Top takeaways from the primary elections in Maine and South Carolina: ‘Movement about us’

BLUE HILL, Maine – Graham Platner, the progressive left, and Donald Trump appear to be the big winners in Tuesday’s high-profile primaries in Maine and South Carolina.

Platner, the oyster farmer and military combat veteran who has been facing plenty of incoming fire amid mounting controversies, cruised to the Democratic nomination Tuesday in left-leaning Maine and will now face longtime moderate Republican Sen. Susan Collins in a key race that is among a handful which will likely determine if Republicans hold their Senate majority in the midterm elections.

Meanwhile, in solidly red South Carolina, Trump-backed Sen. Lindsey Graham won a majority of the vote in the Senate GOP primary and will avoid a runoff against a primary challenger from the right.

And the candidate the president endorsed in the state’s Republican gubernatorial primary, Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, finished on top of a crowded field of contenders and will advance to a runoff election in two weeks against longtime South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, who came in second.

Here’s what we learned in the key June 9th primaries.

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The left storms back

The convincing victory by Platner, who was backed by progressive champions Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Rep. Ro Khanna of California, looks to be another feather in the cap for the left in their intra-party face-off with the establishment.

The primary in Maine was held a week after Iowa state Rep. John Turek, who was supported by longtime Senate Democratic Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer, won the Democratic Senate primary and will face Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson in another crucial midterm showdown.

Turek, a wheelchair basketball player who won two Paralympic gold medals, defeated the more progressive candidate, state Sen. Zach Wahls. The divisive and expensive primary battle was viewed as a proxy war between the establishment and anti-establishment wings of the party.

Fast-forward a week and the ballot box performance by Platner, who promotes an economically populist agenda as he takes aim at corporate influences and advocates for the working class, gives a boost to the left.

“The Democratic establishment and powerful interests spent months trying to stop Graham Platner. Instead, they demonstrated that voters in Maine and across America want to elect shake-up-the-system outsiders,” Progressive Change Campaign Committee co-founder Adam Green emphasized.

And Green warned that Platner’s victory “should be a wake-up call for a Democratic establishment that has spent too long underestimating the appeal of economic populism and outsider politics.”

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What controversies?

Platner in recent weeks has been facing one of the roughest stretches of his bid for the U.S. Senate.

The candidate has been playing defense the past month, amid multiple controversies. They include inflammatory online comments made on Reddit, a well-publicized and now covered-up tattoo on his chest that resembled a Nazi symbol, recent reports that he exchanged sexually explicit messages with several women while married, and new allegations last week from ex-girlfriends of a history of rape fantasies, heavy drinking and violent episodes. Platner has called the latest allegations of violence untrue.

On Monday, a day before the primary election, a former high-level staffer from the Platner campaign wrote in the Washington Post that Platner “is not someone who would be good for Maine or for the country.”

While the mounting controversies triggered some Democrats in the nation’s capital to question whether Platner was damaged goods and needed to be replaced, the candidate this past weekend thanked Maine voters for continuing to support him.

“When hurtful things I said on the internet a decade ago came out into the public as I shared my personal journey through PTSD and darkness of recovery and accountability and growth. Maine had my back,” Platner said at a rally Friday not far from his hometown in Down East Maine. “Now, as every single piece of that past and journey gets dug up, litigated, and weaponized, you have my back. And when politically motivated, serious and false accusations are made against me. Maine, you have my back.”

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And voters in Maine’s Democratic Senate primary seemed to shrug off the controversies.

“In trying so hard to understand me, they failed to understand that this is not about me at all,” Platner said in his victory speech as he dismissed news reports about his past misdeeds as immaterial to the Senate election.

“This is a movement about us, about the far too many working far too hard and struggling far too much.”

Trump has a big night

The president wasn’t on the ballot in South Carolina, but he had plenty on the line in the GOP Senate and gubernatorial primaries.

One week after Trump’s endorsement-winning streak in high-profile Republican primaries was snapped, the president’s immense clout over the GOP was on the line again, this time in South Carolina.

And the president easily passed the test.

The candidate Trump endorsed in the Palmetto State’s GOP gubernatorial primary, Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, finished first in a crowded field of candidates and clinched one of the two tickets in the race for the nomination.

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Evette, who repeatedly spotlighted Trump’s support, now advances to a Republican runoff election in two weeks against South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, the second place finisher, in the race to succeed term-limited GOP Gov. Henry McMaster. 

Since no candidate topped 50% of the primary vote to land a majority, Evette and Wilson will battle for the nomination in the June 23 runoff, and the winner will be considered the clear favorite in the general election in the solidly red southeastern state.

Meanwhile, in the South Carolina GOP Senate primary, longtime Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham did win a majority of the vote, and will avoid a runoff, the Associated Press reported.

Graham, who was endorsed by Trump, was facing primary challenges from five candidates, including conservative businessman Mark Lynch, who took aim at the senator over his support for the war in Iran. Lynch was backed by some MAGA leaders who have been critical of the president.

Graham’s campaign and allied political groups spent nearly $20 million to highlight Trump’s support. And the president joined Graham and Evette for a primary eve tele-rally.

The brute force of the president’s endorsement power has been on display in GOP primaries over the past month, with his candidates ousting incumbents he targeted in showdowns in Indiana, Louisiana, Kentucky and Texas that grabbed plenty of national attention.

But his 11th-hour endorsement of Republican Rep. Randy Feenstra of Iowa a week and a half ago — which came on the same day he also backed Evette — in the race to succeed retiring GOP Gov. Kim Reynolds wasn’t enough to muscle the three-term congressman to victory.

Feenstra was narrowly edged by Zach Lahn, a businessman, farmer and former political strategist who was backed by the political wings of MAHA — the acronym for the Make America Healthy Again movement aligned with Trump Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — and Turning Point USA, the powerful conservative organization co-founded by the late Charlie Kirk.

In the South Carolina GOP gubernatorial primary, the major contenders had long been highlighting their support for Trump and his agenda, in hopes of landing his support.

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Trump, after staying neutral for months, endorsed Evette, praising her as an “America First Patriot” and a “WINNER” in his announcement.

In her primary night speech, Evette thanks the president and touted that she’s a “Trump-endorsed businesswoman and conservative who’s going to take the fight to the radical left.”