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By Kaivan Shroff
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Two years ago, I participated in one of the most controversial decisions either major political party has made in modern American history. As a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, I voted to replace President Joe Biden with Kamala Harris as our party’s nominee following concerns over Biden’s age and health. I believed the circumstances justified it, and I still do. But I also understand why millions of Americans were uncomfortable with what they watched: primary voters had selected one nominee, Biden, and delegates selected another. However urgent many Democrats believed the substitution to be, it felt to a great many Americans like something that had happened to them, rather than by them.
That experience is why I have watched the reaction to Graham Platner’s withdrawal from Maine's Senate race with particular interest. Since Platner stepped aside following a sexual assault allegation he denies, Republicans and cable commentators have repeatedly invoked 2024, arguing that Democrats are once again overriding the will of their own primary voters. Having participated in the original, I think critics have drawn the wrong lesson from 2024. Moreover, if there is a 2024 redux on the horizon, it appears to be unfolding in another state, South Carolina.
The defining problem in 2024 was never that delegates cast the deciding votes. Political parties maintain rules for extraordinary circumstances because extraordinary circumstances happen: presidents withdraw, candidates die, scandals end campaigns weeks before elections. The political damage came from the choreography. Within days of Biden’s withdrawal, governors, senators, donors and party leaders converged around a single successor, and millions of Americans reasonably concluded that the outcome had been settled before delegates ever gathered. The formal vote occurred and the rules were followed, but a process that was deliberative on paper felt, to much of the country, like a coronation. That distinction matters because political legitimacy rests on more than procedural compliance. It rests on whether citizens believe meaningful competition still exists at the moment a choice is made in their name.
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Measured against that standard, Maine looks nothing like 2024. To be maximally clear about what is fair in the comparison: Platner won his primary decisively in June, his withdrawal means Democratic voters will not directly choose the nominee who faces Republican incumbent Susan Collins in November, and the vacancy will instead be filled through the party process established under state law. That deserves scrutiny, and Democrats should not pretend otherwise. But the similarity ends there.
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Unlike the rapid consolidation that followed Biden's withdrawal in 2024, Maine Democrats opened the process to multiple candidates and held county nominating meetings across all 16 counties to select 500 delegates for a special convention. Those delegates—not national party leaders—will cast the decisive votes, and while former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson has emerged as the front-runner after winning support from much of Platner’s political coalition, he did so by competing for delegate support rather than through an elite party coronation. It is not a perfect substitute for a primary, but it is a process that sought to preserve competition, transparency and legitimacy under extraordinarily compressed circumstances.
Now consider what Republicans have constructed in South Carolina following the shocking death of Senator Lindsey Graham. South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster immediately appointed Graham’s sister, Darline Graham Nordone, to the seat to finish out her brother’s term. Despite Nordone having no political experience, Senator Tim Scott then promptly suggested Nordone become the permanent successor to the seat. President Donald Trump quickly followed, offering his “complete and total endorsement” to her for the full term before the filing period for the special primary had even opened. Several other Republicans, including Nancy Mace, Ralph Norman, William Timmons and Pamela Evette, had each been discussed as candidates or expressed interest in running. Yet, while the primary remains open as a matter of law, every ambitious Republican in the state has received the message—the decision has been made.
This is precisely the dynamic Republicans have spent the past two years condemning. Their argument, repeated endlessly after 2024, was that Democrats had denied voters a genuine choice—that powerful people settled the outcome before anyone else had a meaningful opportunity to compete. They were not entirely wrong. Whatever else explains the Democrats’ 2024 defeat, many Americans came away believing they had watched party leaders manage an outcome rather than facilitate a decision, and in a country already deeply distrustful of its institutions, that perception carried real electoral consequences. Republicans understood this well enough to campaign on it. They appear not to have understood it well enough to avoid repeating the same mistake—on a faster timeline, on behalf of a family member with no experience, in a state whose voters will be asked to ratify the arrangement within weeks.
None of this means South Carolina Republicans have broken any rules, and none of it means Maine Democrats have built a flawless process. The distinction between the two states is not procedural but perceptual, and it is perception that decides elections. A party convention can feel legitimate when delegates genuinely choose among competing candidates and so too can a primary feel hollow when its most important decision was made at the White House before the funeral. Voters proved in 2024 that they know the difference, and that they punish the parties who confuse managing an outcome with earning one.
Republicans are entitled to keep calling Maine undemocratic. But until they can explain why a contested convention threatens democracy while a cleared field honors it, the comparison to 2024 will keep pointing somewhere they do not want it to—at a Senate seat in South Carolina being handed down like an inheritance, and at a party that learned nothing from the backlash it spent two years exploiting.
Kaivan Shroff is a culture and politics commentator and attorney. He also serves as senior adviser to the D.C. nonprofit Institute for Education, was a 2024 DNC presidential delegate and worked as a digital organizer on Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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