In the final, petulant hours of his campaign for Senate, Graham Platner chose to conclude the letter formally ending his candidacy with the phrase “Fuck ICE.” This was no mere outburst. As a candidate, Platner vociferously argued that ICE agents should be unmasked, arrested, and made to answer for their violence and had the support of many immigrant leaders and their communities. This was also not merely about immigration per se. Platner called for a coalition of unions, immigrant groups, and civil-rights groups around the broad project of making life for working people in Maine more humane.

The Trump administration’s war against immigrants is one of several issues that have been largely absent from the frenzy of national coverage of Maine’s Senate race, which has focused on Platner’s war against the Democratic Establishment, which he officially lost last week after being accused of rape and withdrawing from the ballot. But the question of ICE’s violence has been central in Maine, a predominantly white state with an expanding immigrant population. In January, a wave of ICE incursions separated family and friends and left immigrant communities terrified. Many were unable to go to work or pay for food or rent.

ICE pulled back after the murder of Alex Pretti in Minnesota but has never left Maine. Now its presence has exploded back into headlines. On Monday morning, 26-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero’s body lay on the pavement of an intersection in Biddeford, Maine, for five hours in an unrelenting heat wave. Guerrero had been shot in the head by ICE agents while driving his car, then pulled out roughly and handcuffed, perhaps after he was already dead. Nearby were Guerrero’s wife and daughter, a 3-year-old in Bluey pajamas. His death followed that of Mexican national Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who was shot by ICE agents in Texas last week.

Maine’s longtime senator, the Republican Susan Collins, who voted for the $70 billion reconciliation package that funded ICE, tried to take credit for a decision by the Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday to temporarily pause ICE vehicle stops. But few were fooled, and protests at her offices around the state commenced within hours of Guerrero’s killing. Donald Trump rescinded the pause on Wednesday.

In a statement, Janet Mills, Maine’s Democratic governor and Platner’s former opponent for the Senate seat neither of them will occupy next year, deplored the “reckless and haphazard manner” in which ICE was acting and noted vaguely that “this has to end” without specifically acknowledging the loss, or the life, of Guerrero at all. The passivity of her statement echoed her refusal last summer to sign LD 1971, a bill passed by Maine’s legislature that prohibited state and local law enforcement from directly helping ICE unless ordered by a judge. Mills also did not veto the bill, instead permitting it to become law in the following legislative session; during their campaigns, Platner lit her up for her complacency.

What has been missing in Mills’s response to ICE’s brutality, and what Democratic voters have signaled has gone missing from Democratic politics in general in Trump’s second term, is any sense of genuine, visceral horror, of moral disgust, and a drive to fight back — which outsider candidates, even alleged sexual miscreants like Platner, have provided, or at least managed to perform more persuasively than their Establishment rivals. Tepid institutional response to Guerrero’s killing is key to understanding not only Platner’s former popularity but also why much of the Democratic base remains so frustrated with its party in Maine and beyond.

Voters in Maine are preparing to choose a replacement for Platner on November’s ballot, and many of the same people who attended his town halls are now gathering at vigils for Guerrero and protests against ICE across the state. The candidates vying to take Platner’s place on the ballot have noticed: Several got to Biddeford within hours of Guerrero’s death on Monday to partake in the first demonstrations there; seven have since called to abolish ICE, demonstrating that while Platner himself is off the ballot, the ideas he championed are not.

Meanwhile high-altitude Democrats and their pundit brethren are still chattering about how awful he was all along without showing any curiosity or concern about how a guy this awful could have beaten their choice for the Senate seat as soundly as he did. As one Mainer who was always leery of Platner but wound up donating to him anyway explained to me this week, “When you are starving, you will put your tongue on the floor.”

Among the things voters may be hungering for is basic recognition of those whose lives are at stake right now. Nearly 500,000 people have been arrested by ICE during Trump’s second term, around 60,000 of whom are currently being held in concentration camps. But the Democratic Party is terrified of being seen as weak on immigration enforcement, even as innocent people are being gunned down on the streets, which means that the tenor and volume of the party’s mainstream response never comes close to matching the scale of the atrocities.

Much has been made of the fact that Guerrero, who was originally from Colombia, had been headed to work when he was assailed by ICE. Neighbors described him as a “hardworking father,” and immigrants’-rights groups affirmed that he had been authorized to work in the U.S. and had been issued a Social Security number. Of course, even if he had not been legally authorized to work, his killing would not be any less horrific a tragedy. But the focus on Guerrero’s status as a worker in the state of Maine was particularly resonant in the context of a yearlong political circus in which various factions of the Democratic Party have been yelling at each other about what working-class Americans really look like.

The knock against Platner’s supporters is that they were taken in by his fake working-class vibes. He is an oyster farmer and veteran who wears sweatshirts but also the grandson of a famous mid-century architect and a private-school dropout. The obsession with Platner’s class position, however, said a lot about a media and political leadership so distant from and perplexed by the complexities of working-class life in America that they found Platner exotic. In Maine, he was entirely familiar. You can go to a Hannaford parking lot and find six guys who look just like Platner; one might be an oyster farmer and the other a middle-school principal, and the oyster farmer might come from generational wealth and the principal from abject poverty.

In Maine, the people being hunted, rounded up, and separated from their families by ICE, in addition to being sisters, brothers, and parents of toddlers in Bluey pajamas, are workers. They, alongside a large population of impoverished white Mainers, are the human beings who build, repair, and clean the summer residences of visitors from New York and Washington. They labor as dishwashers and cooks in the incredible restaurants that tourists rave about; they pick the blueberries and the broccoli served at those restaurants; and they are maintenance and janitorial staff and care workers at the year-round schools and hospitals that have lost funding and are closing at alarming rates, sending even more Mainers of every race and age into poverty. Platner, for all his flaws, conveyed that he understood all of that.

It’s true that Democrats have scarce institutional power against the fascist goblins who have this country’s three branches of government in their grip. But at least one step of building back actual power is communicating a set of values and the will to punch back. And yes, that entails a certain sort of performance, one that is different from the purported working-class aesthetics that have so offended Platner’s detractors. Democrats might not want to literally say “Fuck ICE,” but they have to figure out some way to get that feeling across.