Graham Platner Reminds The Left Who We Don't Want To Be

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz Podcast · Jul 9, 2026 · 4m

This sucks.

There’s no way around it.

Politically speaking, for those of us on the Left, losing a candidate who carried the Democrats’ hopes of finally unseating Susan Collins in Maine and shifting the balance of power in the Senate this late in the game and in this manner is devastating. There’s no spin here that can make this good news, at least not in the political arena.

But from a human perspective, this is where we should be today as a movement and a people. This is where we have to be if we’re going to prevail as a civilized society, if we’re going to differentiate ourselves from the…