Senate Candidates Have Been Replaced Before. Here’s How It Went.

The campaign team for Claire McCaskill went from euphoria to dread within a few hours.

In August 2012, the Missouri Democrat’s challenger had uttered a politically fatal line that boosted McCaskill’s chances of winning reelection to the Senate. Then her aides realized state law gave then-Rep. Todd Akin until late September to withdraw from the race, possibly handing Republican insiders a chance to handpick his replacement.

“That was the longest six weeks of that campaign,” Caitlin Legacki, a top McCaskill adviser, told NOTUS.

That contest turned into one of the more wild Senate races of the past 50 years, and ended with McCaskill winning a second term. But it’s not the only one in which one of the parties had such a flawed nominee that leaders intervened and tried to find a replacement candidate.

The results are often a mixed bag and offer some clues — and warnings — for how Maine Democrats should proceed as they sort out who will replace the disgraced Graham Platner on the ballot to go up against five-term Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November.

Most prominently, Democrats had to replace Joe Biden two years ago after the president — at 81, already facing voter skepticism about his age — had a disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump. Biden endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, and the party quickly coalesced around her. Harris narrowly lost every swing state and Trump won a second term.

In the Maine contest, Platner had survived earlier scandals, but an ex-girlfriend accused him in a story published this week of sexually assaulting her in 2021. While he denied the allegations, he announced Wednesday that he would withdraw by the Monday deadline to formally remove his name from the November ballot.

State party officials are setting up a fairly wide open process to find a replacement. Potential candidates are already announcing bids, and Democrats have asked county organizations to send several hundred delegates to a convention so they can choose a replacement by July 27.

The plan might win plaudits from party activists who had recoiled at the efforts by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other Washington operatives to line up support for Gov. Janet Mills in the primary. She ended up leaving the race as Platner surged.

Veterans of past tumultuous Senate campaigns are urging Maine Democrats to use the next few weeks to focus on only one thing.

“The North Star needs to be: How do we beat Susan Collins? And then work backwards from there,” Legacki said.

Almost every other recent Senate replacement candidate was chosen in a back-room deal, an idea that is very out of favor with voters in both parties right now.

Perhaps the most cataclysmic mid-campaign change came in 2004. Illinois Democrats nominated an ambitious young state senator, Barack Obama, as their nominee. Republicans settled on Jack Ryan, a business executive with a deep background in charity. The public release of family custody records during divorce proceedings forced Ryan to bow out of the race.

Illinois Republicans spent six weeks flailing in their bid to find a prominent politician to take the nomination, leading to a failed courtship with the famed Chicago Bears head coach Mike Ditka.

Eventually they gave the nomination to Alan Keyes, a former Reagan administration official who became a prominent Black Republican commentator — even though he lived in Maryland. Obama won the election by more than 40 percentage points, and would be elected president four years later.

The most successful last-minute, back-room deal might have come in 1990, when the Minnesota Republican gubernatorial nominee withdrew with only about a week left in the race after multiple stories of sexual misdeeds emerged.

The state auditor, Arne Carlson, who was the runner-up in the primary, became the backup pick.

“I was a surfer who caught a beautiful wave,” Carlson, now 91, told Gabe Fleischer of Wake Up to Politics, which recounted the story in its Wednesday newsletter.

He won by a few points in 1990, then won reelection by a nearly 2-1 margin and retired as one of the most popular Minnesota governors ever.

John Warner ended up having a 30-year tenure in the Senate even though he finished second in the 1978 Virginia Republican primary. The winner died in a plane crash and a team of 78 state operatives chose the replacement, settling on the former Navy secretary who was a political celebrity after marrying actress Elizabeth Taylor.

“John Warner is a man of principle,” he said in accepting the nomination. He won that November by less than 5,000 votes.

In 2002, New Jersey Democrats pulled off another successful insider deal for a candidate swap. Wounded by years of Justice Department investigations, Sen. Bob Torricelli’s support cratered.

At the National Republican Senatorial Committee headquarters, senior staff repeatedly sent word to New Jersey for their candidate, business executive Doug Forrester, to not call for the senator’s resignation. They thought they’d have a better chance facing off against the tainted incumbent, known as The Torch.

In late September, Torricelli withdrew, setting off a legal dispute about whether he could be replaced that late in the cycle.

“You can put somebody else on the ballot when somebody else has died, but political death does not qualify. He still has a pulse,” Mitch Bainwol, the executive director of the NRSC at the time, told reporters.

Local courts decided otherwise and former Sen. Frank Lautenberg, who had previously served three terms, won by almost 10 percentage points in a year that was otherwise good for Republicans.

A decade later, a similar scenario faced the McCaskill team when they started to absorb the fallout from Akin’s controversy.

McCaskill’s campaign had spent $2 million on an ad campaign that waded into the Republican primary with messages like “Todd Akin is too conservative” — boosting his popularity with the die-hard conservatives who show up to early-August primary elections.

Akin won the GOP nomination with just 36 percent of the vote, ahead of two much better-financed candidates.

But Akin himself would soon make a major mistake, in his response to a question about the right to an abortion in the case of rape or incest.

“From what I understand from doctors, it’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down,” Akin told an interviewer.

Legacki can still recall the note she sent to the campaign team: “Even for Todd Akin, this is crazy.”

The McCaskill campaign worried Akin would drop out and Republicans would pick someone better able to target McCaskill’s strengths, especially with moderate women in the voter-rich suburbs of St. Louis. Their biggest fear was Jo Ann Emerson, a 16-year veteran of the House with a voting record much more moderate than Akin’s.

Legacki said the McCaskill campaign found ways to feed polling data to allies of Akin that showed the race was still close. They also tried to stiffen opposition to Emerson or other potential moderate replacements by sending anonymous research packets to local conservative operatives about their moderate records.

It may have helped. Akin held a news conference on Sept. 25, the deadline to withdraw, defiantly staying in the race.

On election night, McCaskill coasted to victory by 15 points, even as Missouri voters gave Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney a 10-point victory.

Democrats haven’t won a Senate race in Missouri since.