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Hilarious. I was thinking that by the time I posted this, he might already have dropped out.
Still, the point was always moot in the sense of lacking practical significance / being purely academic - I wasn't seeking to sway his decision! So I guess I still have a similar question: what could have happened behind the scenes to convince Platner to abandon his campaign?
Lol, he posted two minutes before you, but spent 7 minutes on preliminaries before clearly dropping out (I skimmed it, so there might be another one before the 7:00 and 8:40 statements).
I don't think they could stop him from running as an independent, but they can pull all their support and tank his campaign that way. I don't know how fundraising works (is it money for Platner, who will spend it on his campaign, or for the Democrats, who sourced it through him and will spend it on the Senate race, or what), which affects how much he could even spend. If it was party funds sourced from his campaign and earmarked for its use, then he might be simply out of luck. If it was personally-allocated funds, then he still needs to have staff willing to accept his money to do work etc.
It would be very difficult to run a campaign of that scale without a political machine backing you. If the Democrat membership as a whole (not just the leaders) reject him, then he won't get any volunteers, staffers, analysts, etc.
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