Hugh Chapman of Brunswick, a registered Democrat, is currently studying political science at Southern Maine Community College.

Since the latest allegations against Graham Platner, I have been deeply concerned for the future of the Democratic Party.

While our basic response was solid — we learned about his violent behavior and pushed for his withdrawal, keeping him accountable — we are yet to hold ourselves accountable. We seem to see ourselves as faultless in his nomination, and more and more, this self-assuredness reminds me of the Republican Party back in 2016 — when its respectable, conservative nature folded into something akin to a political machine.

After Platner’s withdrawal, I received a text update from the Maine Democrats. “This week, the Democratic Party did something you will never see Republicans do: we held our own accountable. We called on our Senate nominee in Maine to withdraw over serious, credible allegations. He withdrew. We stand with women and survivors, period.”

While I appreciated this update, and I agree that we outperformed our Republican colleagues, it conveyed no sense of responsibility. The tone felt too proud for a mistake that was our own; Platner was our nominee. Although we could not have predicted him to be an alleged rapist, we should have noticed the other signs of his instability much earlier.

In April, an ad appeared for Platner’s campaign that I found deeply unsettling. It contrasted him with establishment politicians by showing them as characters in a pixelated arcade game. He said that “career politicians treat Washington like a game,” and a crowd rallied around Platner while the politicians laughed and held piles of gold coins.

I agreed with the message so far, but something felt off. “When I get to the Senate, their game is over. I’ll flip the board and be a voice for you, not the billionaires.” With those last two sentences, alarms went off in my mind. I was unnerved that he was so willing to play the hero. The narrative felt too convenient, too melodramatic.

This heroic image combined with the history that we knew about — the questionable relationships, the tattoo, the Reddit posts — should have paused our support for Platner. U.S. senator is a job with a high bar for personal integrity and honesty that he never demonstrated. Yet, we pushed forward because we liked his message.

We made excuses for him — excuses reminiscent of those made for Donald Trump back in 2016. We were so desperate for change in Washington that we distracted ourselves from our responsibility to vet our own nominee. If we simply find another nominee and push on, there will be many more Platners in our future. We need to address the fact that we impaired our own critical thinking. We never questioned ourselves, and that was to our detriment.

One mistake was Platner’s background checks, or lack thereof. His vetting process was incredibly superficial. The Wall Street Journal published a video with a couple of interviews with his earliest supporters, and this was made clear.

There has also been a dramatic shift in what Democrats look for in a politician. As Morris Katz (an advisor and writer for Platner’s campaign) told the Wall Street Journal, Platner’s campaign wasn’t “a progressive agenda as much as a populist agenda.” Given Washington’s lackluster performance, this shift toward populism is justified, but it still has consequences.

Because populism demands that the political establishment be dismantled, it calls for heroic strongmen who promise to tear it down. And in my view, anyone with the ego required to play that role is far too dishonest for politics. In 2016, we watched that same dishonesty hijack the Republican Party.

We are not immune to the faults that broke right-wing politics — no party ever is — and we may end up like them if we’re not careful. Already, the Democratic Party has never looked more like the Republican Party. Looking forward, our biggest task will be to adopt a populist agenda that doesn’t compromise our own integrity. Being led by strongmen is risky; we need statespeople, not heroes.