Republican primary for the same race. That seems a little odd, since voters were originally allowed to vote in just one party’s primary for the 2026 Senate election.
Others want the election to be otherwise open but exclude those who have already voted in the Democratic primary. That seems like a reasonable idea, given that this is still the same overall contest — the one that will determine South Carolina’s next senator. If you’ve already chosen to vote in that contest, in the Democratic primary for that race, your candidate has been chosen, and you don’t get to vote in another primary. If you chose to vote in the June 9 Republican primary, or if you didn’t vote at all, you would be eligible to vote in August.
Whichever way is chosen, what is going on now in South Carolina is by any standard an admirably democratic process. The next Republican nominee will be chosen by voters who, the last time around, voted in the hundreds of thousands. On the other hand, in Maine, the next Democratic nominee will be chosen by a few hundred party officials and activists. And that leads to a question: Which is the party of democracy?