Politics
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Many of the same progressives who wrote to the Democratic State Committee last week urging officials to revote on the process to replace scandal-plagued Graham Platner pressed the seven contenders to replace him on the ballot to sign a pledge on core policy issues and to participate in forums starting next week.
A source familiar with the group’s behind-the-scenes work says more than 500 Mainers have signed an open letter calling on the candidates to get on board with a seven-point progressive platform ahead of the 600-member nominating convention on July 25.
So far, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows and former state Senate President Troy Jackson have signed on and agreed to take part in a potential Zoom forums spearheaded by the group.
The progressive push comes as seven candidates seek to rally and recruit delegates ahead of the unprecedented convention and hope to gain support from Platner’s base in a pivotal midterm year when one of them will face five-term Republican Sen. Susan Collins as Democrats seek to take control of the Senate.
The group, which began last week with nearly 200 progressives, many of them former organizers and volunteers for the Platner campaign before he bowed out after sexual misconduct allegations, calls itself the Maine People Powered Movement.
The group has kept in contact with a network of organizers, local and state party leaders and candidates as it pushes for the final nominee to be representative of the June 9 primary in which Platner won more than 150,000 votes, a record for Democrats.
“This was never a campaign built around one person,” the group said in its letter Tuesday, which Jackson shared over social media. “It was a movement built around a set of values: healthcare as a right, housing that isn’t a Wall Street commodity, an economy that isn’t rigged for billionaires and corporations, real support for workers and veterans, and a foreign policy that doesn’t treat endless war as the cost of doing business.”
The group said it wasn’t trying to dictate who the nominee should be, but said the party and Mainers must be “equally clear about what comes next for us.”
They called on the declared candidates to pledge to uphold a progressive platform. The seven policy items included pushing for Medicare for All; banning corporate and hedge fund purchases of homes; reforms on taxes, money in politics and term limits; strengthening labor rights; ending “forever wars’; human rights for all including immigration reform and full sovereignty for the Wabanaki Nations; and reining in the influence of the fossil fuel industry.
The other candidates include former public health chief Nirav Shah, former political aide Jordan Wood, Maine Beer Co. co-founder Dan Kleban, former government official David Costello, social worker Paige Loud and former state Rep. Elizabeth Dickerson.
Shah has been pressing for debates from the start of the new race. Jackson said Tuesday that he’d agreed to a debate with News Center Maine, but other debates are in the works.
Jackson on Tuesday said that grassroots leaders had powered a movement across Maine in a pivotal midterm year.
“They deserve to know their efforts, talents, and hope were not in vain,” he said. “The next Democratic nominee must pledge to embrace the same progressive platform and mission that got us here.”