The Democratic Party's Civil War

**Dan Pfeiffer** (0:20)
Welcome to Pod Save America, I'm Dan Pfeiffer. You're about to hear a great conversation I just had with Amanda Libman, co-founder and president of Run for Something, an organization that has recruited more than 250,000 people to run for office since its founding in 2017
And she's the author of When We're In Charge, The Next Generation's Guide to Leadership. I invited Amanda on because I wanted to hear her perspective on where Democrats are heading into the 2026 midterms, how the fight between establishment and insurgent candidates is playing out in racism across the country, especially in a heated Democratic primary in Michigan and where the party goes from here.
I also asked her about how Graham Platner's decision to drop out of the main Senate race could impact Democrats chances of taking back the Senate, and what she thinks as someone who has worked with thousands of candidates about the recruitment and vetting process that led him to jump into the race. It was a great conversation and we'll get to it in a minute. But before we do, if you want more analysis heading into the midterms, consider subscribing to my newsletter, The Message Box, where I pull back from day-to-day punditry to offer deeper analysis on the trends affecting our politics. Go to crooked.com/yeswedan for a 20% discount on your subscription. And as always, consider becoming a paying subscriber to Friends of the Pod, where you'll get this episode and many more ad-free, which now includes ad-free episodes of Alex Wagner's phenomenal runaway country. Head to crooked.com/friends to subscribe today. All right. Here's Amanda Lippman. Amanda Lippman, welcome back to Pod Save America.

**Amanda Litman** (1:34)
Thanks for having me, Dan.

**Dan Pfeiffer** (1:36)
I wanted to have you on for so many reasons. I want to talk about the midterms. I want to talk about the battle within the Democratic Party between the insurgents and the establishment, the left, the right, et cetera. But I feel like the best place to start, maybe the worst place to start with this conversation is Maine, a topic we've talked a lot about. Now, I don't think we need to go through our own personal histories with Graham Platner or who we liked or when we liked them. We've all done that. I went deep with Alex Wagner on last week's pod. You've written about this, you've talked about, you've tweeted about it. I want your perspective as someone who has worked with thousands of candidates about how we ended up in the situation. And I want to begin with a candidate recruitment process. Dana Morath and Leanne Fan, two progressive activists who did a very aggressive media tour about their plans for recruiting Graham Platner. They went looking for a candidate in Maine. They looked through FEC records, they looked for a lobsterman, then they looked for an oyster farmer. They looked at, then they saw a video of Graham Platner. They went with, met with them, convinced them to run for office.
This has come under a withering critique from lots of people.
What did they do right? What did they do wrong? What's your take on this recruitment process? And we'll get to the vetting after this, because that's a different topic, but related, obviously.

**Amanda Litman** (2:50)
What did they do right? They looked for someone new. I think that's good. I think we should open the door to as many new voices as possible. We should expand our idea of what a good candidate looks like. That's the end of the list of things they did right.
What they did wrong is you cannot play kingmaker, and you really cannot play mad libs with candidate recruitment. You cannot look at a state like Maine or any district and say, you know what, we need X kind of occupation, Y demographic, Z type of politics. We're going to make this person into a candidate. One, we have no idea who the fuck can win. We have no idea. But two, it leaves open so much space for it to feel like a puppet master is creating the candidate, as opposed to the candidate coming up organically. It is possible that he, like notwithstanding all of his other personal stuff, that he might have come up through and seen an ad from Run for Something or gone to a Maine Democratic Party event and said, you know what, maybe I do see myself here. Then gone through the kind of rigorous, thoughtful process you need before you actually get on the ballot.
That maybe could have been so.
But they did not do that. They said, we're going to make this man into a senator, and they tried to puppet master it into being. That will backfire any number of ways.