So who will vet the vetters? Certainly not Matthew Yglesias who had an opinion piece in the New York Times less than a month ago, June 17, in which he enthuses so much over the one who supposedly vetted Graham Platner, Daniel Moraff (pictured), that it comes off as The Adoration of the Moraff as you can read in "The Democrats Need Better Candidates. This Guy Knows How to Find Them." Love is in the air as Yglesias merrily gushes over Moraff, the one whom many/most Democrats are furious at for perhaps ruining their chances of taking the Senate in the midterm elections. You’ve probably never heard of Daniel Moraff. He went to Brown and was excited by Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign and spent years as a local organizer in Pittsburgh and New York while involved with the Democratic Socialists of America. Today he’s emerging as a new force in politics specializing in populist outsiders. He discovered Dan Osborn and Graham Platner, showing a knack for finding unlikely politicians with real charisma and skills. As we now know, Mr. Platner also comes with a somewhat checkered past and real, potentially costly flaws. But Mr. Moraff, in contrast to his somewhat bombastic candidates, is quiet and unassuming in person and approaches his job like a casting director. He looks for a particular type: military veterans with blue-collar jobs and no electoral experience but an interest in politics and (typically) labor unions. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out this guy absolutely does not take the task of vetting candidates seriously as you can tell by the following interview in which Giggles Moraff and his smirking companion laugh mockingly at the notion of conducting thorough background checks of candidates such as Platner. Daniel Moraff gives off a vibe of self-satisfied cleverness, a confidence that he is more clever than everyone else, and that his cleverness alone will be sufficient to avoid error. pic.twitter.com/DWoOotMfFQ — The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) July 8, 2026 Yglesias provided the inadvertent service of identifying other candidates Moraff hand-picked besides Platner such as Dan Osborn, who is running for the U.S. Senate from Nebraska supposedly as an independent (but really as a Democrat). Here are a couple more candidates that need to get a real vetting from professionals based on Moraff's underperformance of this task with Platner. Mr. Moraff himself is not a Democratic insider or a strategist. In the terms popular with the Silicon Valley types whom he doubtless hates, Mr. Moraff is “high agency.” He saw a void and moved into it. He doesn’t accept the view that good candidates need to have a traditional résumé, or that to be the guy behind the guy in a critical Senate race, you need to pay your dues by managing House campaigns or toiling for multiple cycles at the national party committees. Mr. Moraff is also working with House candidates like Brian Poindexter in Ohio and Nate Powell in Washington State, who are cut from a similar labor-populist ideological cloth. Attention Democrats! Possible vetting cleanup alerts for Ohio and Washington State based on the toxic legacy Moraff left behind in Maine with his personally picked Graham Platner.