A Candidate Walks Away From 150,000 Votes

A man receives more votes than any of his comrades have ever gained for that Senate seat. The party celebrates “an unprecedented amount of energy and enthusiasm,” and attributes it in part to the volunteers and supporters inspired by his campaign. Then this same man withdraws, leaving others to choose a replacement before July 27. I begin from the effectual truth, as I did in The Prince: he had power in his hands in the only form that matters in a republic—150,000 citizens marking his name—and he did not convert that into a candidacy that endures even a few weeks. That is not bad luck. That is lack of virtù.

I do not know his motives, and they do not greatly interest me. Men dress their retreats in fine words. “My name might be on the ballot right now, but that ballot line belongs to the people of Maine.” This sounds noble, and perhaps it is; but politics is judged not by the nobility of phrases, rather by what follows from them. The effect is clear: the line that yesterday belonged to a man backed by a record number of primary voters today belongs to a small council of party leaders who must now “pick a candidate to replace Platner.” When a leader steps aside, someone steps in; nature and power both abhor a vacuum.

The party’s first necessity is not moral cleanliness but to maintain the state—that is, to hold the Senate seat. Its prudence will be measured by one question: can it transform this “unprecedented” enthusiasm into obedience and turnout for a successor chosen in a back room? Here my old distinction between arms of one’s own and auxiliaries applies. Those 150,000 votes, those volunteers, are the only true arms this enterprise has; everything else—money, endorsements, pleasing words from outside grandees—are mercenaries. As I argued in The Prince, in W. K. Marriott’s translation, whoever leans on others’ weapons leans on a broken reed. If the new candidate cannot quickly make those people feel that they, not the insiders, still own the line, then the party fights unarmed.

There is also the motion of things. All states are either rising or falling; they never stand still. Here we are told that “Democratic primary voters are happy to select socialist and quasi-communist political figures,” more from anger at the establishment than from doctrine. In Rome, I watched this same drama in Livy: the people use radical tribunes as sticks with which to beat the nobles, less for love of the tribunes than for hatred of those above them. When I wrote in the Discourses, following Ninian Hill Thomson’s translation, that Rome’s tumults produced her liberty, I meant precisely this kind of conflict. A party that treats such anger as a storm that will pass, rather than as a river that must be given channels, is already in decline.

So the question is not whether there will be conflict between the great and the people inside this party, but how it will be managed. The people have signaled that, when given a free hand, they will push toward more radical figures. The leadership now claims the legal right to override that impulse by choosing a replacement. If they do so in a way that appears to annul the people’s choice, they will deepen the mistrust that produced the radical vote in the first place; if, on the other hand, they merely anoint another figure who flatters the anger but has no organization of his own, they create a new unarmed prophet. Only by making the most engaged of these supporters part of the decision and the enforcement—by giving them some real share in choosing and backing the successor—can they transform this tumult into fresh legitimacy.

Appearances here are not decoration; they are dykes against the flood. The phrase “that ballot line belongs to the people of Maine” is more than rhetoric; it is a claim of ownership that, if believed, can hold the coalition together through an abrupt change of horse. But if the successor looks like a pure creature of “Wednesday” meetings among professional strategists, the story tells itself: the people voted; the great decided. Most citizens, who judge by the eyes, will not read internal memos about rules; they will see only whether the new face on the ballot can plausibly say, “I am here because you chose our direction,” or whether he looks like a custodian sent to turn off the lights.

Time presses. July 27 is not far; fortuna does not wait while men deliberate endlessly. In The Prince I compared fortune to a raging river that floods the plain wherever no dykes and barriers have been built. Here the flood is both the general uncertainty of your times and the specific anger that pushes voters toward “socialist and quasi-communist” figures. Platner’s withdrawal broke the first dyke; it showed that the playbook that wins a primary may not be the playbook that carries a man through the hard months after. Now the party must either raise new barriers quickly—clear leadership, a candidate who visibly carries forward the same popular energy, structures that bind volunteers to him—or watch the water carve a new channel around them. The middle course, where they half-embrace the insurgent spirit and half-reassure the establishment, will satisfy neither, and the river will take the shortest path to the sea.

If I were counseling these actors, I would say: the withdrawal has already revealed a failure of virtù in seizing occasione. Do not compound it with timid substitution. Choose a successor who can credibly inherit the anger that produced 150,000 votes, arm him with the organization those voters created, and bind both to the party with visible concessions to their spirit. Otherwise, that proud sentence about the ballot line belonging to the people will be remembered as an empty flourish, and the people, who are wiser and more constant than any single leader, will quietly take their mandate elsewhere. In politics, as in war, those who refuse to command still end by obeying.